June 12th, Australia Day 111

Well, another week has come and gone in Australia, and everywhere else I suppose. Perhaps thankfully, it has been another uneventful time here with only 1 thing of great significance occurring. The coming weeks will be slightly more hectic as exams come up but I am confident in my abilities to handle both the pressure, and the exams.

Firstly, the most important thing this week happened this Thursday and I didn't even realize it until the event was upon me. That day, I had my last lectured classes of my 4-year Honours degree with a quick exam review in my Ancient Greek Religion class. I didn't even realize that this was my last class of my current degree until I was already inside the room. Following that, I had a tutorial which ran from 16:00-17:00 and thus, without much ceremony, my last classes passed. I'm still not out of the woods yet, though, as I have a few more papers, some exams and my Honours Thesis to complete before I truly earn my sheepskin but that will be over soon enough.

I suppose now would be as good a time as any to explain some more quirks about Australia. This is the only place in the world I can think of where major professional sports leagues are confined almost exclusively to 1 city. In the case of the AFL, my favourite Australian sport, it is Melbourne with 10 of the 16 league teams residing in that city of 3.5 million. When AFL was only to be found in the state of Victoria, as it was until the 1980s, it was known as the VFL and it had 12 teams. Of those, 11 were in Melbourne with the lone outsider club being the Geelong Cats of the city of Geelong, about 100 kilometers west of Melbourne. Then 1 team moved out of Melbourne and went to Sydney and thus the South Melbourne Swans became the Sydney Swans. From what I'm told, the denizens of Victoria barely acknowledge the existence of the other sport of which I wish to speak, rugby.

In Australia, there are 2 forms of rugby, League and Union. Rugby Union is the one that is globally more popular and you just have to watch the Australian National team, the Wallabies, or the New Zealand All Blacks to figure out the rules. Lisgar Collegiate, my former high school, had, and I assume still has, a rugby team and it plays Union style. The rules of League and Union are quite similar except that in League a team has a limited number of tackles before it loses the ball whereas in Union, a team can keep the ball for as long as it can hold on to it. In League play, a team has 6 tackles before it must hand over the ball to the other team but they can kick it away before that. Also, League fields are marked off in a similar style to football. The Rugby League is to be found almost exclusively in Sydney but there are teams from outside New South Wales, although the situation is similar to the AFL with respect to Melbourne. Sydney is a city of about 4.5 million and most of its suburbs have a Rugby League team. I am also told that there is a class distinction between the types of play with lower to middle class people preferring League and upper class citizens preferring Union. If you have trouble remembering this, just thing L=League and Lower Class, U=Union and Upper Class.

Finally, let me recount 2 yarns that the Aussies like to spin to tourists about their native fauna. They say that this works particularly well on those Americans who are ignorant of the continent when they arrive. Most people in North America hear that Australia is home to the deadliest snakes and spiders in the world, which is true, and so the Australians have capitalized on this momentum and added 2 new species to their wildlife. The first, is the dreaded Drop Bear which lives in trees. It is supposed to be a larger and more ferocious version of the koala and it hangs ever so silently in the trees until in pounces by dropping on the unsuspecting victims below. Recently, a commercial for Bundaberg Rum, a native brewing company whose symbol is a Polar Bear for some reason, used this as a theme for one of its commercials. The second deadly critter is the very venomous and wily Hoop Snake. The idea is that if you are being chased by a snake, you should run down an incline as snakes have trouble negotiating unlevel terrain. The Hoop Snake, however, has adapted so that it bites its own tail, creating a wheel, and then it rolls down the hill after you. Both of these stories gave me a good laugh when I heard them. Being already well versed in Australian fauna, and Canadian, I knew the stories were fiction but good nonetheless.