Don’t Feed the Animals!

My husband and I are in Tasmania – a.k.a. “Tassie” – which is why I haven’t been blogging for the past few weeks. I was going to wait until I got back to Sydney to blog about the trip, but this morning’s events were just too strange for me to wait.

We’ve been driving all around the state as well as hiking through its varied (and beautiful) national parks. Coming from Sydney, we still get excited when we see kangaroos in the wild. Of course, after a drive up to Musselroe Bay in Tassie’s northeast, we saw enough kangaroos in the wild at Mount William National Park to be over the novelty.

But now we’re in a cabin further south on the east coast, on the edge of Freycinet National Park, a popular tourist destination where foreigners routinely succumb to the temptation to feed the native animals. FYI: You shouldn’t. It’s not good for the animals. They’ve survived in the bush of this country for thousands of years without men and their crappy food. But that doesn’t seem to occur to all the foreign tourists feeding the native animals in public spaces in blatant disregard of ubiquitous signs advising against it. And they’re not even doing it for the animals. They’re doing it to get the animals to come closer to them for their own transient amusement.

Do you know what happens when you feed the animals?

This:

I woke up this morning and opened the sliding door to my cabin for a bit of fresh air, and then proceeded to fry up some bacon. Fifteen minutes later, I find this guy. He was actually on his way into the cabin when I called my husband out of the shower to come have a look. My husband took these photos while the kangaroo posed patiently.

Okay, he’s seriously cute. And yeah, I would’ve loved for him to hop into the cabin and hang out for a while. Hell, I would’ve loved to have fed him some breakfast just to make him like me. He’d obviously smelled the bacon I’d been frying – which is kinda funny, since they’re vegetarians.

But I didn’t feed him.

He stayed outside the door for a good ten minutes. At one point, he slowly turned his back to the cabin to chill out against the glass door for a spell while he scoped out the bush.

In the end, he wised up to the fact that these particular tourists would not be feeding the native animals. So he hopped away despondently.

I felt bad. I really wanted him to stay and hang out.

Later on, we went on a hike, and in the parking lot to Freycinet National Park we saw a large kangaroo interacting with two foreign tourists. Initially I was surprised, until I noticed the tourists feeding him. We saw more of the same inside the park, despite the signs advising against it.

You’d think that visitors to a protected national park would be able to control their own impulses – especially when they’ve paid to see a natural environment largely unspoilt by human interference.

But tourists have always been particularly selfish animals.

Dunny Door Vandalism

A “dunny” is a toilet in Australian slang.

I took the following photo of the inside door of a toilet in a women’s bathroom at a hospital where I was working. I thought it was fascinating because of the scientific knowledge required to make a few of the comments. Clearly, even health care workers are aren’t immune to the lure of vandalism and graffiti.

I’ll remember these dueling message about breast cancer screening a lot longer than any Susan G. Komen for the Cure campaign.

Related: See the inside dunny door of a women’s bathroom at the Sydney airport here.

Photo Break

I took a year-long hiatus on blogging before I had the chance to post this picture.

Last year I flew from Sydney to my family home in Virginia by way of Atlanta (which is actually out-of-the-way). I can’t remember how long I’d been away since my last visit, but it would’ve been seven years running that I’d lived in Australia.

On walking into one of the airpot bookstores, I headed to the magazine section to see what was selling these days. I still read almost exclusively American newspapers and online political and cultural blogs, but the airport material gives you a better sense of what’s currently popular to the largest swath of the population.

As I headed to the racks, I couldn’t help but overhear a 20-something year-old girl talking to her father about their latest hunting exploit.

Wha-?

I thought that was fascinating. I don’t really know anyone who hunts animals for sport. Shaking off my surprise, I started to browse the racks and was struck by this particular display.

I’ve spent far too much of my time in Australia defending America and my countrymen to Aussies with a snobbish contempt for what they consider American insularity, militarism and ignorance.

So I was surprised by how ubiquitous supporting evidence for American stereotypes can be.

But this picture is literally just a slice of what was on offer in that bookstore, just as the worst stereotypes of Americans represent just a fraction of its people.

At least that’s my argument, and I’m sticking to it.

I’ll defend my country to the last.

When talk ain’t cheap

Ninety percent of the tensions I have with other people stem from my being misunderstood. My meaning is misinterpreted as judgmental when it’s far from it. My declarative American tone in the acoustic world of Aussie upward-inflection doesn’t help. In the end, though, the fault lies with me and my word choices.

My med school has made effective communication a skill of fundamental importance. Over six years, we’re forced to practice our communication skills in speaking and writing, and are regularly assessed on them in everything we do.

I would often question the time spent at school on communication rather than physiology and anatomy. Then I did my Family Practice term and saw the effect of poor communication on the front lines…

The Australian female doctor with whom I worked was prescribing an antibiotic called doxycycline to a girl of Asian descent whose first language wasn’t English. The doctor knew, as all doctors do, that pregnant women should not take doxycycline, as it can cause brown staining of the teeth of the fetus; so the doctor told the girl:

“Now, you can’t get pregnant on doxycycline, hun, okay?”

The girl nodded her understanding and left with her antibiotic.

Some time later, the girl returned to the doctor. Pregnant. Confused and distressed, the girl exclaimed:

But you said I couldn’t get pregnant if I took this drug!

