WHAT IS AUSTRALIA?

As you all would have known, mum was visiting last couple of weeks and I had taken on the responsibility of showing her what Australia really is.

So here's the tourist viewpoint.

Australia is the land of

Cowgirls

Boomerangs

Whiplash

Sheepdogs

Sheep shearing

and The Great Barrier Reef

I'm telling you, it feels really strange to be doing touristy stuff when you've lived in Australia for a long period of time, mainly because of the way the sites pander towards the Asian clientele. The most hilarious place I went to was the Paradise Country Farm on the Gold Coast(see videos above). I found it strange because I have actually seen a real working farm, and this was definitely not one. It purely caters for tour groups (apparently you can't just walk in and buy a ticket at the door, has to be through group tours) and demonstrations are translated live by a Korean, Japanese and Chinese hostesses (again the Asian slant). This farm does a really good job of portraying Australia in the same vein as movies like Crocodile Dundee and Kangaroo Jack, where koalas can be plucked from a tree for a photo, where every Australian knows how to hunt using a boomerang, and when there's nothing much to do, we shear sheep and make billy tea. I guess if I was a tourist, these things would be pretty intriguing to me to, but I sometimes wonder what goes on in the minds of the demonstrators at the funny farm, cos their acting skills are so well honed their enthusiasm is almost believable. They must love their jobs.....Well, as long as mum enjoyed herself, and i think she did.

And now we come to the part where I think mum enjoyed the most, FOOD! Honestly, that must be where I got my foodie gene from, as mum has always been a purveyor of fine food. Below are just a few of the food she sampled while she was here.

Baby custard cakes which are also available in Singapore I know, but not in such micro sizes.

This was the first meal Mum had when she got here. David and Lily brought us all down to the fish market where we had raw and cooked oysters, the freshest ocean trout and salmon sashimi and a giant seafood platter (consisting of succulent char grilled baby octopus, crispy beer battered fish fillets, crunchy breaded calamari rings, bouncy cooked prawns in seafood cocktail sauce sitting on top of a mountain of chips). And we devoured all these on a picnic rug under a sunny blue Sydney sky, and was Mum's introduction to Aussie style alfresco dining!

We had to have a obligatory Chinese meal, which is somewhat different from the Zi Char style in Singapore. The Chinese food in Sydney is more skewed towards Hong Kong cooking, attributed to the number of Hong Kong immigrants here. The unidentified gold brown stuff on the right is actually deep fried salt and pepper calamari, a signature dish of the restaurant we went to. Alas, it was a bit disappointing that night we had it as it was a tad overdone and ended up quite rubbery.
This is steak tartare, Japanese style. Basically raw beef infused with mirin and superior shoyu. You break up the egg yolk and mix it in with the beef, which coats it and gives it a silky mouth feel. The spring onions and seaweed counterbalances the sweetness imparted by the mirin. Mum liked this very much.
This is Bahn Xeo, a wafer like Vietnamese pancake made with a batter containing rice flour and coconut milk. Enclosed within the pancake are copious amounts of beansprouts, mung bean, prawns, paper thin slices of pork belly and an assortment of fresh herbs. Its then wrapped with lettuce leaves and dipped into a sweet, sour and salty sauce which perfectly complements the rich nutty flavour of the crispy pancake.
And here's mum enjoying her dim sum (otherwise known as yum cha in Sydney, which is grammatically wrong as yum cha is a verb where dim sum is the noun, therefore you eat dim sum, not eat yum cha, as the direct translation of that means "eat drink tea", which doesn't make sense, but I am sensing you don't really give a fuck so I will stop here now). While dim sum is more expensive here in Sydney, I proclaim the quality and variety here to be 650 times better than that in Singapore. And I have my mum and her friend to back me up on that.

Now these pictures are meant to prove that my mum was actually here...It was a good trip, I learnt some things that I don't even know, even after being here for 8 years. Best of all was that Mum enjoyed herself tremendously and went home with truckloads of chocolates and nougat....another successful Aussie export.

Now for the real Australia....

100s of thousands of Australian families took to the streets to protest about the government's industrial relations reforms as it meant workers were no longer as protected from unfair dismissals or had as many benefits as they use to. I will not comment on this as I have not studied it enough to make an informed comment.

6 gunshots were fired into a club in a drive by shooting right on our street less than 2 months ago. Fortunately no one was killed, 3 people were injured. I would love to say that the community and law enforcement agencies were shaken up and took pro-active measures to prevent it from happening again. Sadly, it was business as usual for the club the following night.

Now thats Australia for ya, behind the happy kangaroos, merino wool products, beautiful blue skies and the friendly people saying "G'day" to you.