Once More With Footnotes

Just like us.
     
                  We like to build these little worlds where everything gets sorted out and makes sense and, if possible, the good guys win. No-one would call Agatha Christie a fantasy writer, but look at the books she's most typically associated with — they're about tiny isolated little worlds, usually a country house, or an island, or a train, where a very careful plot is worked out. No mad axeman fo r Agatha, no unsolved crimes. Hercule Poirot always finds the clues.
     
                  And look at Westerns. The famous Code of the West largely consisted of finding somewhere where you could safely shoot the other guy in the back, but we don't really want to know that. We 'd rather believe in Clint Eastwood.
     
                  I would, anyway. Almost all writers are fantasy writers, but some of us are more honest about it than others.
     
                  And everyone reads fantasy ... one way ... or another              
     

That wonderful, prestigious, and above all influ ential UK magazine SFX asked me for a signing tour report on Australia. Actually, it's composed from several "real" reports, just like it says. It was published in 1998.
     
    Oh, and the current PR lady in Australia is not fearsome at all, really.
     
     
     
     
     
No W orries
     
                  Australia had the best de facto national anthem in the world. Even people living in swamps in Brazil knew that if you heard the strains of "Waltzing Matilda" you'd soon be swamped by young men and women with orange complexions and the heaviest kna psacks in the world. So, when Australians actually got the chance to vote in a replacement for "Cod Save The Queen", what did they vote for? "Advance Australia Fair", that's what. Now, true, it's more hygenic than most anthems, singing the praises of suns h ine and fresh air rather than, say, bashing other countries, but it does sound so ... worthy. Why didn't "Waltzing Matilda" get chosen? Because it wouldn't have been respectable. Australians care a lot about what other people think.
     
                  I had this conversati on with an Aussie on the edge of a swimming pool at Ayers Rock:
     
                  Aussie: "So what do the poms think about us wanting to kick out Queenie, then?" (The "republic v. monarchy" debate was big at the time.)
     
                  Me: "Doesn't worry us. We've been thinking along t he same lines."
     
                  Aussie: "You don't mind?"
     
                  Me: "Nope. It's fine by us."
     
                  Aussie: "So ... you poms don't mind, then ..."
     
                  Me: "Nope." Aussie: "Oh. Right."
     
    -
     
                  I saw him once or twice again that day, and he was clearly uneasy. He wanted us to mind, so he could say that it was none of our bloody business.
     
                  Because ... well, Australia is still very English, down at bone level. You can see it everywhere, especially in the letters columns of its newspapers. There's the same hair-trigger fear that someo ne somewhere might be getting more than their fair share, the same low-grade resentments, the same tone of voice ... it's just like being back home. I love the place, and must have been back at least a dozen times.
     
                  I did my first Australian tour in 1990. It was a bit of an eye opener. They talk about UK and Commonwealth rights in the contracts, and the author says "yeah, yeah" and signs — and then you go out there, and there's all these real people. Let's see, what were the highlights on that tour ... oh, y es, going into a bookshop in some tiny place called Toowoomba and finding a huge crowd of people, and on the signing table was a Vegemite sandwich and a cup of Milo, cornerstones of the Australian Experience. One of the others is "a chunder", which I didn ' t have. Incidentally, an early Australian rival to Marmite was tentatively called Pawill, although the proposed slogan, "If Marmite, Pawill," was never used as far as I know, possibly because of police intervention. I was also pissed on by a koala, becaus e that's what they do. A taxi driver ran after me in the street to give me my change, a thing that's never ever happened anywhere else in the world. And we shifted a lot of books, in this huge continent hitherto known to me as a word in the small print on