Your American Masters

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Well... there was the Leading WREN that invited a couple of us over for spaghetti one evening... and the elderly lady who asked me to show her what a US penny looked like, saying, "I'm sure you must think this terribly ignorant of me..." (the sort of behavior inveighed against as "the Australian cultural cringe" in books of the time), and the schoolboys who asked us what we thought of Australian beer (it's darn good). It was my first exposure to Australian table wines -- the Monty Python sketch was later for me.

The social stuffiness seems less a thing of individual Australians than of something in the atmosphere. Singapore has the identical feel -- and it too was a British colony. I didn't pick this up in Kenya, perhaps because the social effect of the strongman rulership of Daniel Arap Moi overlaid it too much.

The WA'ers told us the people from The Big Smoke were the stuffy ones. At this point an American might lift an eyebrow and wonder aloud about "a failure to communicate (broad Cool Hand Luke reference)."

Fremantle (was that "Freo?") struck me as a small navy town, most notable for its port facilities and underused submarine base, which is handy for US nuke boats making a port call during operations in the IO, as our submariners abbreviate the Indian Ocean. Come to think of it, I spent most of my at-sea time in the Navy somewhere in the Indian Ocean.