Stronger Than You

Went to the Aboriginal artifact exhibit in Chicago. And it’s interesting. How many blankets and masks and totem poles say ‘unknown source’, because every five seconds my mom would stop and point to something and say. “Pauline’s grandmother made that,” or, “That belongs to Mike’s family, I should call him” because. It’s all stolen

“These artifacts were excavated by archaeologists from a burial site in the 1970’s. The remains were returned for reinterment” Okay cool, cool cool. So you just, like. Dug up the grave of a respected family member, stripped them naked, mailed their body back to their family and kept everything they were lovingly put to rest in. Like a graverobbing bastard

Reminds me of the time when of the elders from my hometown started touching a totem pole in the Museum of Anthropology out at UBC and got yelled at by the staff, only to tell him that the pole had been stolen off of the front of her bighouse when she was ten years old.

Museum collectors did the equivalent of kidnapping a family member when they were away fishing.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act requires all institutions that receive federal funding to repatriate remains and artifacts so if you can identify the source of something on display absolutely get a hold of that institute’s repatriation office

Street art in Melbourne, Australia.

I feel like this would be a slippery slope towards making it illegal for people to choose to not vote.

that’s already how it is in australia

That’s just so fucked up. :( Do certain medical conditions exempt you?

?????? why is it be fucked up to have compulsory voting? that’s the way it is in most democratic countries? it’s a part of being a citizen, like paying taxes and obeying speed limits? the fine for not voting is only like $50 and because of the compulsory voting law, our country bends over backwards to make it accessible: it’s always on a weekend, lasts most of the day, and is set up at schools and community centers so there’s one within easy reach of almost everybody. you can also mail your ballot or vote early if you’ll be out of the country on the day. like, IT’S EASY TO VOTE, and the penalty isn’t even that ridiculous. i don’t understand why the usa doesn’t have this, except obviously it would make it harder to literally stop minorities from voting.

I think we Americans tend to forget that a lot of other countries don’t actively work to make it harder to vote.

Adding to this here, in Australia you don’t have to vote. Or, more precisely, there’s no way they can tell if you ruined your ballot. You have to turn up, get your name marked off, but you can put a line through the ballot if you don’t think any of the candidates are worth voting for. Or do this: 

Or this: 

Or this: 

You have get your name crossed off (if you don’t want to wear the fine), but you don’t have to make your vote counted if you’re opposed to it. 

And it is so, so easy to vote. Stuck at work or on holidays? That’s fine. Do a postal vote.  Stuck in hospital? That’s fine. They’ll go to you. Stuck in an old people’s home and can’t get around? Again, they’ll go to you. It’s amazing to me that it’s so hard for so many Americans to actually vote. If you make it compulsory, than at least the government is obligated to provide you with the means to vote. 

And look, I get it. Sometimes I don’t want to vote either. But I suck it up, I walk three minutes down the street, and I hope that this year they’re selling lamingtons again. Oh, and I buy a democracy sausage, which, even if all the candidates suck, makes the effort of turning up pretty worthwhile. 

ALSO, you can see even on the fucked up ballots that you NUMBER CANDIDATES IN ORDER OF PREFERENCE. There’s no need to calculate whether I would be throwing away my vote on the candidate that I most agree with if they’re not from a major party. I can say, I want that independent person to get in, but if not them, give me Big Party A, and if not them, that minor party person is still better that Big Party B, and I’m not giving any preference to the Lunatic Fringe Party.

Our system certainly has some issues still, but I can show up to somewhere nearby, line up for a few minutes (if at all), vote exactly in line with my values (on paper, leaving a paper trail that can be recounted), and then buy a sausage and some home made cupcakes on my way out.

A country’s voting system matters a hell of a lot and every citizen deserves one that makes it easy to vote and results in a government that is representational and accountable.

And by the way, one time I had a bad asthma flare-up on Election Day and didn’t make it to my polling station. I got my fine in the mail, I filled out the form explaining why I couldn’t vote, no more fine. I would rather have, you know, expressed my preference for who should run my country, but they were cool with the fact that I couldn’t do it that day.

“oh no, what if people actually have to participate in picking the government officials who will impact their lives” jesus christ

For the last time, for everyone who still doesn’t understand: not voting is not a tool of resistance, it’s a tool of surrender.

Hey, its Australia day! Aka the day a bunch of English arrived in Australia and began two centuries worth of genocide and cultural erasure.

In honour of Australia day, do you wanna help some indigenous people reclaim rightful ownership of their unceded lands?

If any of my posts blow up please let it be this one:

Australia is currently petitioning to make it that all gender confirming surgeries for transgender individuals are covered by Medicare. This is absolutely huge as surgeries are super expensive even with private health insurance.

