Advance Australia Fair

I Love A Sunburnt Country

Hehe, do i sound corny? I should. I am. I love Australia. That's not to say that i'm not desparate to see the rest of the world. But, i'll always call Australia home. While the cultures and differences of the rest of the world catch my eye and i am desparate to see it all, of late i've become increasingly partial to home.

At the wedding, someone sent a telegram, saying that they were sitting in a bar in Memphis, Tennessee, toasting Mark and Sophie with a whole bunch of Australians, whom neither they, nor the happy couple, knew. That just encompasses the Australian behaviour - who cares who it is? It's an Australian wedding, we'll drink to that! It's the Aussie way. I love it.

It's not just the happy, carefree, relaxed, mate-ish, chilled nature of Australia's occupants that i love. It's the beauty that abounds; trees, lakes, vegetation, wide open spaces, sweeping mountains, rolling oceans, starswept nights, clear blue skies... they're all things that we take for granted, but are things that so many other people across the world have never had. Australia has every culture you can imagine. We have everything here. Everything we need. Space, food, culture, friendly people. Sure, we have water problems and pollution problems. But managed correctly (not that i'm quite sure what 'correctly' is), Australia will still be great.

It's not just Australia, but Adelaide that i love. We've got tree lined streets, we're small, we've got significantly less traffic that other places. From my palace, you can get almost anywhere you would ever need to go in under half an hour. Anything more than twenty minutes away, we complain about as being too far away. I love it. Everyone knows everyone - which can be totally awful when you're in Rundle Mall, looking daggy and you run into a million people you know - but it can also be great, when you're having a terrible day and all of a sudden you run into a friend in the street who smiles and cheers you up. Fantastic. We can drive at sixteen, have free rein (to an extent) because there is simply no trouble that we can get into, without a souped-up car, fake ID and gun. With none of these things, free rein is all mine.

Maybe it's irrational. But even with the boredom that is Adelaide, it's annoyances, it's flaws, i love it. It's home. It's a little country town, disguised as a city. We're all really country bumpkins in hiding, among a few big buildings, in hopes of appearing sophisticated. But we're not. We know it. We love it.

We're really all just bogans, living it up in little old Adelaide. Don't deny it, you love it too.

And if you're not from here - you should be! Or at least you should come to visit. Because you won't want to leave!

Annie