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 Postcard from Sydney: 9/29/00
Friday, September 29, 2000
I thought I knew a fair amount about Australians before I got here, but one characteristic didn't show up in any of my research. Aussies have a terrific talent for naming things.
Across the street from the Media Village is a giant cemetery, apparently the largest one in the Southern Hemisphere. When a bus took me past it for the first time, my lasting impression was not of the hundreds of headstones but the name on the gate: Rockwood Necropolis.
That's Greek for "City of the Dead." That's thinking.
The newspapers here have excellent nicknames for each of their national teams, too, creations more on the level of, say, the Santa Barbara Banana Slugs than the Detroit Tigers.
Among my favorites: the Opals (women's basketball team), Boomers (men's basketball team), Matildas (women's soccer team), Hockeyroos (women's field hockey team) and Kookaburras (men's field hockey team). I have yet to find a team nicknamed the Koalas, but I figure it's only a matter of time.
Most descriptive, however, is the ubiquitous "drug cheats." The term has been bandied about in so many headlines here, unfortunately, that it is really no longer necessary. Why waste words? Now, everyone knows what headline writers mean by just "cheats."
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