It doesn't ask for an address or phone number or anything so I think anyone in the world can sign for it? But I'm not entirely sure.

EDIT: yeah you gotta be a citizen, so if you're outside the country, if you could reblog this to reach more Australians, this would be amazing!

Here's the petition link:

Petition information:

Please reblog this and spread it as far and wide as you can, this is super important!

Welcome to Australia! Where a fast food restaurant literally made a mirrored reflective sea-gull proof packet for their fries so they don’t god damn try to fly down and steal your fries.

YOU THINK IM JOKING?

LIGHT? FRIGHT!

This is the best thing I’ve ever seen

I think American accents are cute I love hearing American cuties talking yes bitch show me how rhotic your rs are

Especially because I hear absolutely nothing but Australian accents and I'm so tired of it. I want an American girlboy gf. "Waahtermelon" yes bitch.

carr keys. starr worrs. superr duperr. etc

Music to my ears

Excellent work ladies

Foreigners tend to assume that the big cultural confusions between Australians and most other countries are gonna be based on our food, or social services, or weather, or weird animals. But it’s never that. In my experience, the real cultural confusions re: Australians are about The Respect Thing almost one hundred per cent of the time.

? I realize im proving your point but what

The broader Australian culture doesn’t, as a whole, have status-based respect. Some individual groups might, because they’ve brought it from other cultures they’re involved in, but the general culture doesn’t. There’s no sense that your boss or scout leader or the guy in charge of your country deserves more respect than you, or that you should behave differently to them than you would to any random person you know similarly well. (The very rare exceptions include ritualised settings, such as courtrooms, and for some reason the fact that children use “Miss/Ms/Mr” honourifics for teachers at school.) 

I don’t mean Australians are a “stick it to the man, fight back against those in power” kind of people – we’re generally not. And I don’t mean we have a “we’re going to do the status thing but pretend we don’t and pretend to all be equal in mixed company” thing that middle-class Americans do. I mean the status-respect system does not exist, and if you try to use it, it weirds people the fuck out at best, and insults them at worst. Treating someone most countries would say is ‘above’ you differently in Australia is basically telling that person that you hate them; it’s saying “I’m forced to interact with you due to our current circumstances but I don’t see you as a person and won’t grant you the basic respect of treating you like an equal”. (When I was in America, I was constantly suppressing the instinct that random service people were sassing me because they overuse honourifics and were so keen to help me.)

This makes interacting with foreigners really baffling in a lot of circumstances. In university, my international friends would often describe Australians as “friendly, but very rude”. They thought we were all arseholes because of the way we spoke to our PhD supervisors and soforth, and wouldn’t believe us when we explained that our behaviour was respectful and that being deferential would be weird and awkward and insulting to them. Learning Japanese had a similar problem; everyone in the class could get the concept of different levels of formality and deference in language, ans was happy to memorise the usage of various words for Japanese people, but using them on each other was super weird, and we’d only ever use the most casual form of anything unless specifically instructed otherwise by the teacher.

The reason I’ve been thinking of this lately is because I’ve recently become aware that a lot of countries have like… a special respect for their country’s leaders? I don’t just mean “yeah, that guy makes the rules”, but that having that office makes them better than everyone else, somehow. Which I expect from countries with royal families, because Tradition, but I’ve recently found that Americans feel this way about their President, too. (Except the current one, who seems to be enough of a dick to break the system.) Like, if six Americans were in an aeroplane that was going down and there was only one parachute and one of the Americans was A Generic Non-Trump President, it’s just assumed that that guy gets the parachute? Like he’s automatically the life worth saving over the others, and they’d just give up their chance in favour of him? And that’s so weird to me. An Australian prime minister would have a 1 in 6 chance at the parachute; however the people decided, “this guy happens to be the leader of the country” wouldn’t be a factor. 

When Americans don’t like a President, they usually feel the need to work in how he’s “not my president”, either through sheer denial, or by finding some way he’s theoretically illegitimate (different ways votes are counted, wild conspiracy theories about birth country, etc.), and while making sure those rules are obeyed IS extremely important, I’ve recently noticed that part of the motivation seems to be that they’re invested in whether he’s Really The President because being the President somehow makes someone Special rather than just a normal dick who’s been put in charge of the group project. (You see the same thing in “THIS IS TRUMP’S AMERICA!”, like him becoming President gives him superpowers or something).

This is getting off-topic. Point is, in Australia you can run into the Prime Minister and ask him to help you fix your phone and if he’s not busy but refused to help you out he’d be kind of a dick; of course he should help you out. And if I walk into your restaurant and you act like I’m a movie star and you’re going to be super attentive to my every need because I’m The Customer, I’m gonna get creeped out. We’re suspicious and insulted by what most people in the world consider to be basic manners, and vice versa. And it makes interacting with foreigners super weird because I always feel like they’ve got some invisible heirarchical flowchart in the back of their minds that I don’t.

