OUTSIDE FREMANTLE, AUSTRALIA

“Free, free, freo…..free, free, freo.”

The chant started softly from the other end of the train I was riding outside Perth through the lengthening shadows of an Australian evening.

I stood up to see who was making the noise. About a dozen guys, in their early 20s. All of them in the young Aussie male uniform: baggy board shorts, footie jerseys, sun-streaked hair and tans so deep and even you’d swear they were sprayed on.

I had come to Australia to find out what it was really like, eager to look past the world of Crocodile Dundee and “throw a few shrimp on the barbie”, listening for a sound that went deeper than Olivia Newton-John or Men at Work.

Were the Aussies the same as us Canadians? Totally different? Or halfway in between?

Australia and Canada have been linked in the world’s minds for a century. Both are geographically sprawling, resource-based, former British colonies that share language, history and guilt-laden problems with their native people and have become two of the richest nations in the world

But the surface similarities mask fundamental differences and the Star sent me there to examine them.

“Free, free, free….free, free, freo.”

By now the train was pulling into the station and I realized what they were chanting about. We were pulling into Fremantle (or Freo to the locals), once a great port, later a sporting hub, but always, always, party central for Western Australia.

“When I was going to theatre school in Perth,” Hugh Jackman once told me, “we’d head out to Freo as often as we could. It was magic. I love all of Australia, but the western part always grabs me the most. I think it’s the light and the way it hits the water.”

The guys I’d seen on the train seemed to have multiplied like a surfer version of the loaves and fishes and they were all heading south-west, men with a mission.

I had to walk quickly to catch up with them, rushing past the Victorian buildings glistening in the gathering dusk and then I saw it, a series of metal cylinders etched against the sky.

Welcome to Little Creatures. Named after a Talking Heads album and built on the site of a former crocodile farm, it’s where I found the heart of Australia beating.

It’s only 10 years old, but it seems like it’s been part of the landscape forever. A microbrewery that went maxi, spawning an industry devoted to one of the things Aussies love best — their beer.

And as it grew, a beverage hall mushroomed around it. That’s where the lads were all heading. And even on a Tuesday twilight, there were well over a thousand people there already, drinking, eating and laughing, laughing, laughing.

I stopped and listened to the sound of the laughter. The noise that people make who are used to having fun, who feel it’s their birthright, rather than something they clutch at in desperation on a holiday weekend, the way we often do here.

The sky was copper, the people were bronze and I felt golden.

I had slipped into the zone, the Aussie zone, the place where the mantra is “No worries, Mate” (a phrase you’ll hear a hundred times a day) and I felt like there was nothing that could trouble my spirit.

“In the mountains, there you feel free,” wrote T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land, but had he visited Little Creatures it might have come out as “In Freo, there you feel free.”

Freedom. It seemed to be the magic elixir, the electric Kool-Aid that everyone had willingly downed, leaving them with benign grins.

The superficial impression one gets is that this is a land where people live fully, work lightly and party hearty, but like all superficial impressions, it’s as false as it is true.

I told myself that just as all Canadians aren’t polite and boring, all Australians aren’t brash and fun-loving. But so many, many Aussies boldly leap into backslapping, glad-handing life, that it’s easy to see where the assumptions come from.

They’re genuinely very friendly and seemingly very open, but they’re also reverse icebergs: 90 per cent is above the surface, but dig a while and you discover the pay-dirt in the 10 per cent underneath.

“Believe everything an Australian tells you,” advised Tony Sheldon from the cast of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, “but believe what he doesn’t tell you even more.”

The gob-smacking aspect of all these revelations may have hit me most solidly in Freo, but, truth be told, I felt them from my very first morning in Australia, when I landed in Sydney on an overnight flight from Singapore.

I took the bright sun and the baking heat as par for the course, until I saw the tabloid headlines the next morning screaming “42 C! The Day That Sydney Melted!”

Yes, they have tabloids that would have done London proud. They tipped me off to the first impression I had in Australia, that of the country’s overwhelming Britishness

Not anywhere in Canada, not even Victoria, do you find such Anglophone leanings, although if you said that to the average Aussie under the age of 65, they’d deny it violently and claim they don’t want anything to do with the monarchy.

