Today is moving day from Australia to New Zealand. We have really enjoyed our time in Sydney. We have made some good friends and experienced some unusual scenes and activities. So as we go, we are feeling some regret about some things we did not get to do, but looking forward to returning to Kiwi land.
Susan took a early walk on Bondi Beach to Bronte Beach with her new friend, Suanne Adelman.
Some girl time exercising and a stop for coffee at Suanne's regular java joint. It was just like home, except for the photo op with the Bondi Surf Rescue Team.
Australians have been wonderful to us and we feel they are like our companions in Texas in many ways. They are outgoing, fun, irreverent, unpretentious and open to strangers. They like to laugh and pull jokes on others and enjoy one on themselves.
Maybe we are like them because our histories are similar. We have read in the history books that Australia was settled as a penal colony for criminals from England. Like most things in history books, that is somewhat accurate, but there is much more to the story.
In the late 1700’s, England was an overcrowded country with a great deal of poverty and a class system that kept those at the bottom firmly in their place. Property crimes could be a hanging offense. The prisons could not hold all the population who were jailed just for stealing food. So for almost 100 years, about 650,000 convicts were shipped to Australia to work off their sentences. While some were probably hardened criminals, many were just caught up in an economic system that placed them in jail. Usually they were freed after seven years of servitude in Australia and could return to England. Most chose to stay.
In the US, our criminal justice system was not nearly so efficient as England’s, so our frontiersman who settled our wilderness were often un-convicted men and women fleeing the authorities. That is particularly true of Texas. Both our countries had a minor, but significant number of their early occupants who were not an approved component of the “civilized” societies from whence they came.
However, many more early settlers were neither convicts nor fugitives from the law, but people with entrepreneurial instincts who had the vision to see that an insular society was never going to allow them the opportunities they would find in the frontier. Just as the Western land rush populated empty territories in the US, a gold rush brought many more early settlers to Australia than the convicts we read about the history books.
In the Midwest, we heard about the courage of our pioneers who loaded their wagons with their household goods in Kansas City and departed for Oregon, Utah or California. But think about the mindset of someone who would board a dinky sailing ship in Plymouth, England with just a bag of belongings and set sail across the most treacherous oceans in the world to a land on the other side of the earth.
The happy result for both our countries is we created a population of productive people who were enthusiastic about the future and eager to improve their personal situations with the force of their enthusiasm and hard work.
See you in New Zealand!
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