I have long noticed that Americans have absolutely the same cultural attitude to the President as they would to a serving monarchy. They just think they don’t on a technicality.

Can confirm that if I call someone ‘Sir/Madam’ I generally mean ‘asshole’ (unless talking to an animal or tiny child) and that if I get called Ma’am I feel like I’m being called the asshole, which made time in Atlanta, Georgia suoer weird.

Australians have a very good attitude to respect

…so this explains why I have spent the last fourteen years low-grade pissed off at nearly every Australian I meet, because every time I try to be American Polite at them it pisses them off. And, for that matter, why my second boss here, the one I was so careful to be Formally Respectful of and always called “sir,” took such an intense dislike to me.

Yeah, even if that boss understood that you were American and what that meant, their instincts would’ve been screaming at them the whole time that you were being a dick. It’s a difficult thing for us to get used to even when we know the culture is different’.

As a Brit visiting Australia, the most vivid experience I had of this is: in the UK it’s really uncool to get into the passenger seat of a cab - you’re expected to get in the back. In Australia the reverse was apparently true.

… I am only just now realising that inAmerican and British movies and stuff, people don’t get in the passenger seat of a taxi.

covid update: you’re now meant to get in the back seat for social distancing and IT FEELS SO RUDE. sorry taxi person I AM NOT TRYING TO SHUN YOu just I know there are rules and we’re protecting each other. let’s be intensely awkward for a while.

Reblogging this because I just remembered the time Molly Meldrum absolutely horrified Prince Charles by describing meeting the Queen as “I saw your mum last week”.

One of my favorite travel books described humanity as, broadly speaking, having two types of culture: one where formal is respectful and informal is rude, and vice versa. Australian culture sees formality as hostile or unfriendly and familiarity as warmth. It’s decidedly not the case in USA as a whole, though as with any broad category the dichotomy changes as the group gets smaller.

YOU PUT THE THING INTO WORDS!

Different cultures are fascinating.

As an American, in my experience, calling someone “sir” or “ma’am” could have several connotations, depending on context:

- if you’re addressing someone whose name you don’t know, ie a stranger (ex: you see someone drop money from their wallet and they don’t notice, so you get their attention by saying “sir/ma’am, you dropped this”)

- and if a stranger is helping you out, or if you’re helping a stranger out (ex: “sir/ma’am, do you need help carrying that?” If someone holds the door for you, you’d say “thank you sir/ma’am!” (Though most people just say “thank you” and don’t usually add the sir or ma’am)

- addressing an authority figure, such as a boss, business/government official, etc (maybe even a parent of someone you’re dating, or the parent of a friend. Not that they would be seen as “authority figures”, but there’s a certain unspoken formality in addressing a person you’re not familiar with, especially if it’s the parent of someone you’re dating.) In some settings, people will address their boss/bosses by their first name, or by Ms/Mrs/Miss/Mr [Last Name]. It varies between each type of job and each workspace.

- teachers are ALWAYS addressed by students as Ms/Mrs/Miss/Mr [Last Name]. In my time in grade school and high school, I’ve seen students get reprimanded, sometimes harshly, for calling teachers by their first name, whether jokingly or not. It’s pretty universally accepted that if you’re a minor, you address anyone not related to you in this way (part of the controversial “respect your elders” culture)

- college is a mixed bag on this topic. You’ll commonly have professors who will, right off the bat, tell you to go ahead and call them by their first name. Some students do, but then again plenty don’t, because of 18 years of being forced to address teachers in the way I explained above, and it’s a habit not easily broken. In some more professional college settings (off the top of my head, law school or medical school) professors are mostly addressed as “Professor [Last Name]”. Most American elementary/high schools are similar, if not exactly the same in their social cultures. But every college is different.

- if you’re at work and speaking to a customer, because there is a LOT of socially grey area when it comes to customer/employee interactions (but that’s a whole other can of worms)

- and usually vice-versa, if you’re a customer and speaking to an employee (I personally always try to address employees as politely as possible, because the service industry is hell in America, and you would not believe the kind of assholes that workers have to put up with. They deserve much better than what they get, but again, a can of worms for another day.)

Idk these are just some of the examples I can think of

all these canadians or brits or aussies with superiority complexes watching the american election for a cheap laugh... real people will continue to suffer and die at the hands of these candidates and it’s not a time for you to post your little flag emojis. your countries are extremely fucking racist as well. how about you exert that energy on addressing the horrific experiences of Indigenous people in your nations or the impacts of your brutal colonization on the culture and political stability of 90% of the world? back off your superiority complex and show some fucking empathy.