Maybe so. But their papers’ shout Fleet Street with the broadest broadsheets in the world and scandal-mongering headlines remind you that this, after all, was Rupert Murdoch’s homeland.

Although recent years have found Asian influences revolutionizing Australian food, there’s still a solid block of the country that that spread Vegemite (the Marmite of Oz) on their toast each morn, overcook their veg and love a good Sunday roast.

Younger people dress like they do all over the world, but if you look at the establishment, especially the men, those spread-collar shirts, wide colourful ties and tightly-fitting jackets could have come from Saville Row or Jermyn Street.

And let’s face it, the very sound of their speech is as close to Britain as our Canadian speech is to American. Country cousins, yes, but the same family for sure.

On that blazing Saturday morning I arrived in Sydney, I decided to fight the heat the way the natives would. Before 10 a.m., I was on Bus 380 heading to that classic surfer’s beach 30 minutes from downtown: Bondi Beach.

Carmen Pavlovic is the CEO of Global Creatures, one of the world’s largest animatronic firms. She lives with her family at Bondi Beach and commutes into Sydney every day.

“It’s absolutely wonderful. First thing in the morning, you go outside and see businessmen with their jackets draped over their arms, blokes waking up after a night on the beach, young beauties getting an early start on their tans, kids ready to begin surfing as soon as the waves are up.

“Everybody’s on the same page and everybody’s happy. There’s nothing like it.”

She was right. There was a breeziness to the whole place that made it seem louche, but not tawdry. Board shorts were $10 a pair, wine was $5 a bottle and what else did you need?

The sand was hibachi-hot and no one went barefoot until they were near the water, then flip-flops and sandals were casually abandoned in the firm belief they’d still be there when you returned from the water.

The water. This is something we forget about Australia. It’s always there. Like Canada, all the major cities mould themselves to a narrow strip along the perimeter, but whereas all we have to cling to is the U.S. border, Australia has the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

Soothing as a lullaby, hypnotic as a cobra and warm as an unexpected kiss, the water laps into waves that make everyone think they can be a surfer.

Suddenly, I felt a surge of jealousy for these people — seemingly carefree, at home with their surroundings, acting as though nothing mattered but the here and now.

I watched one of those striking Aussie women — 40 and fabulous, with sculpted cheekbones and a sinewy body — kneel down on the sand with a baby in her arms.

“There you go darling,” she crooned as she scooped her hand into the water and poured it gently over his head, like some sort of pagan baptism. “That’s the ocean, baby, that’s your home.”

For an instant, I felt I was back in Vancouver in the 1970s, on Kitsilano Beach and that sensation kept replaying many times during my stay there, no matter where in the country I was.

Part of it is physical: despite the wave of arts and sports facilities built all over the nation, the basic urban topography for Australian cities is pure 70s.

Try to drive in or out of Sydney, Melbourne, Perth or Adelaide during rush hour and you’ll be astonished at the old-school highways you travel on.

No wonder a recently transplanted Aussie told me the only thing he hated was the 401. “It scares the bloody s--- out of me,” he confessed. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”

But it’s not just physical, it’s psychological, too. There’s the whole feeling of a population who just lived through the summer of love and are getting ready for the autumn of mellowness.

“Edgy,”, “nervous”, “frantic”, “stressed”; all those adjectives we use to describe North American life today don’t make any sense in Australia, the country that, in many ways, the last three decades have forgotten.

I think to understand why, you have to start with the Sydney Opera House. Think of Australia and it’s that iconic seashell shaped structure, with its crown of angular outgrowths, that comes to mind.

It was built in 1973, during a time when Australia was discovering itself as a unique entity, when the first Labour government in 23 years enlisted sweeping changes (including a national health care system, free university tuition and divorce reform) and the country made its presence truly felt on the world scene in terms of music (The Bee Gees, AC/DC) and film (Mad Max, My Brilliant Career).

