Australian Adventure

Episode 6

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...in which our intrepid hero gets to the bit you've all been expecting - the Automobile Rant, makes a pilgrimmage, and finds a monster in a sacred place.

Those of you who were party to my early Canadian ravings may recall a not inconsiderable time given over to the discussion of the local vehicles. It was only a matter of time before it happened here, and the wonder is that I held off until the 6th episode.

To tell the truth cars in Oz are pretty much like cars in Europe, that is to say not much like cars in North America. They range from super-minis to executive cruisers, to use European categories. On the North American scale this would translate to "laughably tiny" at the small end, and little more than "medium" at the other. There's a heavy bias towards Japanese models, not surprisingly, but most people drive a car - not many people carriers (vans - US) or pickups (trucks).

But there is a quirk - as a result of some bizarre and frankly outrageous tax penalties, which make cars in general fiendishly expensive (see later) it is in the car maker's interest to assemble inside Australia rather than import whole cars. The result is some rather bizarre badge re-engineering. JoeyTee - your Mazda 626 (and the one I wrote off last year) were sold as Ford Telstars, and Mazda 323s are quite often badged as Ford Lasers. Holden (the local arm of General Motors) appears on anything from Old Nissan Sunny's to new Toyota Camry's. And the other day I saw a mark 1 Honda Integra badged as a Rover 416, long before the designation was used in the UK. Car buying is a tricky business when you're not quite sure what you're getting.

This is compounded by another quirk. If you sneak a look at the Holden model line-up you would think that they produce enough models to suit any buyer. Commodore, Acclaim, Berlina, Eclipse, Estelle - except that with the exception of varying amounts of trim, they are all identical - Vauxhall Omegas/Cadillac Cateras. Just to throw their oar in, Toyota also made a model called Lexcen which, you've guessed it, is also a Holden Commodore. Not to be outdone Ford produce the Falcon, the Fairmont and the Fairlane, all essentially the same large saloon, although they have the decency to graft increasingly more tasteless grilles onto the front to justify the price differences.

All of these beasts are pretty European in their styling, which makes it all the more surprising to find that the Holden Statesman is, to all intents and purposes, identical to the excrutiatingly unlovely Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera that GM America stopped making two years ago. Presumably as even the Americans could abide it no longer...

Back to car prices. On the whole the normal smallish cars are around the same price as in Europe - not cheap. The bigger you get the more disproportionately expensive they become. Eve and I drove past a Jaguar garage last week and spotted a relatively ordinary XJ6 with an asking price of $140,000 - 70,000 English quid! By the time you get up to sports cars (Eve's Canadian MX-6 is twice as expensive here as in Canada) and German saloons you're looking at the price of a two bedroomed house in a posh part of town. Or a mansion in Perth. The two quirks are those Holden Commodores and Ford Falcons - for some reason they seem to be relatively good value. This could account for why every other car seems to be one.

This next tale is targetted at those of you (and you know who you are) who, for a period of some years, tuned in nightly to a certain Aussie soap opera called Home and Away. You can claim that you were only watching it to be sociable. You can claim that it was only going with the flow. But we know that you secretly were just as addicted as I was. Anyway, the show is filmed just up the coast from here, and so yesterady Eve, Karl and I made the pilgrimmage to Summer Bay.

They call it Palm Beach, but I could see through the disguise. The long sandy beach swept into the distance with exactly the right curve. The waves crashed with exactly the right noise. Lone surfers battled gamely against just the right sort of ludicrous odds. I even tripped down one of the paths clearly recognisable from the opening credits of yesteryear.

The faces may have changed on the show these days, but there are some who look familiar. Including, and hold on to your pants here chaps, Marilyn, the pretty but ditzy one who used to fancy Lance, the big dumb one, is now married to the middle aged headmaster, who may or may not have been called Fisher or something, and who is even more grey and wrinkled than he was five years ago. Shock!

Strolling back down the beach I was surprised to see a strange apparition sitting on the sand. At first glance it looked exactly like those fish-with-people's-faces that Monty Python used to use in the series of yore. On closer inspection it looked exactly like that. I'm getting used to approaching odd wildlife with some trepidation after the snake experience last week, so I wasn't going to get within eight feet of it. So Karl poked it with his shoe. Luckily this ascertained that it was a well and truly dead spiny puffer fish kind of thing, inflated and with all it's spines sticking out, about the size of a large melon. Only much more hideous. It was even more out of place since it was virtually the only thing on an otherwise blemish free beach.

(Note for Geoff and JohnnyG, we also walked from Dee Why beach around the cliffs to Fishermans and Colloroy beaches. Great rock shapes, all that frothy volcanic stuff. Like giant biscuit crumbs... Lots of crabs and snails too - looked just like mint humbugs. Also found Sylvia's Pie Shop in Colloroy - fab)

And finally...

For all those of you who have made it this far, Eve and I have decided to get married while we're down here, on January 25th, if all goes well. That takes in the Australian arm of the joint families, then we will go back to the UK in the summer and catch up on the UK contingent! We're going to do it in our garden, which has a great backdrop, and a rather handy BBQ...