OVERSEAS Travails
First published in The Independent 25 June 2008
In recent columns, I’ve been a little unfair to Americans, I’ve come to realise. So this issue I’d like to spend some time reflecting on a far more noxious and disturbing race of people – travelling Australians.
The last week or so I’ve had the misfortune of being forced to travel around northern Italy with a tour group called Intrepid. Nothing wrong about Intrepid – a fine outfit – except that the largest single species within this group is made up of Australians. Or should that be sub-species?
These people seem incapable of sitting down and enjoying a glass or 12 of very average local wine or a volley of grappas without becoming very, very noisy ... and very, very crude.
For the first time in my life, I’ve realised that the reason we’re known as coming from down under is that we seem incapable of having a conversation about anything without it all becoming mired in references to things down under – namely bottoms, poos, farts, dicks, c... well, you’ve got the general picture.
We’re not so much an out-going people as an outhouse-going people.
Sex rears its ugly head before the first courses are even ordered. Then bodily functions get a solid workover and before too long, one of our tour group, Janet from Victoria, has tears and other liquids running down from various cheeks.
In fact someone just has to shout “Bum, poo, dick” after a half-litre of plonk and peels of laughter shatter the group and start dispersing those unfortunate enough to have sat too closely to us while they try to enjoy their incredibly overpriced and overrated pasta.
Probably the worst example of this appalling and infantile behaviour was the other evening in Florence, where our tour guide traipsed us up to this lovely old park, the Piazza Michelangelo, to watch the sun set over the city of Florence for the first time that day. Nice place, too, but there’s still a lot of old buildings standing here and an Italian Bjelke-Petersen would have done this mediaeval city the world of good.
Anyway, wouldn’t you like to see the conversation going something like this: “I just could not believe the array of works at the Uffizi museum devoted to Rin Tin Tinto’s iconic period, could you?’’
Or: “I can’t believe we’re travelling tomorrow to Lucca, the birthplace of Puccini. I truly believe his variations for oboe in his seminal work, Madama Butterfly, have never been surpassed!”
Well, my Intrepid group at least tried, starting the conversation with a discourse on the artistic merits of the fake statue of David in the city’s Piazza Signore.
Almost all the Aussie sheilas in the group – and maybe that was this tour’s main problem because they were all female except yours unruly and our intrepid leader – is that this cultural discourse soon degenerated into ribald discussions over his apparent lack of manhood and how his pathetic pecker seemed to be made even worse by Michelangelo’s weird decision to give the poor chap a right hand much larger in proportion to the rest of his body.
While it did this particular Australian good to know that Aussie sheilas obviously expect much, much more in the bedflute department, and have the highest possible expectations of what they’ve come to grow and love in that area, most of the discussion that followed could best be summed up by paraphrasing dialogue from the famous Oz film, Crocodile Dundee.
“Mick, he’s got a dick!”
“That’s not a dick.”
Zippppp. Flop.....
“That’s a dick!”
There were the usual under-graduate offerings of what a real dick should look like, and the general observation that if Michelangelo in his desire to create “the perfect man” had been Australian, and his model has been, too, and the whole thing had been carved in the middle of summer, maybe down by the beach at Bondi, then David’s marblelated manhood would have stretched to at least to the bottom of the statute and maybe even run a foot or two down towards the high-water mark!
More shrieks of laughter. More startled young Italian lovers edging further away from our group.
In fact they were unusually coarse and ribald this night, so I deliberately took one of the pictures shown abov from behind the group so these gutter-mouthed and rather childish individuals can’t be identified. That’s them in the other photo.
To be fair, at times the group tried hard. The night before, after we’d cleared a cafe with our scatological gun approach to things, one of our group tried to lift the tone by starting a conversation about brushes with fame ... you know, famous people we’ve met, or passed in an airport corridor?
Okay, sure ... hardly highbrow stuff but at least above the navel for a change.
This pretty young theatre nurse from Sydney jumped straight in: “I saw Mark Phillipoussis’s penis once.”
Cries of encouragement from her XX-gen peers of her intimate knowledge of that great Greek tragedy of Australian sport.
“By mistake,” she added quickly, although why she had gotten the Poo to lift his surgery smock all the way over his head in readiness for a simple shoulder operation remains pretty much a mystery, but that’s by the by.
What followed, naturally enough, were many requests from her female companions as to whether the Poo’s penis matched his tennis-playing abilities or had in fact presented itself as something quite reasonable under all the circumstances.
“Bum, poo, dick!” shouted someone else, and our table once again began rocking with cheerful mirth.
It all became a little too much for me, I must admit, and I began to share the gustain, a heady mixture of disgust and distain, that showed frequently on the faces of our north American travelling companions.
But as you would all know, the pressure to conform can be a powerful thing, and from time to time I was reluctantly forced to join in with the childish antics of my fellow countrymen and women – if for no other reason than to avoid being ostracised from my peers.
“Bum, poo, dick!”
