Tom Pepinsky

Category: Travel

  • Australia Impressions

    Our time here is quickly drawing to a close: today’s our last business day in Canberra, and we leave on Monday afternoon to head home. I (TP) celebrated the last day with a final presentation (which you can watch online if you have a spare 40 minutes). JMP and I celebrated last night with a very nice dinner at a very good bistro-style restaurant. (I had the calves liver, JMP the ocean trout special). Now, a reflection on our impressions of Australia and Australians.

    • Australians are what JMP calls “aggressively friendly.” Not in a bad way, in a “stop in the middle of the street to volunteer helpful information to two dazed tourists and their toddler about how to catch the tourist bus” way.
    • The lifestyle of an ANU researcher studying Asia has got to be the best thing ever. 9:30–roll into work. 10:00–morning tea with colleagues. 11:00–research presentation by visitor. 12:30–lunch. 1:30–coffee with colleague. 2:30–get awarded an ARC research grant to do research you would have done anyway. 3:30–afternoon tea. 4:30–seminar. 6:00–drinks at University House. (Aussie friends, I kid because I’m jealous.)
    • We were trying to describe to our babysitter last night where I grew up. I said “you might have heard of Philadelphia?” She responded “Oh! Like the Cheese!”
    • The Australian word for a crash (like a car accident) is “smash.” “There’s a smash on the Sydney Harbour Bridge,” stuff like that. The Australian way to say “how are you?” is “how ya’ goin’?”

  • Perth

    I (TP) just returned from a quick trip to Perth for a presentation at Murdoch University. Well, the trip itself wasn’t quick (it’s a 4 hour transcontinental flight), but the stay was. Perth is interesting but different than “out east,” as they say there. It’s warmer there this time of year, and gets well into the 100s for weeks on end in their summer. The city is similar to Los Angeles in the sense that it is new, rapidly growing, and it just sprawls for miles and miles; compare that to Sydney and Melbourne, which are like older North American cities and feel more compact. Perth also happens to be just about as far as you can possibly go from Ithaca and still be on land.

    Ithaca’s Antipodes

    antipodes

    What’s most striking about Perth, though, is the economy. Perth is dominated–dominated–by the mining sector. There’s actually not much  mining done in Perth itself, but from what I understand the places that do all the mining are isolated and ferociously hot for most of the year (like the Kimberley), so lots of workers live in Perth and commute in (that commute, of course, is a 3 hour plane ride, but you get the point). Plus, Perth being the state capital and by far the largest city, it generally profits from the mining sector’s effects on the economy of Western Australia as a whole.

    According to everyone I spoke to in Perth, the huge increase in mineral wealth has generated the following outcomes. First, inflation, which doesn’t matter too much if you’re a miner or work for a mining company, but makes it hard for everyone else. Second, a construction boom, which meant that Perth weathered the GEC much better than you’d expect but which might be giving Perth a false sense of security. Third, a captured political system in which mining companies dominate state politics. Fourth, a weird kind of dependence on China and other resource-poor emerging economies: these are the main consumers of the iron and diamonds that they mine in Western Australia, and their hunger for resources is the basis of how the state’s economy works.

    All that said, Perth was really a nice place to visit and it would be great to return for a more extended period of time someday. Fremantle, where I actually stayed, was really nice. It’s a very different vibe from Sydney, Melbourne, or Canberra. Too bad it’s so incredibly far from home.