No wonder that Australians cling to the Opera House as a symbol of good times past, when everything seemed possible.

It also anchors the sprawling city like few other structures I can recall. “You must always remember that Sydney is an endless string of suburbs wrapped around the Opera House,” Barry Humphries (Dame Edna) told me and, to walk around it on a summer night is to feel the country in microcosm — white and well-bred and generally genial.

Although stroll 15 minutes north to the area known as The Rocks and you’re as likely as not to see a fist-fight break out in the overflow crowd from the Hero of Waterloo pub, for example. But Aussie bar brawls are bare-knuckles affairs, which rarely even send the loser to an emergency room.

Yes, Australians love to drink. That’s like saying Canadians love Tim Hortons. But although I arrived with the cliché of Australian alcoholic indulgence under my belt, I was surprised at how widespread it was.

It’s not unusual for well-dressed businessmen to grab a couple of very early morning pints at the airport bar before hopping a commuter flight to Melbourne, at an hour when Canadians wouldn’t even be serving.

Most bars simply list their closing time as “late” and when I asked one Melbourne bartender when he shut the doors, he grinned and said “After we roll the last survivor out the door.”

Beer is still king and what we call a “2-4”, they somewhat ominously dub “a slab”, but wine consumption is an ever increasing factor. The extensive Australian wine industry produces 1.4 billion litres a year, of which 430 million litres is consumed within the country.

And the Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that in 2010 the average consumption of all types of alcohol across the country was 186.1 litres.

Broken down, this means 10.4 litres for each Australian over the age of 15 (as compared to 7.8 litres per person over 19 in Canada), or roughly 2.3 alcoholic drinks a day for everyone in Australia.

More fascinating was the bus advertisements I saw plastered all over Sydney: “Want to Stop Drinking?”. If you followed the website they sent you to, you wound up at the home of St. John of God Health Care, the third-largest private hospital operator in Australia, with many facilities specializing in drug and alcohol treatment.

The country is also attempting to put into place what the government is calling “the toughest antismoking legislation in the world,” banishing all cigarette brand logos from packages by 2012, a move that has caused Philip Morris to threaten a multi-billion dollar lawsuit.

And these stringent moves are taking place in a country where 2009 statistics show only an average of 16.5 per cent of the population still smoke, roughly the same figure as in Canada.

With Australia having the highest rate of skin cancer in the world, it’s not surprising that sunburn warnings are to be found everywhere, but it’s interesting that, after stringent legislation governing tanning salons in 2008, those establishments decreased by 51 per cent, although why they’re needed at all in a country with such bountiful sunshine remains to be seen.

Such movements have been called “the new Puritanism” in the U.S. but many Australians I spoke to were more derisive, blaming it all on “the nanny state” they feel is running rampant under their female prime minister, Julia Gillard, although most of these initiatives were in effect long before she took office in 2010.

There’s another opinion about this rush towards moderation. The period I was in Australia was marked by a particularly brutal stretch of floods, cyclones, brushfires, rainstorms and record heat.

The line you heard frequently, especially from older Aussies, was that “God is getting back at us for having too good a time.” One malt-befuddled gent in a Melbourne bar quipped, “It’s like we were Sodom and Gonorrhea, or whatever those f—king towns in the bible were called.”

When I assured him I wasn’t, he said with a perfectly straight face, “That’s good, because if you were, I’d have to rip them from your luggage, burn them on the spot and send you back to Canada.”

A second’s pause, then a grin. “Just kidding, mate.”

That pattern would be repeated literally dozens of times during my stay in Australia: a cutting remark, sometimes with a racist or sexist undercurrent, delivered deadpan, then followed by a quick smile and the all-purpose Australian panacea: “Just kidding, mate.”

I congratulated an Adelaide journalist on his country having a female prime minister and he snapped “She’s only here on sufferance; you Canadians are smart, elected a female PM, then turfed yours out after six months.” The pause, the flash of teeth, “Just kidding, mate.”

In reality, it is a country still largely run by men, a point which Valerie Wilder, formerly general manager of the National Ballet of Canada and now the executive director of the Australian Ballet, taps into her considerable experience travelling internationally to observe: “There’s as rigid a glass ceiling here for women then any I’ve run into around the world.”

