Luke Ford

When you graduate from high school in Australia and your family has some money, you’ll typically go to a resort such as Surfers Paradise and party for a week. It’s called “Schoolies.”

I don’t remember this sort of thing 30 years ago.

If you don’t have air conditioning or a pool at home, your kids are likely to accuse you of owning a “pov house.”

When I lived in Australia in the 1970s, about 5% of the population went to university. Now it is about half, about the same rate as America.

From Brisbane’s Courier-Mail:

TENNIS wild child Bernard Tomic has been caught up in a major Gold Coast party drug investigation.

Tomic is believed to have been at a penthouse party in Surfers Paradise where two teenage girls were allegedly supplied cocaine by local nightclub king Jamie Pickering.

The Ferrari-driving Pickering, who owns prominent Surfers nightclubs SinCity and Vanity, was arrested in March as part of Operation Kilo Fraction, a 19-month police probe into bikie and organised crime links to the Glitter Strip’s party drug trade.

More than 150 people were arrested and tens of millions of dollars in drugs and alleged proceeds of crime, including luxury homes, were seized in the operation.

Pickering, the son of 1970s national political cartoonist Larry Pickering, was charged with five offences including supplying drugs to minors.

I haven’t heard any Australian say anything racist in my week here. What happened to the country I knew and love? People are much more circumspect in their speech today than when I was growing up here.

Everyone I meet says racism is bad and that the White Australia policy was shameful but when I point out that everybody prefers those who are genetically similar to them, I get wide agreement. Australians have been cowed into abiding by the West’s new norms on race even though life as they experience it tells them there are significant differences between the white, black and Asian races and it is much more natural to trust your own kind.

When I lived in Tannum Sands 30 years ago, nobody celebrated Halloween. Now it is as celebrated in this part of Central Queensland as Christmas. Kids dress up in costumes and go around trick or treating. They’ll sometimes throw eggs, which are a great mess to clean up.

There are lots of naysayers against this new Australian custom, but American cultural hegemony rolls on.

Sydney’s Daily Telegraph says:

FOR a country that happily embraces images of a White Christmas amid sweltering humidity, and duly accepts the springtime symbolism of Easter even as we unpack the winter woolies, protesting against Halloween is as nonsensical as it is mean-spirited.

And yet every year the naysayers resume their paranoid bleating about the inherent dangers of children dressing up and eating lollies in the presence of carved-out pumpkins.

It’s the end of Australia as we know it! We’re becoming slaves to Americanisation! So wail the critics who blithely assume Halloween celebrations are the exclusive domain of sugar-laden citizens of US suburbia.

But it is of course a tradition with Celtic origins, and yet you don’t hear Americans whining about how their culture has been hijacked by medieval Europeans.

That’s because they are secure enough in their own national identity to acknowledge a foreign festival and proudly make it their own.

Rather than succumb to yet another insecure bout of parochialism, we’d do well to do the same.

Rampant anti-Americanism notwithstanding, what’s to fear about festivities that involve nothing more sinister than children donning costumes and spreading a little pre-Christmas cheer around the neighbourhood?

The minimum wage for adults in Australia is $16.37. For kids the minimum wage is about $15.

For most Australian workers, their wage is set by the government. It’s called an award wage. Employers are allowed to pay more but few do unless there are special circumstances. Advanced workers, workers with education and special skills, get paid far more than the award rate. Management get paid more than the award rate.

The Australian and American dollars are almost of equal value (92cUS buys $1 Aussie), but the cost of living here is almost twice that of America (though healthcare is free to the consumer). Gas and food are about twice as expensive down under.

Seattle just voted for a $15 minimum wage, the highest in America.

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Topless bathing was common on Australian beaches when I lived here 30 years ago but it has diminished, perhaps thanks to Asian and Muslim immigrants.

I used to see some lovely sights just off the main Tannum beach, sheilas just lying back in the sun on their towels without a care in the world, letting everything hang free. Nowadays however, one has to be grateful for the girls in bikinis.

Frankly, I blame the new prudishness on the Muslims.

Daniel says: “So the Muslims are cool with women in bikinis??? Why the hell do these people move to modern, western countries if they want to turn it into another Jihadstan, or wherever they’re from?!”

I assume they follow the dictates of their religion which aims to conquer the world, through violence if necessary, and rule everybody with Sharia (Islamic law). It seems to me that the West and Muslims are enemies and that the West admits Muslims and allows them to practice Islam to its destruction.

Sydney Morning Herald reports in 2008:

Conservative MP Fred Nile says he wants topless bathing banned in NSW to protect Sydney’s Muslim and Asian communities.

The Reverend Nile has rejected allegations that prudishness is behind a bill he has prepared to ban nudity, including topless sunbathing, on the state’s most popular beaches.

Australia’s reputation as a conservative but culturally inclusive sociery was at risk of erosion by more liberal overseas visitors, he said.

“Our beaches should be a place where no one is offended, whether it’s their religious or cultural views,” he said.

“If they’ve come from a Middle Eastern or Asian country where women never go topless – in fact they usually wear a lot of clothing – I think it’s important to respect all the different cultures that make up Australia.”

The practice was at risk of raising the ire of Muslim men in particular, Mr Nile said.

“I don’t want to have any provocations or disturbances on our public beaches,” he said.

REPORT:

A TOPLESS sunbather is being investigated by police after being accused of sensuously rubbing sun cream on herself on a public beach.

Police were called to a beach at Anzio south of Rome by a furious mother who said the way the “attractive” sunbather was rubbing lotion on her body had “troubled her sons aged 14 and 12.”

The mother said she had asked the 26-year-old woman, identified only as Luisa under Italian privacy laws, to cover herself up. But the woman, still topless, refused and an argument broke out and police were called.

“A patrol was stopped by a mother of two sons who was angry at a topless sunbather and the way she was applying suntan cream,” a police spokesman said…

The number of women sunbathing topless on beaches in Italy and France has dropped in recent years, Italian etiquette expert Countess Barbara Ronchi della Rocca told the UK’s Daily Mail.

Ms Rocca said the beach is no longer the place where you go to get a tan, as people spend the winter topping up their tan in salons.

FROM THE INDEPENDENT:

On any given day, acres of tanned flesh are on view at Bondi Beach: men wearing the briefest of briefs, women sunbathing topless. But it wasn’t always so. In the 1940s, a legendary beach inspector, Aub Laidlaw, patrolled the golden sands, ruler in hand, ensuring that men’s and women’s bathing costumes conformed to bylaws governing public decency.

Costumes had to cover at least three inches of thigh, as well as the entire front of the body, and wobbly bits had to be kept in place by robust straps. Mr Laidlaw frogmarched 50 or more people a week off the beach, including, in 1945, the first woman to brave Bondi in a bikini, and in 1961, a group of men wearing Speedo swimming trunks.

The fanatical Mr Laidlaw retired in 1969, eight years after the bikini was legalised, but now his ghost is once again stalking Sydney’s beaches. A Christian fundamentalist politician, the Rev Fred Nile, is calling for topless sunbathing to be outlawed, and he has received backing from several mainstream MPs.