Australia The Hoonish

Well, we did it. Twenty-six medals, fourteen of them gold, thumped the U.S. in both the final hockey games, and (therefore) managed not to have any unsightly rioting. So what now, post-Olympic hysterics? Back to the daily grind, I suppose.

But, as Vancouverites, let's take a moment to salute our partners, the people of Whistler. And by that, of course, I mean the Australians.

It's true, you know. Try ordering a burger or trying on a toque in Whistler, and see how long it is before somebody with an Australian accent wanders over and inquires if they might be of assistance. I managed to get up there last weekend, and every single server, bartender, store clerk, or barista was from down-undah (with the exception of a ferocious gorgon of a Frenchwoman who chased us out of her store for daring to look at wares displayed therein).

Australians are a lot like Canadians in many ways, although they suspiciously always seem to be having a great deal more fun. Having been to Australia, I can understand why. I've got a special place in my heart for the people, with their flavoured salt for your fish-and-chips, their winding white-metalled roads, and their excellent wineries, staffed entirely by cheerful middle-aged women who, despite protestations that you are only a poor student and are certainly not going to be buying a hundred-dollar bottle of Chateau Cuivre Réserve Nuit San Wogga-Wogga or whatever it is, will pour you brimming glass after brimming glass with the instruction, “Now, get stuck into that.”

Currently, the wife is watching an Austalian television show called McLeod's Daughters, a programme of such overwrought melodrama, it makes Grey's Anatomy look like Waiting For Godot. Everybody on it is spouting off about brumbies and jumbucks, pronouncing the word “No” like “Naiue”, getting into tangled relationships generally involving fighting over horses and sheep, and tearing off in a cloud of dust in their modern El Caminos.

Which brings me in a meandering way around to my point. This is loosely a car column after all, and having spent last time chatting about the uniqueness of the Canadian motorist, let's contrast our tight-fisted appreciation for the cheap and cheerful with the sunny Australian driver and their mania for whacking great V8s.

I'll put this out at the start: if your only experience of Australian-style driving up to this point has been watching Mad Max, it's not like that at all. For one thing, there are only two or three mutant cannibalistic biker gangs, and they're fairly easily avoided.

Picture instead a winding tarmac road, freshly laid and curving through the gum trees, around a veranda-skirted pub, and off towards the distant ocean. Imagine the sun beating down upon your dashboard, and lizards skittering off the road at your approach. Imagine semi-suicidal wallabies bounding along beside you and then suddenly dashing out in the road, forcing you to shift a foot to the brake pedal everytime you spot one. Imagine seeing, off in the distance, the shaggy form of an emu: a bird the size of a donkey with the intelligence level of a particularly stupid budgerigar.

Now imagine, and this is the really important bit, that every single car that passes you (as you drive on the left, remember) is infinitely cooler than the lame stuff we get here. Enjoying your Camry? Well how about the Australian option: the supercharged TRD Aurion, perhaps the most powerful front-wheel-drive car available. Yes, it's a family sedan, and yes it has the same horsepower as a Nissan 370Z.

Oh, you've got a nice comfortable Ford Fusion, do you? Well in Australia you might have a Falcon. It'd be rear-wheel-drive and available with either an inline-6 turbocharged engine or a big V8, both of which produce around 420hp. The same goes for the offerings from GM, which in Australia are usually Holdens, and you can get all of these as either station wagons, or half-pickups, or with bare frame rails out the back if you're going to bolt on a flatbed and really terrify your sheep as you drive them to market.

Great big engines are all well and good, but what are you supposed to do with them when you're not outrunning the cannibal bikers or turning cute little wallabies into fine red mist? You go racing, and in Australia that's more fun too. I regard F1 racing as being extremely difficult and technical, but it's not very exciting to the casual bystander. NASCAR is just plain terrible unless you're a fan of turning left and marrying your cousin. Australian V8 racing is like the two previous forms of racing had a baby, and then that baby grew up listening to the Rolling Stones on vinyl and watching The Terminator, and rebuilding engines in the bathtub.

It is sheer, unadulterated awesome, with the demandingly wiggly racetracks of F1 combining with the bullish shunting and rubbing of full-contact NASCAR. The Bathurst 1000 is the big one, Australia's Indianapolis 500, and here's a little tidbit to give you an idea of what such events are like: a police “crackdown” has restricted fans to a limit of no more than 24 beers. Per day.

So, if you have a mullet, move to Australia ASAP. But not everything in Oz is so shouty. Yes they produced AC/DC, but also Dame Nellie Melba. Consider Ford's Fiesta EcoNetic. This small but excellent family hatchback (the Fiesta will be available in Canada later this year) makes use of a 1.6L turbodiesel engine with a little less horsepower than a Honda Fit, but gobs more torque. It will handily trump a Prius for fuel economy, getting a combined mileage of about 3.7 L/100kms, 35% better than the more-expensive Toyota.

Australia also has a much better grey-market import system than ours, so it's even cheaper to get a Nissan Skyline GTR or a Mitsubishi Delica 4x4 Diesel, and the steering wheel's on the correct side. Japanese manufacturers often release vehicles in Australia which are essentially the same as the ones available in the Japanese home market. There are far more engine choices available, including diesel versions of just about everything.

I'll leave you with this little anecdote. After driving from Adelaide to Melbourne and kicking four kinds of hell out of our poor rental car (including me backing it into a concrete mailbox), my wife and I flew up to Brisbane, and spent a few days lounging around with the in-laws before getting a little bored and deciding to drive into the rain forest. We headed for a resort called O'Reilly's, and it was lovely and full of parrots and giant ferns and so forth. However, to get there required the traversing of some seriously narrow roads, with hairpin turns and unguarded drops, blind corners and steep hills, and it took us a good few hours to get there.

When we arrived, slightly seasick from all the corners, we all piled out of the car to go for a recuperative stroll. I wandered around the corner and promptly went back in time a century as there was a man in brown coveralls working on his 1912 Rolls Royce. Turns out it was the semi-annual get-together for the Classic Rolls Royce club of Australia, so I chatted to a few of the nice gents – most near the same vintage as their cars - who had all driven their priceless vehicles up that looping road.

One of them turned out to have driven his Silver Ghost all the way from Tasmania, a distance of 2500 kilometers! When I asked him, with a look of disbelief, what possessed him to drive essentially a rare museum piece all up the Eastern Coast of Australia, he grinned, and patted the flank of his car affectionately. “Well,” he said, with that peculiar Tasmanian pronounciation that's quite like a New Zealander's accent, “It's a great country for driving.”

Indeed it is.