She’s right. Only 3 per cent of the CEOs on the ASX 200 are female, while in Canada, women make up 6.4 per cent of the CEOs on the Financial Post 500 companies.

And there’s nothing more cutting than when you hear Aussies turn on each other. No Calgarian ever spoke with more venom about Toronto than the residents of each Australian state about their neighbours.

From Victoria? You’re a “Mexican”, because you’re south of the border. New South Wales? You’re a “cockroach” because of an old rugby rivalry.

It runs hand in hand with their love of childish diminutives, the less appropriate, the better. Who else but an Australian would call their favourite brutal body contact sport “footie” instead of football?And all names are shortened, then dressed up. I was never “Richard”, I was “Richo”, for example.

I don’t want to give you the impression that the whole country is made up of unbridled frivolity. There were a lot of darker moments during my stay there, most of them interestingly enough, when the topic of the country’s aboriginal population came up.

Only 2 per cent of Australia’s 21.8 million people identify themselves as aboriginal, while in Canada, the latest Statistics Canada figure is 3.8 per cent of 34.5 million, the second highest percentage in the world after New Zealand.

But somehow, the Australian aboriginals cast a longer shadow over the lives of their fellow countrymen. Perhaps it’s because it took so long for the country to give them any rights, or that it wasn’t until 1999 that the Motion of Reconciliation acknowledged the treatment of them as “the most blemished chapter in our national history.”

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Roger Smith is a naturalist and guide who took me on a walkabout a few hours outside of Melbourne and he recalled growing up as a white boy with aboriginal friends.

“To me it was the most natural thing in the world, but one day, when I was in my teens, my parents told me I was going to have to spend all of my time with ‘my own kind.’

“I hated to leave my aboriginal friends, but they said to me ‘You will always have a black heart in a white body,’ and I still feel that way.”

His words came home to me again in Perth, when I attended a performance of an indigenous theatre company named Yirra Yakin, offering a musical they called Waltzing the Willara.

It dealt with aboriginal-white relationships, first in the years following World War II and then decades later, as the same characters meet for a “reconciliation event”.

The play praised no heroes or damned no villains. Everyone was guilty of misunderstanding festering over time and fermenting into hate.

In the final scene, one character sang:

“May you wash away with tears

The memories that you fear

And your dreams let you taste what might have been.”

I looked around me and the packed theatre, white and aboriginal, were all weeping, not from easy sentiment, but from opportunities missed and chances let go by.

I understood more when I arrived a few days later at Uluru, in the “red centre” of the country, a sacred space desolate to the white man, but of incredible importance to the aboriginals.

For many years it was called Ayers Rock and it was a tourist attraction, its loaf-shaped reddish rock formation offering a challenge to climb.

One character in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert initially dreamed of climbing to its top in full drag and doing a medley of Kylie Minogue hits, something that seems sacrilegious now.

In 1985, ownership was returned to the Pitjantjatjara Aborigines and since then, it has been developed as a site for increased cultural awareness.

I rose before dawn and went out with an aboriginal guide to watch the sun rise. There was true splendour, but, at the same time, something almost terrifying about this monolith of sandstone created by nature thousands of years ago.

It made me aware of the flip side of the freedom that so much of the country lived in every day. There was also a past, rooted in something deeper than they could really understand or deal with and the tension there caused them to pick Carpe diem rather than Memento mori as their Latin aphorism of choice.

Yes, I told myself again, it’s a marvellous country, full of spectacular scenery, exciting arts, passionate people and a lifestyle that could seduce almost anyone.

But why, then, has emigration from Australia been rising sharply over the past decade, from 35,181 in 1998 to 81,018 in 2008?

Perhaps because the one thing you can’t ignore is Australia’s isolation.

“Sometimes, when I’m missing my kids or my friends,” says Valerie Wilder, “I remind myself that I’m 19 hours by air from them. That’s a long way.”

It’s even further if you’ve never seen what the world outside your country is like.

