(This post is dedicated to my Australian friends, Joe and Alison, who may or may not read my blog.)
Seriously, this is what I think of Australia.
I have gained such a strange mental picture of Australia from reading novels. Most of the weird Australian books I've read are YA literature, probably because I used to check in with Persnickety Snark a lot for recommendations, and she's Australian. Off the top of my head, here are novels about Australia that I remember reading recently:
Does My Head Look Big in This?
If I have learned anything from these books about Australia and its people, it is that Australian youth are poor. Australian youth know/are friends with at least one person who owns/lives on a ranch in the middle of nowhere. Australian youth are very keen on camping "in the bush." They use a lot of incomprehensible slang words and don't mind throwing in the occasional American curse word for good measure. They are astonishingly independent - they seem to go places and do things without an adult ever checking in with them. They eat atrocious foods like meat pies with sauce, and tinned milk. Australian youth are tough and unemotional but don't mind a good brooding spell from time to time. They operate outside the American assumption of a nation that is populated across its entirety, with cities connected to one another by well maintained roads.
Seriously, this is what I think of Australia.
I finished A Town Like Alice the other day and more than any of the others, it reminded me of the fact that just because two countries have a shared language (in this case, English) doesn't mean they have more in common than any other two countries you compare. That really comes through to me in Australia's literary tradition. The underlying assumptions of the plots and the driving behaviors of the characters are so different from their American counterparts. A Town Like Alice puts it somewhat like this, speaking in the context of an Australian cattle herder (ringer?? or something) wanting to visit the Western United States to see how they've established that industry - "Their problems are the same as ours; they've just been at it longer than we have." I guess that's how we can be so similar, and yet so, so very different.
Tomorrow, When the War Began, specifically, is an example of a book that you might have to be Australian to really "get." I really liked the premise and the setup, but the execution was odd, and it wasn't something I could chalk up to a bad translation or easily apparent cultural differences. I think that book (and the ensuing series) is almost worshiped in Australia, which tells me that I'm missing something. I think it's a complete childhood upbringing in Australia.
What wild, sweeping generalizations about other cultures have you learned from reading novels?