Melbourne

31^st July 2003

Melbourne

With a three hour stop over at Singapore’s Changi airport, our Cathay Pacific Boeing jet finally landed at Melbourne’s Tula-marine airport, after an eighteen hour journey from Mumbai. The one way ticket was our fourth international relocation as a family. We were looking forward to spending a couple of years “down under”. From everything we were told, particularly from our British friends, we expected Aussies to be similar to British except perhaps a bit laid back. The whole family move from London to Melbourne was so rushed - with a brief family holiday in India - that we had done virtually no research on what to expect in Australia. Our knowledge of Aussies was limited to Ricky Ponting who had scored double centuries against India at Adelaide and Mebourne in 2003, Shane Warne who had just been banned from international cricket, after being found guilty of doping that year and of course watching Mick Dundee, from the Crocodile Dundee series.

After being sniffed and intimidated by a couple of massive Alsatian dogs – part of the routine Australian quarantine immigration process – we finally approached the arrival lounge. A stocky six-foot-three Aussie man in his mid fifties, with a double chin, small inquisitive grey eyes and a French hat beard, was waiting patiently for us with a placard. He was our chauffer who welcomed me with a warm “G’day Mate” as he touched his hat and cocked his head to acknowledge my wife Himani. As he was effortlessly loading our four heavy bags in the boot of his black limousine, I noticed his hands. They were stout and broad, the fingers ending abruptly with stubby but well manicured nails. Once we got comfortable, he looked in the rear mirror and started the small talk with a rather blunt question. “Have you come here to die?” Despite my jet lag, I was startled. I replied in a firm but calm voice, “No. I have come here to work! We are on an international assignment.” He chuckled. What he meant to ask was, “Have you come here today?” I had failed my first test of the Aussie accent – they pronounce an “a” almost as an “i”. So my client “ANZ Bank”, I found out much later, was in fact “INZ Bank”!

Once you get the hang of the Aussie accent and train to elongate your vowels, it’s quite easy to follow. What takes a bit more time to get under the skin, is all the slang and the Aussie sense of humour. Several months into my stay, I was once conducting a brainstorming session with my colleagues about project management best practices. The session was going well and we had identified a few common issues. So I said, “Right! Now that we have a good list of problem statements, let’s carry out some root cause analysis.” That’s when I suddenly realised everyone was grinning… It was that feeling when you intuitively know that everyone else except you knows what the joke is, but it’s obviously lost on you. In the next break, one of younger PMs came up to me and obliged with an explanation. In Aussie English “root” means “sex”. I thanked her and bought my dictionary of Aussie slang on the same day in the C.B.D. on my way home.

Another interesting language experience in Melbourne is learning to pronounce weird names of places mostly derived from the aboriginal times. In and around Melbourne, you can drive through the forests of Murrindindi on the Maroondah highway to the suburbs of Murrumbeena and Mordialloc. Balagorang are Kangaroo feeding grounds and Boogoodoogada is a rain bird.

In hindsight, I guess this is good news for us Indians. Throughout my international career both in the West and the far East, I have seen too many of my clients and colleagues murder the pronunciation of Indian names. However, since Aussies are used to these aboriginal tongue twisters, if you are say a Krishnappa Yellapragada from Thiruvananthapuram, “No worries mate!”

As an Indian, I was pleasantly surprised to find several similarities with Australia. Their weather, culture, cuisine, attitudes, folk music and lifestyles are in many ways remarkably similar. Take the rugged, rocky, dusty and bright sunny landscape for instance. It very familiar to the Deccan plateau of Western Maharashtra, where I grew up. That heat often starts some of the worst bush fires around Melbourne. One of the tips from my office colleagues, was never to underestimate the Aussie sun especially as you are out and about on weekends. I now know why Shane Warne had so much silver sun-tan lotion on, as he bowled Sachin Tendulkar.

If you look on the world map, Australia spans 12 degrees to 42 degrees to the South of the equator. India is 8 degrees to 38 degrees North, almost a mirror image. So it is not a surprise that Australian weather has great diversity, just like India. Australia and India are both agricultural and mining economies. We both rejoice beating England at cricket and we both celebrate 26^th January, as a national holiday.

Melbourne is known as the capital of cuisine of the southern hemisphere. They say the Greek population of Melbourne is next only to Athens. There are large vibrant Vietnamese, Lebanese, Chinese, Turkish and Italian communities living here since the second world war. Because a lot of Aussies go to Indonesia on vacation, Indonesian cuisine is popular too. The long line of cafés along the Yarra (river), bring that confluence of world cuisine to life! And Aussies eat their dinners late, like most Indians do.

But what I love most about Melbourne, is that you can get to some of the most pristine sandy white beaches in just a half an hour drive South towards the Mornington peninsula, or you can drive south West towards Geelong for three quarter of an hour and find yourselves in the dense fern tree rain forests or drive thirty minutes to the East during the winter, to the ski slopes of the Dandenong mountains. I don’t know too many cities in the world, where you can experience such variety and have this much fun, all in a day’s outing.

There are some equally striking contrasts though. With a land more than twice the size of India, Australia’s population is less than two percent of India and roughly the same as Mumbai. So you can drive around in the Kangaroo land for hours and in the outback for days, without sighting a single car. The Aussie definition of “personal space” is very different compared to where I grew up. 

Aussies love the outdoors, their famous long walkabouts and take a sabbatical to drive around the outback for months in their RVs (recreational vehicles). 

I felt the work culture was largely similar to the West, except compared to the British and even Americans, I found Aussies lot more relaxed and informal. It’s much easier to strike a conversation with a co-passenger on the Met rail, than it is on the London underground. 

Aussies are sport fanatics and apart from cricket, they love their horse-racing, rugby, tennis and footy. Before traveling to Melbourne, I would strongly advice you to learn your AFL footy rules and be prepared to support Collingwood. When you get here, just look around you and you’ll see a Magpie. For the less initiated, AFL stands for Australian Football League and Magpie is the Collingwood club symbol. Magpies in Australia are as common a bird, as crows in India.

A few months after we had moved to Melbourne, we read about the Australian gold rush that started in the 1850s and how Australia became famous for its mines. They even have a living museum called “Sovereign Hill” where they have recreated an entire town so you can go back in time to witness how life was in the old gold mining towns of Bendigo and Ballarat. I shouldn’t admit to this, but I now have a new week-end hobby. I go on long drives on the outskirts of Melbourne with a metal detector looking for those golden nuggets.  Well… you never know!

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by Sachin Kulkarni, Melbourne, Victoria.  July 2003.