Home, Sweet Antipodean Home Andrés Neuman (2013)
1. Before I travelled to Australia, the clearest accounts I had of the country came from Helen Garner, one of my favourite storytellers, and Under Capricorn, a film by Alfred Hitchcock now relatively forgotten despite Ingrid Bergman’s inebriated starring role. The plot revolves around the origins of the Australian nation, founded in good part — somewhat like Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego, another place at the edge of the world — through the enterprise of former convicts and adventurers of dubious reputation. When I came across the ferocious urbanism of NSW’s capital, Sydney, which doesn’t give the impression that it cares about the harmony between nature and buildings along its coastline, I immediately remembered Hitchcock’s film. In Australia’s landscape of contradictions, trees can appear taller than skyscrapers. There always seems to be a tension between Australia’s extravagant wilderness and the urban structures that encircle it. It’s as if here, the paradigms of civilisation and barbarism are neighbours. If truth be told, in Australia everything is concurrently ferocious: fauna; history; distances; individual liberty; immigration – and the policies that supress it. Australia’s Babelic make-up is only barely comparable with certain epochs of the United States, Argentina or Panama, the difference being that in Australia, the migratory waves – notably during the Gold Rush and after the two world wars – have lasted for more than two centuries. It all began a year before the French Revolution with the transportation of British convicts. The first Scottish settlers would arrive four decades later. Both details are notable: the Aussie model is a combination of Anglo-Saxon fringes. That’s why it is not unusual for a writer like J.M. Coetzee to have ended up settling in Adelaide, in Australia’s south. 2. Melbourne’s Immigration Museum is the centre for the preservation of memory. And a monument to the identity paradox – it conveys convincing nationalistic propaganda based on pride in being a host country. The introductory video seems 179