Uncle Sam don't want no whingers

"The problem with Australia," my friend Jeremy says, "is that your government mothers you." It's May of 2008, and Jeremy and I are in a bar in Sydney. Jeremy is a young American composer* who I met by pure coincidence in Canberra a few weeks earlier. He was about to return to New York after living in Sydney for twelve months, and after a couple of farewell beers we moved onto a conversation topic that always crops up when one party is foreign: What Your Country Does Wrong.

"What the hell do you mean?" I ask, mildly offended. Sure, we have public healthcare but that hardly qualifies us as mothered. God, in some Scandinavian countries the citizens cheerfully fork over half their income so the authorities can do things like buy thousands of bright yellow bicycles for public use (that are then all easily stolen by less-civic minded community members. Apparently the government in question had not considered that light-fingered cyclists might stoop to painting the bikes a less conspicuous colour).

"I mean, your government mollycoddles you to the point where everything is safe. There's always a safety net. Here in Sydney the job I've been working pays me twice as much as what I would earn doing it in New York because the minimum wage is so high. I have superannuation and cheap health insurance. In short, it's not that hard for me to keep my head above water."

"But surely that's a good thing?" I say. I couldn't think Jeremy was more backward than if he'd said, "you know what the problem with Australia is? You have way too much oxygen here."

"Look," he says, "if you're asking me if I would rather live in a society like Australia where I could feel happy and safe and not have to worry about whether I'll get sick or get a job all the time, then, probably yeah. But Australia sacrifices something for that. No one needs to take risks."

It was at this point that I kind of stopped taking the conversation seriously since I had decided that Jeremy felt the need to live his life according to strict sado-masochistic principles of struggle and angst, and it was pointless me trying to convince him otherwise. But something of that conversation always stuck with me, and two years later, living in New York, I think I'm beginning to understand a little of what he was getting at.

My neighbourhood is not exactly ritzy. It's safe, for sure, but it's a little grungy and maybe a little poor, kind of like a cross the Sydney suburbs of Newtown and Cabramatta, if the former had hipsters instead of emos, and the latter was home to several generations of Puerto Rican immigrants. It's noisy, busy and thoroughly lived-in. It also seems to be home to an inordinate amount of a limited variety of businesses. Walk down the street and in one block you might pass a grocery store, a laundromat, a liquor store (no bottle-o's here!), a cafe, and a hardware store, and in the next block you'll pass exactly the same kinds of stores mere metres from their competitors. The same can be said for most parts of New York - I guess the sheer volume of people keeps all these grocery stores and laundromats in business.

The stores are pretty basic. They're not bedazzled with lovely faux-mahogany shopfittings and soft downlighting, they're big white rooms with fluorescent lights and a bunch of stuff on metal racks. In short, the people who own these businesses are poor, perhaps with limited education who can't speak proper English as good as I or youse, and the choice is to either open another laundromat or starve. There's no welfare safety net to live off while they look for a job or go to publicly-funded TAFE (well there is, but it's so woefully pitiful that one can't help but wonder if it's a cruel joke).

But what is really striking about these businesses is that they seem to occupy a fuzzy middle ground between "business" and "lounge room". Anyone who has been to South-East Asia will know exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. They may be poor business owner struggling to make ends meet, but man, are they proud of their business. The shopfronts are just as likely to be decorated with pictures of the owners' kids as the actual stock inside the shop. They keep not just the shop spotless, but regularly scrub down the pavement outside the store. And they're social hubs - the owners sit outside on plastic chairs and talk shit with their friends or family waiting for customers to come, and when they do they stand obligingly behind the cash register until the customer either buys something or doesn't, whereupon they return to the plastic chairs outside in the street. The nights are still quite warm, so in the evening when I come home from a hard day's drinking at the pub study it's pretty common to see two dozen people congregating outside the grocery store on the corner having a barbeque in the street, kids running around, music playing loudly, old men arguing about whatever crap it is old men argue about, with only the occasional customer wanting to buy milk to spoil the illusion.

