"Streuth!" - Australia

Well, thanks to suggestion I now have an "o", but it takes an awfully long time, and I am basically a very lazy person. That would have been my New Years resolution, to be less lazy, to stop procrastinating, but I changed it. I want to be one of those people who don't put things down and then spend two hours trying to find it again, to then find it hidden inside a lamp because you thought that was a logical place. That might not be a type of a person, that might just be me.

I leave my this dear old country in about, exactly, actually, ten days. Its a tad scary, but I guess it really is just an extended holiday, I'll be back before I know it and avoiding everyone, shamed. But its a big thing! I have spent eight years here! And I am not even crying, or at least feeling like eating fudge, instead I am thinking over what hats I should be wearing (is a beret too much?). Am I completely apathetic?

Maybe not as proven by today's trip to the cinema to see Luhrmann's "Australia" (Which was slightly funny as I smsed stating I was going to Australia and received replies saying they thought I was leaving later and that they were worried thinking I meant the actual country. I thought that was funny. Maybe they didn't. I am a complete bitch, sooner people realise this, the better.). I cried in the movie, maybe in patriotic spirit, maybe wrapped in the intensity of the movie or maybe from sheer embarrassment (but I cried in Ice Age too, so its not much to go by.) The movie was, in a word, fine. Fine is what you say when you're not really fine, but you don't want to let on, as the great man of words, Dylan Moran, would say. But there is no other way to describe it, it was just "fine". It slightly played up to the idea of Australians, despite being a well established Australian director ("Moulin Rouge", "Stricty Ballroom"). I am pretty sure in the 1940's, no one really said "crickey", especially not a prim English woman (Who shockingly embraces the Australian life.). It was a bit predictable, really. On the positive, the movie provoked emotions, had lovely scenery, Diver Dan and some good ol' mateship.

The movie, had this perfect opportunity to simply end, it was happy, looked like the start of some feel-good movie, flowers, laughing children, kissing, near to birds chirping kind of feel good. And it was perfect, I would have left a happy girly.... And then it went into the war and the fight to keep the half-caste child. It made it seem like it was "okay" to steal the Aboriginal children, that the Stolen generation was fine because everyone was so damn happy. That is wasn't really a disgusting deal that lasted until Mr. Whitlam came in the 1970's. The 1970's, that's not even 50 years ago.

But I guess Australia needed a film, besides "Crocodile Dundee" thanks, so that's now done and we can sit back and continue drinking, being filthy and calling each other mate. Because that's what we do.