Oops.

The girl had thought that doxycycline would act as a contraceptive, and so hadn’t bothered with birth control while taking it. It was that timeless error of swapping ‘can not’ for ‘should not’ that caused the confusion. Had the girl been given any number of other drugs which can cause serious fetal malformations, the miscommunication here would have been very expensive, indeed. In this instance, it still cost too much.

The confusion here could’ve just as easily occurred with two native English-speakers if the patient hadn’t sought clarification of the doctor’s meaning.

Unfortunately, we live in a world of lazy communication and shoddy spoken grammar. Because of this, it’s imperative that patients seek clarification from their doctors, coworkers and friends seek clarification from each other, and wives seek clarification from their husbands.

So the next time your husband admires, say, Scarlett Johannson’s, ahem, figure, you shouldn’t rush to conclude that he’s therefore bemoaning that you’re built like a twelve year-old boy. Better to politely ask:

“Don’t be shy, tell me what you really mean.”

More often than not, he meant no more than exactly what he said. They’re not for mincing words, men. Their meaning tends to be pretty clear in fact.

Perhaps we women are the ones with the communication problem.

What’s in a name?

To be a black American in Australia is to be culturally irrelevant. You have no place in the ethnic dynamics or racial consciousness of Australians, and the people around you have a very limited frame of reference in which to understand you. Despite how much I may talk about being black on this blog, I’m almost never conscious of it in Sydney. That is, until someone brings us up.

I’m doing my paediatric rotation at the moment, and during a lecture on orthopaedic conditions, the silver-haired doctor giving the lecture began discussing a rare condition called chondrolysis:

Chondrolysis is a very rare condition. You will likely never encounter it, as it mainly affects Negroes.

Whoa. That got my attention. He said it again, too.

Dude, your age is showing.

For the record, I thought it was funny, not insulting. Why would it be insulting? That’s what we were called at one point. That’s what we called ourselves. What I found funny, was that he was about three names behind the times. I’m guessing this guy had become so used to the name “Negro” during his formative and young adult years, and had so little opportunity to discuss us in Australia, that he never became accustomed to using newer names. But surely he must have heard of them? We just elected Barack Obama president for goodness sake, and that election was all over the press in Australia. No one was calling him the first Negro president. Perhaps he was too old and too tired to be bothered trying to keep up with our ever-changing mood about what we want to be called.

I know another woman in Australia in her 70′s, originally from Britain, but who’s been here for ages. When we first met, she told me some story about a gentleman she vaguely knew:

He’s like you. He’s coloured too.

Say what?! I’m only 33 years old. I’ve never been called that. My Aussie husband looked at me instantly to gauge my reaction. I thought it was weird. And yeah, pretty funny.

Honey, your age is really showing.

You know, I don’t think this lovely woman has ever referred to my race again. I’m betting she has the same problem so many non-blacks have. They don’t know what the hell to call us anymore. We keep changing our minds and gettin’ pissed as hell if you haven’t caught up. But I think we’ve settled things now. We’re “African-American”, or just plain old “black”. And yet the name “black” still has the potential to confuse…

I was speaking to some white Australian one day, I can’t remember who, and I made reference to my being black. [By the way, I'm Will Smith's skin color.] She looked at me with surprise and remarked:

Black? Oh no, I don’t consider you black.

Um. Well, I am.

Well, I wouldn’t consider you that.

Wow. I had no comeback after that. The last time I checked, my identity wasn’t defined by this woman. This isn’t 1850 lady. Weird. I should’ve asked what she did consider me, but I was too flummoxed to get my thoughts straight.

In hindsight, I’m thinking this woman didn’t get the memo about the meaning of the term “black”.  She wasn’t very old, so that was her ignorance showing. She also spoke the word “black” as if it were something you wouldn’t want to be, but maybe that’s my paranoia showing. I wonder what she thought “black” described exactly. Still, I wasn’t offended. Just confused.

So now I’ve got a new theory about these people and the names they use. This could all come down to political correctness. Conservatives in the U.S. may think political correctness has gone wild in the States, but Australia may have us beat. It’s a rare day in Sydney that I hear Australians use the word “whites”. They refer to themselves as “‘Australian” and their various “ethnic” groups by their ancestral nationality: Lebanese, Chinese, Aboriginal, etc. In the field of medicine, they’ll get more specific and refer to “Caucasians” or people of “Anglo-Saxon heritage”.  But they never use the word “white” to describe themselves, or “black” to describe the Indigenous. Interestingly, the Indigenous don’t have a problem using these words. It’s all “black fellas” and “white fellas” to them.

So I’m thinking Aussies find the ubiquitous American use of the names “black” and “white” rather crude. I’m thinking they reckon themselves more enlightened, more sophisticated, and more tolerant a people these days – now that they’ve come so far from their Whites Only Immigration Policy. And they have come far – further than Americans I’d wager.

So I’m thinking they consider the word “black” an unacceptable term and now struggle to come up with a better one. So they pull out the last name they remember being in use, and in so doing, betray not only their age, but also their knowledge of modern American culture, their attitude about political correctness, and perhaps even their opinion of “blackness”.

I don’t really care what they call me, but it is fascinating how much they can reveal about themselves with the use of a name.