Escape to anonymity in the city

A Greyhound Bus took me south down from the Outback. It was an overnight trip. I fell asleep somewhere in the desert and when I next woke up we were passing through the lit grids of suburban roads.

Emerging on to Adelaide's streets in the pale new morning, I was surprised to find being in the city was a shock. It was just being there that surprised me – all the buildings, all the people. I'd only been away five weeks. The smells were strange too. But this, I realised, was probably just the lack of the desert scent – the strange old dust smell underlies everything.

Turning a corner too quickly I accidentally stepped in one man's way and he started to scream. Profanities, mostly; his chest moved like he was expelling demons. I watched him dimly as he walked away and tried to remember the word: Tourette's.

Another night, another bus and this time I woke up in Melbourne – a city of colour and old facades and endless cafes, vintage stores, bookshops. Everything I loved about Wellington on a grander scale. Nearly every wall seemed to be coloured by graffiti or by mural (and even these merge so it is hard to say what was commissioned and what just grew). I spent a whole afternoon just looking at these walls, wandering in and out of shops in the bohemian area of Collingwood, taking in the sights, the diversity of people.

After the initial shock I'd felt at this return to cityscapes, I was beginning to enjoy myself. And – to be honest – feeling something like relief.

It wasn't that I hadn't enjoyed the five weeks I spent in various corners of the South Australian Outback – not at all. I had loved it there, even that strange desert smell. But here there was freedom – expression – anonymity. It was a stark contrast to the town of eight people I'd been working in – a place where you could barely sneeze without comment.

The differences between city and country seemed suddenly stark. Each contrast was in sharper focus. The expression of the cities against a sense of conformity; the noise of the city through the night to the peace of an Outback evening, the star-riddled skies. Cultural differences, too, were thrown in dramatic relief. The drinking culture seemed so much more blatant in the rural settings, for one thing. It was like the eve of prohibition was constantly upon us: each drink downed with quiet desperation.

Cities were regarded with the same antipathy as foreign countries: places where they do things differently. I began to notice the stories Australians told me about all Australians typically ended with "except in the cities".

"We don't like all that fancy food," one man told me. "The little stuff in the middle of a plate? An Australian will go into a place and ask if there's a cook or a chef, and if they say a chef he'll walk out again." The man paused. "Different in cities," he conceded.

Another man spent five minutes seething over a newspaper article about a woman who had bitten a small child on the cheek. She should be put in a cell and the key thrown away, which – he promised me – 90 per cent of Australians would agree with. "But probably not in the cities. Political correctness."

It was the sort of outburst that made me wonder if a loud crusade against political correctness is often just a veneer of bravado for otherwise unacceptable views. I heard several comments in the pub which – if they weren't busy being brazenly un-PC – would have just been racist.

It wasn't the first time I encountered racism in Australia, but the further from the cities I was, the more overt the bigotry became. There was the regular run through of derogatory names, the side comments and the snide remarks, a regular diatribe of "us" against "them". "They" lived further out, occupying land they didn't deserve, drinking and smoking and wasting taxpayer money. It was in their genes, I heard someone say, they had a genetic indisposition to work. Unlike us.

Another person said – with a loud and unquestioned self-importance – that putting all indigenous children into welfare was the only way to fix the rates of unemployment and drug abuse among the indigenous populations.

Pointing out the blatant stupidity of this was, of course, just a little more political correctness. And Australians don't like political correctness, I was assured of that. Except for the cities. They do things differently there.

Award-winning writer Jenah Shaw, a former student at Richmond's Garin College, is writing an occasional series on her travels in Australia.

- © Fairfax NZ News