I’ve been fascinated with the underground town of Coober Pedy, in Australia, b/c it’s the Opal mining capital of the world, and my birthstone is the Opal. Plus, it’s a very interesting place. 

B/c it’s so hot, 80% of the town is underground. You can buy an above-ground house, if you really want one, but all homes are relatively inexpensive.

Shopping is underground.

Bars, coffee shops, & restaurants are also underground.

Churches are underground, too.

You can visit & stay in one of the many motels. This is the lobby of a Comfort Inn.

traveloutbackaustralia.com

just saw bindi irwin got engaged and apparently her fiance is american. she’s 21 and they’ve been dating for 6 years. I wonder if his family lives in aus/works in conservation because imagine just being a random 15-year-old tourist at the zoo and having a meet cute with steve irwin’s daughter lol 

apparently that’s exactly how they met. bindi just happened to be giving tours the day his family visited. love is unreal. how is this not a teen romcom yet

It gets better. Terri is also American and met Steve Irwin the same way, by chance at the Australia Zoo, in 1991. Terri was devastated when he immediately offered to introduce her to his girlfriend Sue, until Steve called Sue over and a dog came bounding up.

Multi-generational love at first sight.

My favorite part of the story of how Steve and Terri met is that it was literally love at first sight. He saw her in a crowd and froze. Which was a bad thing, because he was sort of wrestling a crocodile at the time.

Aussie fairy tale

they just got married!!

So important. 💕 

Musician Lizzo has taken a break from her gigs in Australia to lend a helping hand as the country’s worst bushfire crisis continues. The 31-year-old “Good As Hell” hitmaker spent time volunteering at Melbourne’s Foodbank on Wednesday, helping package food hampers for those who’ve been affected by the devastating fires. The organization has set up a page on its website where Lizzo fans can learn how to make a difference this bushfire season – head here to learn more. 

IS THAT A SHARK?

if you watch any video today it needs to be this one

I LOVE THIS NEWSCAST AND IM NOT EVEN FROM AUSTRALIA.

#like that little cage is gonna help ya

Theyre so. Honest

idc what anyone says, that was a megalodon

As a person from australia that dude always has the best reactions to things. like always. I’m pretty sure it’s the only reason he was hired.

You non-Aussies are missing out on quality television

This clip got them a cameo in Sharknado 5 lmao

Reblog if you’re part of a hostile nation that’s declared war on Australia

Oh my god though guys you don’t know the best thing!  The best thing is: he’s right.

The Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands is a micronation near Australia.  This is their flag:

The Gay Kingdom (as it is colloquially known) was founded in 2004 in protest against Australia’s legal stance against same-sex marriage.

Here are some of their stamps:

They are currently ruled by Emperor Dale I, and their currency is the Pink Dollar.

And, indeed - they declared war on Australia for not recognizing same-sex marriages performed outside the country.  (Second link.)

You’re telling me there has been a Gay Island this ENTIRE TIME and I’m only just finding out about it????

WHAT

okay, but not enough people know the details on this. people at pride were upset about gay rights in australia. so they decided to sail 200 miles into the coral sea just ‘cause and put a rainbow flag on a fucking empty island out of spite. and i’m talking empty. no inhabitants. zero. it was a flat piece of land with a bit of dry grass. now it has a camp site and a post office. 

they have a declaration of independence that talks a bit about gay rights and then just flat out copies the “life liberty and the pursuit of happiness” part from the american declaration of independence. and here’s the best part: the founding group actually elected their emperor. he was originally going to be called the “administrator” of a republic. their website, however, says that “upon legal advice, his title was changed to that of Sovereign on the grounds that under Australian law a defacto prince trying to claim his crown cannot be charged with treason”. so they made it a kingdom and he now claims to be a descendent of edward ii.

everything about this is glorious and everyone should know about it.

Keep reading

Not one of you mentioned that the anthem for this nation is I Am What I Am by Gloria Gaynor. Not. One. Of. You.

A very good micronation. Very good.

:D

idk if y’all americans and that know this, but in Australia instead of snow at christmas we get these lil shiny bugs everywhere and they’re attracted to the christmas lights and we call them christmas beetles

and despite being australian they don’t bite or anything they just crawl around on your hand and it’s such a good and pure feeling and yeah

“despite being australian”

sometimes i get mad at australian stereotypes but then i remember that my backyard looks like this

IM FREAKING OUT THIS IS MY BACKYARD HOW DID YOU GET THIS PICTURE??????

never mind i just found my brother’s blog by accident

I’m quoted in this NPR article Dogs Are Doggos: An Internet Language Built Around Love For The Puppers (which you should definitely read in its entirety)