Cockatoos, Showbags, Arvo, and Other Australian Surprises

If you squint, daily life in Australia looks a lot like daily life in the USA. People sit in traffic on highways, watch awful basic-cable reality TV, and wait forever on hold with an indifferent-bordering-on-sadistic cable company when an outage interrupts their awful reality TV. Their barbecue and their football are a bit different from the American versions, but they play the same cultural roles. They even call their money dollars.

Of the differences between the two, the biggest are well-known and often remarked upon by both Aussies and Americans alike. Mobs of kangaroos frolic along the sides of country roads. People say “G’day, mate”. The Queen is all over the money, and that highway traffic runs down the other side of the road. I knew about all of that before I arrived. I was ready for it.

The differences that really stop me in my tracks are the little ones nobody talks about: Americans because they’ve never heard of them, and Australians because they don’t realize that they’re differences. Everything in this list, no matter how weird to my Missouri-bred eyes, is such a mundane, routine part of life here that Australians don’t notice them any more than they notice the air they breathe.

A cockatoo or two, or two hundred: Melbourne has pigeons and crows like every other city, and seagulls near the shore. The big black-and-white magpies look enough like crows that you get used to them.

Then there are the parrots. The most striking are the green, yellow, red, and blue rainbow lorikeets, but far more common and visible are the cockatoos. I’m talking big, white cockatoos like I’d only ever seen in pet stores or on Baretta’s finger. Here they’re on your lawn by the dozen, in trees by the hundreds, cawing you awake in the morning.

One day I couldn’t even drive down the street because it was carpeted with cockatoos picking through fallen gumballs and fighting each other over the seeds. They weren’t fazed in the slightest by the car horn or the car itself. It was as much an “OK, now I feel like I’m in Australia” moment as any kangaroo encounter.

“How you going?”: Yes, as I said, Australians do say “g’day, mate”. But the greeting you’ll hear much more often - in every store you go into, in every casual workplace chat - is “How you going?” (or “How are you going?”). My ear still registers it as a disorienting mashup of “how you doing?” and “how’s it going?” - even though, when you think about it, none of them make any more literal sense than any other.

Arvo, spruik, and ta: Everyday Aussie slang is like nothing you’ve heard from Crocodile Dundee.

“Arvo” means afternoon: “Got any time this arvo?”

To “spruik” (pronounced “sprook”) is to sell, tout, promote: “The prime minister was in Queensland to spruik his new climate plan.”

To “dob” means to snitch.

“Ta” just means “thank you”. As in, after I picked up a toddler’s wayward football and handed it to him, his mom told him to “Say ‘ta’.”

These are just a few of the most obvious examples that spring to mind. Again, none of this is worthy of comment in Australia. Words like these are absolutely unremarkable everyday speech.

Tasty cheese: Not a value judgment: this is what they call their basic sandwich cheese, the one they use like Americans use American cheese. It’s a kind of semi-aged cheddar, always white in color, with a sharper, saltier flavor than American cheese. If you want it sharper, that’s called “extra tasty” or sometimes “extra bitey”. Presumptuousness of the name aside, it is pretty tasty cheese.

The Aussie burger: Australians still consider burgers the epitome of American food even though they are, if anything, more common in Melbourne than in Seattle. But there’s one burger they proudly lay claim to, usually listed on the menu as an “Aussie burger” or “burger with the lot.”

Take a burger. Add a slice or two of tasty cheese (makes sense). Then some bacon (English-style, but still, nothing weird about bacon on a burger). Next, a fried egg (hmm, a little eccentric, but not totally unheard of). What really makes it an Aussie burger is the final touch: a slice or two of purple, slimy, earthy-tasting beetroot.

Frankly, on paper, beetroot sounds like a great way to ruin a burger. In practice, though, it’s pretty delicious.

Parm and a pot: The other great Aussie junk food entree is a chicken parma, or parm: a schnitzel (breaded chicken patty) topped with a slice of ham, tomato, and melted cheese. As with so many of the items on this list, I cannot stress enough how these are everywhere, often paired in a meal deal with a beer as “parm and a pot” in…

Hotels where nobody sleeps: Some Australian hotels are what Americans would call hotels: places where you rent rooms by the night. But in every suburb, every town, usually in one of the grandest buildings on one of the most prominent corners, you’ll find a different kind of “hotel”. These are enormous bars catering to high-volume mass-market revelry, with giant TV screens, video poker machines (pokies), and the cheapest food and beer around.

It’s the kind of place you can take the whole family for six hours on a Sunday: Mom and Dad get cheap drunk, Granny plays the pokies, and the kids stuff themselves with junk food, all for under a hundred bucks.

Showbags: This uniquely Australian retail phenomenon is like a fanboy Bag of Crap: a mystery bag of themed merchandise packaged and sold as a single unit, usually at a carnival (which they call a “show” here). The theme could be generic (glowsticks, or novelty pranks) or licensed (Doctor Who, Pokemon, Cadbury). Every Australian I’ve talked to thinks showbags are the most normal thing in the world; nobody else in my office has ever heard of them. I should bring the concept back to America and become the country’s first showbag billionaire…

I haven’t even touched on “Christmas in July”, or all the things you can do at the post office, or Australia’s weird candy, or the fact that they don’t really call it candy. I won’t condescend to call Australia the “Bizarro USA” or whatever, but I just might think it every once in a while.