I think I'm painting a pretty rosey picture here though. Obviously there's a flipside to this salubrious business model. In Australia business owners can reasonably aspire to the luxury of not actually needing to be in their shop seven days a week from dawn til dusk. If they work hard then one day they'll be able to afford to staff their shop with disinterested teenagers with a faceful of piercings (I'm over thirty, I can say that kind of shit now). Here, the economy isn't as strong as the US government likes to pretend it is (or liked to pretend - I don't think anyone has any illusions as to the state of the US economy any more), and so it's pretty unlikely that anyone around here will ever earn enough from their business that they can afford to support themselves and a staff member. So the buck stops with them.

I reckon it's this kind of environment that has made America what it is today - a nation of self-made men (and of course women too, no sexist connotations, 'self-made men' has a nice alliterative ring to it, that's all. Shut-up, this is my blog). You grow up in an environment with no safety net. Mum and dad have worked hard all their lives to support you and your siblings, and they do it tough. Perhaps out of a desire to make them proud, but probably out of a desire to not have to work every day for the rest of your life, you think 'screw this' and you scrimp and save and work like a dog so you can afford to go to college to get a degree to get a decent job. And the government didn't do shit to help you. You did it all on your own. You can do anything.

So America takes risks. Americans love it when people rise from the gutter and become successful artists or media personalities or politicians or just plain old rich-as-hell. These people are beacons of hope to everyone else who aspires to one day 'make it big'. "If they can, then I can, because it's completely up to me - God knows the government isn't going to help me". Unlike Australia, there's no "tall poppy syndrome" here, because no one can afford to rest on their laurels and shyly suggest that perhaps one day they might like to be slightly famous. If you don't do it, then someone else will, and no one will give a shit that you're still selling drill-bits and curtain rods in the same store for fifty years.

Having read back on all this, it could be misconstrued that I've become one of those Aussie ex-pats that, having left Australia, pontificates from their soapbox safely located on the other side of the world about how they were never appreciated Downunder and that one day everyone will be like "ooooh, why did we not realise what a talent we had? Oh boo hoo hoo, poor stupid us... boo hoo...". I'm not (well maybe a little. But mostly not). I love Australia and all the opportunities it has given me, and one day I want to return and give back what I'm learning over here. Nor would I ever advocate the abolition of welfare or public education or anything like that in Australia. I guess what I'm saying is that perhaps there's a reason why New York is a cultural mecca and Sydney just likes to think it is - adversity makes you strong.

*FYI not all my American friends are composers. I'm not a complete music nerd.

Number Crunching

Let's be frank - Orange is not, in the scheme of things, a thriving metropolis. Don't get me wrong, it doesn't need to be, and despite my promise to myself when I was 19 and first left my hometown that I would NEVER return, I've found over the last few years I've started to get pangs of nostalgia for the peace and quiet of Orange. I wonder sometimes, if I feel a bit crazy about all this, how must Ellie feel? Ellie is 18, from Orange as well, and this year also moved to New York to study dance at Julliard, one of the US' most prestigious arts schools.  She's pretty much finished school, moved from Orange to New York without the benefit of the buffer period I've enjoyed of moving to gradually larger cities (aside from a couple of years she spent at school in Sydney. Wish I'd done that, darn it). When I first met Ellie in Orange a few months ago however she seemed composed, more together than I was when I was 18, and completely serene about the fact that she was about to move to what is one of the great cultural centres of the world from (again, let's be perfectly frank) what is... um... not one of the great cultural centres of the world.

Lucky her. I was always worried about how I'd cope with the hustle and bustle of the big city because I'm a country boy at heart. So when Daniel invited me to visit him in little New Haven last weekend, I happily accepted.

He seems to be settling in alright (at the very least there's been no more vitriolic encounters with cab drivers or the police. Yet). After a couple of weeks in New York, it was kind of strange to be in a little country town again. New Haven is kind of like Orange - it's fresh and open with lots of great food and beautiful houses, but at night it can be a pretty dodgy and there's certain neighbourhoods you don't walk alone in unless you have a bunch of pesky money taking up valuable space in your wallet and you need some thoughtful mugger to take it off your hands.

