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Stranger in a Strange Land

Well I'm back in the land of cheap incense
Back in the land of pie and sauce
Drinkin' flat beer with no third course

This Is My City (G.Macainsh) Skyhooks Circa 1975

All that was missing was the cardboard suitcases. Dazed from seven hours of airports and planes, I stared around. A mass of humanity, on the move, resigned and waiting. To be in another place.

Lines and lines of weary luggage-burdened travellers stretched through the glass doorways, onto the street. The crowd was predominantly Hispanic and Asian with trollies laden with electronic gear and parcels of clothes wrapped in brown paper and bound with string.

No Statue of Liberty to watch over us here. We were in the Tom Bradley International Terminal at Los Angeles airport early December 2001.

After a five hour flight from New York and with my internal time-clock telling me it was 2:00 a.m. in the morning, I was in no mood for standing in a three-hour long line, to be wanded, x-rayed, body-searched and whatever. But this is what air-travel is all about, in these days of heightened security post- nine-eleven.

Actually it wasn't so bad. We were a third of the way along the ever-growing queue when a Qantas rep found us and escorted us to security. After all, how could the plane take off without us on board, our luggage in the hold? And how could we get on the plane if we were to wait our turn in line.

After we'd been body-searched and out carry-on luggage inspected thoroughly by men in gloves, we boarded the plane.

Fourteen hours later we alighted to a cold and wintry Melbourne December day. It was colder than New York. Melbourne Airport seemed deserted. I felt that I'd stepped back in time.

Two days later I was walking down Lygon Street, Carlton; Carlton where I spent my university years, a place that had seemed a hundred years away just a week ago. Carefree people eating seafood and pasta, drinking white wine at sidewalk cafes, groups of office workers on their way back from Christmas parties walking at snails' place without a care in the world. Happy faces. Christmas shoppers spilling out of a very-changed Reading's bookstore, bearing gifts for rellies and books for vacation-reading at the beaches along the Great Ocean Road where they'll be heading for extended vacations on Boxing Day.

I drifted into a few shops, consciously trying to fit in with rest of the "crowd" by slowing my New York walking pace to a quarter of the speed. Bright orange and green clothes hung in the racks. I tried to imagine myself wearing these colors in Manhattan ... and walked on.

Several dinner parties and as many days later I think of answering my Manhattan friends on what it is like here, but can find few words. To those who feared hearing the BUT-people (September 11th was terrible BUT...") I have to say it is not that bad. A few naive comments like, "I hear that the World Trade Center site is completely cleared of rubble", "There were only rich brokers killed", and "You've probably got more chance of being killed by a gun on the streets of Manhattan", come to mind. But not from everyone.

But as I look at the carefree smatterings of people who pass for crowds here, I am remained of a time around four years ago when I was sitting on the number 7 subway, on my way to work one cold and snowy Manhattan morning. I was staring at my fellow commuters, men and women of different colors, ages and sizes. I was very homesick. What was wrong, I thought to myself. My answer came back instantly. "These people are not my people, and never will be".

I hadn't thought about that morning in the whole intervening four years. Till my "shopping" day in Lygon Street. I watched my fellow Meburnians amble past. Innocent people, 12,000 miles away from the current "world events".

Were these people, walking around without a care in the world, MY people?

My answer of course is, yes. But so now are my fellow New Yorkers. The people of that melting-pot of a city. A city so misunderstood in the eyes of so many.

New York, NY.



Kate