The other day I picked up a book I'd ordered at a local bookstore and although I'd spelled out my name when reserving it and we even corrected the a the man in the shop had written down when I said i, it was nevertheless filed under Lorima. Australian accents are an amazing thing. Sometimes, as when I overheard some people in the tram planning to swing by Chonnatan for dinner, it makes me woozy. At other times, it thrills me - I think I'm in love with ABC radio's Damien Carrick, or at least with the way he talks.
Something else on ABC made me think about accents yesterday. They were interviewing some prominent Australian expats in the US, including the new director of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography Tony Haymet. (Scripps is just down the coast from Del Mar, and houses a fabulous aquarium where I encountered the weedy sea dragons - most improbable-looking of Gould's fish - in real life just last year!) None of these people quite sounded like Australians any more, though they didn't sound like Americans either. More a sort of slick melodyless drawl with just the faintest occasional echo of singing vowels, but muffled. How must it sound to Aussies back home? The phenomenon is surely not new; I suppose a few decades ago the expats interviewed would be in Britain and sounding more English than the queen. And yet it seems to me there's something tragic in giving up an Australian accent for an American one, especially, as in these cases, where it doesn't seem deliberate.
See? Yanks can do the cultural cringe, too!
In other news, I had my last antimalarial pill yesterday - you're supposed to take them for two weeks past your return from your trip, since it takes a while for mosquito eggs to hatch. Has it just been two weeks since India? It feels like it was last year - all of last year!