When it came time to head back home I jumped on the train and choo-chooed my way two hours south back to Grand Central Station. As I stepped onto the platform there was no doubt I was back in New York - on the platform with me moving purposefully towards the station entrance were hundreds of people, all collected from the dozen or so stops between here and New Haven. "Shit", I thought. "All these people got on this train to come to New York on a random Sunday. This line has a train arriving every half hour on Sunday. On weekdays during peak-hour, this train runs every ten minutes. Hundreds upon hundreds of people commuting back and forth every freakin' day. That's nuts!"

As my tiny mind reeled from considering the sheer numbers of people moving back and forth along this single train line out of hundreds of others in New York my fellow passengers and I entered Grand Central. Inside we joined thousands more people all either catching trains or leaving trains or greeting friends or seeing loved ones off or trying to sell shit to everyone else. And outside, unseen, were millions upon millions of other people determinedly, busily, relentlessly doing whatever it is people do in New York. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

Suddenly, New York seemed to be impossible. How many people were outside the station? Where do they live? How do they all fit? How do they get their food? There's certainly no bloody farms here - there's barely even grass here. Where does their rubbish go? (A goodly proportion of it seems to end up on the sidewalk outside my house, but perhaps I'm being finicky). How the hell does it all operate? How can it even exist? Why doesn't this city just end up as a big, chaotic, stinking hole-in-the-ground, its inhabitants reduced to a sub-human scrabble for survival? (I mean more so than now. You know, without the musicals.)

I needed to know. So I did some comparative research. Orange has a population of about 38,000 people and takes up about 25 square kilometres of the Australian continent (I didn't actually find an official measurement on this, I just looked at Orange on googlemaps and held my thumb and forefinger against the scale and compared it to Orange on the map. It looks like about 25 square kilometres to me). Orange is a primary producer of quite a number of foodstuffs including pears, apples, stone fruit, animal produce, and of course, bucketloads of wine (but, as we all know, not oranges).

Orange is also the proud owner of Springhill airport, which cheerfully hosts 1,300 flights a year for about 60,000 passengers. It has 7 different bus routes, which can take you all the way from Warrendine to Blechington. All this food and transport and busy Orange-folk generate about 54,000 tonnes of rubbish every year, which ends up in the Ophir Road landfill (although during my research it turns out that this will fill up in about four years. Keep your eyes out for more news on this fascinating topic).

Conversely...

New York is home to about 19,500,000 people jammed into about 780 square kilometres (and Australia has a population of about 21,000,000). That means there's 25 people per square metre of New York. (Orange enjoys spacious luxury with each square metre being taken up by a mere 1.5 persons). Add to that the tourists that traipse up and down Times Square every day and the population swells an additional 8,600,000 a year, 420,000 of which are Aussies. To get there, these visitors and other travellers probably arrive and depart via one of the three international airports in New York, which hosts 1,360,000 million flights a year, welcoming or waving off 110,000,000 passengers. While in New York they probably take advantage of New York's famous subway, consisting of 24 routes servicing 468 individual stations to take the 1.58 billion individual commuters around the city annually.

All these people need to eat, so New York imports all of its food. This includes 5,400 tonnes of meat, 9,800 tonnes of cereal, 27,300 tonnes of fruit and vegetables and 5,000 tonnes of booze daily, for a grand total of 28,600,000 tonnes of food a year. FYI, the Statue of Liberty weighs 225 tonnes, and the Empire State Building weighs 325,000 tonnes.

That's a shitload of food.

Literally. New York also generates 5,600,000 tonnes of rubbish (or "trash") a year. Proving that Americans can be mysterious and paranoid about just about anything, this rubbish is packed into containers and floated away on barges to a top secret location. No shit. I couldn't find statistics on sewage (probably for the best... hope you're not eating breakfast) but I bet it's a wee bit more than Orange (pun totally intended, bitchez).

It's not surprising then that it can be overwhelming to think that all these people with all this activity and all this industry is bubbling away around you constantly. I can see how people here can feel completely disconnected from other human beings. It's not that there's no one else around, it's that there's so many people here that you ask yourself - how can my little voice be heard in all this noise?

This was all ticking in my head last weekend as I got on my subway to head home - I am living in a f#*king big place. I had to make a brief stop in a new part of town to get a keyboard. I got off the subway, walked up the stairs, and standing at the top as though we were outside the Orange Post Office on Summer Street, was Ellie, calm as a buddhist monk and apparently completely unsurprised to see me.