My 2c
When I was recently hanging out the washing a bloke passed me and said, ”I guess you’ll be getting some brownie points today.”. Typically, I was caught off guard by this seemingly innocuous comment and I mumbled something inoffensive in response, although my mental response was something that I can’t repeat in writing.
Since we’re nearing the end of our Odyssey, and this type of comment being directed at me is not uncommon, I thought I should detail some of my observations from the last 15 months. While we enjoy camping remotely whenever possible, the reality of travelling Australia is that you have to camp with others nearby most of the time. In campgrounds, as with living in a house, you don’t really get a choice about who lives next door. In a campground, your walls are very thin, and the distance from the neighbours is often very small. You share facilities with strangers and overhear things that you will never be able to unhear. The community snoring can sometimes shake the earth.
It should be noted that to date I have never said what I really think to any of the SOKs that I have come across. I smile benignly and step backwards out of 1955 and try to return to the 21st century. There is not much of the 21st century actually going on in Australia from what I can see. SOK is my mental shorthand for Stupid Old Koot (or something very similar to that). I have met many SOKs in the last 15 months. Plenty of SOWs (female version), but mostly it is the blokes who are trying to take us back to the cave, and not many of them are actually old.
It is slim pickings for the heterosexual women of Australia as far as I can tell.
Belching – unashamed belching is alive and well in Australia. In Litmiluk I was about one metre away from a deafening belch from an SOK who was drinking his coke. He didn’t even know he had belched as far as I could tell, and clearly couldn’t see that I was right in his zone. There would have been about 50 people within hearing, but that seems to be OK. While this particular incident stuck in my mind, I have lost count of the number of times that Sarah and I have been sitting down for a quiet chat in the evening when we’ve been treated to a hearty belch from across the campground. Often repeated through the evening. None of these are accidental burbs that slipped out. All have been deliberately enhanced to be as loud and obnoxious as possible.
Swearing – I can hold my own in most company, but I do have some boundaries and exercise a bit of self-control. Not so the SOKs of Australia. We’ve been treated to a lot of pretty un-inventive and unfettered swearing (not directed at us, but just in our general vicinity). In my day we tried to be inventive with our language, but it is all pretty boring (but offensive) stuff.
Toilet humour – sharing bathrooms with other men really bites. I assumed for a time during the last 15 months that I was always following a teenager into the toilet or shower that I was using, since it was almost always a disaster. After a while I figured out that there were no teenagers – just SOKs of all ages. Seems most men in Australia have no idea what a toilet brush is for, or how to lift a toilet seat, or even how to keep things in the general vicinity of the toilet. Mops? Clearly women’s work, since as far as I can tell I am the only person other than a cleaner to ever use a mop in the men’s facilities at any campground.
There is often a lot of seemingly unnecessary noise going on in the men’s facilities. My suggestion – if you find yourself huffing and puffing while showering, you probably should try to get out for a walk now and then. Likewise the grunting and puffing from the cubicles all around seems to indicate that as a nation we should be consuming fewer pies.
Openly misogynistic behaviour – Sarah was working at the tent one morning in Esperance when a kid on a bike stopped nearby to pat Jett. From afar came an admonishing yell at the kid in question,” Jacob (I have no idea of the real name), you’re not a woman! Stop being nosy!”. Sarah had an involuntary physical reaction when she heard this.
The number of times someone has commented to me, “On cooking duties tonight, heh?” no longer surprises me, but it did once. In itself, it seems an innocuous thing to say, but it is not something that anyone has ever said to Sarah when she is cooking.
Likewise, there are no brownie points available for Sarah when she is doing the washing. This is probably because she enjoys it so much that everyone can see that she doesn’t need anything beyond that pleasure.
There is plenty of the usual on-going big-talking man stuff – big trucks, expensive vans, boats, bikes, cars – men are experts on it all according to what they tell me in the campgrounds. I get the feeling that Sarah driving into or out of a campground with the trailer attached is frowned upon – bad enough that I let her drive at all I suspect, let alone while trailing.
As far as I can tell, the younger men of Australia are not much better educated than the truly old SOKs. I have come to the conclusion that one day the ordinary young blokes in Australia woke up and looked in their mirrors and realized how little they had to work with to attract the young ladies. What to do, what to do? Try to improve myself? Nope – that’s too hard. Then the lightbulb moment for them. What this face needs is a mullet! But no crappy 1980’s mullet for me, I want the super 2020’s mullet – the footy haircut! Still looking sort-of human? Not there yet then. I think I need a bad teenage moustache to get this look really happening. Now I am ready to hit the town and find me a chick. Where are my good double pluggers?
Perhaps my view of these young go-getters is completely skewed by my own old man status. I have been expecting for some time to see the end of the mullet in common use (it really never completely died out after the eighties, but it was only seen rarely after that). I have been expecting the hipster beard to disappear too, but that keeps on keeping on. I am continually surprised to see the young ladies hanging around with the mullet and beard guys. It says something perhaps of the stoic nature of Australian women, or maybe they simply have no choice – those tickets to Europe are expensive, after all.
My firm belief is that if the women of Australia would unite to reject the beards and the mullets, then we’d see a resumption of our casual racism and misogyny being issued from relatively normal-looking faces. Seems harsh to put it back on the women though. They have enough cleaning up to do.