Imogen Henning is a musician and worker in the restaurant industry who moved to Toronto from Adelaide a few years ago. She now works at Luma, the restaurant in the TIFF Lightbox, and loves living in Toronto.

“I thought I’d never want to leave Australia,” she admits, “but there suddenly came a day when I felt I had to test myself against the rest of the world. I had to know what else was out there.”

Tim Dwyer is an orthopedic surgeon from Brisbane, who moved to Toronto a year ago and now works out of Women’s College Hospital.

He cherishes his country but concedes that “Isolation is one of the things I dislike most about Australia because I love to travel. It’s a tranquil place, but it can also be a bit narrow-minded. Canada is a bit more worldly.”

Dwyer is on to something. According to 2006 census figures, 46.9 per cent of Toronto’s population were made up of visible minorities, but in Sydney, the figure was closer to 10 per cent.

But most Australians don’t want to know these things. They’re happy and justifiably so. They view their isolation as a blessing.

When they discuss the financial meltdown that gave all of us pause in 2009, they call it the “Global Economic Crisis” and can’t resist telling us that it passed them right by.

The long, lingering shadow of 9/11 has also failed to dim their sunshine. Spend one day in an Australian airport, where domestic security consists of asking you if you’re carrying any aerosols in your luggage, and you’ll feel a twinge of pain for those of us who still have to place our liquids in a freezer bag and suffer through full body searches, even if we’re only flying to Montreal.

In fact, nothing really bad on a national scale has happened to Australia in a very long time. No War Measures Act, no political assassinations, no near debilitating financial crisis.

In one way, that’s a blessing and an explanation why you see so few frown lines on all those too-tanned faces, but it makes you wonder about the invisible toll a life without any setbacks can take.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” said Socrates, but sometimes I think we Canadians have our heads too firmly buried in our navels, wallowing in an orgy of introspection.

Maybe it’s better to be the carcinoma-daring Australians, lifting their faces up to the sun to find all the answers.

What’s the ultimate difference between Australia and Canada? I think you find it in the phrase outsiders use to mock each of us.

For the Aussies, it’s “No worries, mate,” inspired by a society that always goes with the flow and doesn’t care what you really think of them.

In Canada, it’s “Eh?”, the tentative question of a people who want agreement or perhaps aren’t sure they heard what you said, but are eager to please you all the same.

As I climbed on the plane that would take me back to Toronto, I almost wished I was staying with these people who didn’t seem to have a care in the world.

But then, as we started to take off, I thought back to the crowd I followed off the train in Fremantle, chanting “Free, free, freo.”

I wondered where they were tonight. I wondered where they’d be a thousand nights from now.

Jean-Paul Sartre once observed that “Man is condemned to be free,” and I suppose that’s still true, even in Australia.

Especially in Australia.

Tolerance rather than acceptance

Australia’s attitude towards homosexuality is somewhat conflicted. Although some states like New South Wales decriminalized it as early as 1975, it wasn’t until 1997 that Tasmania made it nationwide. (It took place in Canada in 1969.)

This relative late-blooming of same-sex rights may be one of the reasons that the gay scene in Australia resembles North America in the early ’70s, right after the Stonewall Riots.

There’s a feeling in urban Australia of “Say it loud, I’m gay and proud” that led to the first Pride Parades and Pride Week and the crowds you see on Oxford St., the main gay thoroughfare, still look a lot like a Village People retrospective.

There’s talk of same-sex marriage in Australia, but little concrete government action.

But this is the country that embraced gay icon Peter Allen as a near-national hero back in the 1970s and have always had a soft spot in their hearts for drag comedians such as Dame Edna.

“You have to understand the subtle difference between Australia and Canada when it comes to gay rights,” explains Patrick McIntyre, the general manager of the Sydney Theatre Company.

“Ask the average Australian if he believes gays have the right to have relations with each other and they’ll agree emphatically. But ask them if they should get married, or live next door and you’ll find the response gets considerably less enthusiastic.

“The difference between Australia and Canada is the difference between tolerance and acceptance.”

Richard Ouzounian