Greetings from the Land of Oz. That's what many Australians call their country, with their usual mixture of happy brashness and tongue-in-cheek self-deprecation. They call themselves Aussies, pronounced OZ-ees, not AW-sees — which tells you why they claim Dorothy's dreamland as their own.I have been here just over a week now. Already, I am growing comfortable with driving on the left. I take it for granted that mine is the funny accent, not everyone else's. (Moving north to Massachusetts a decade ago gave me a taste of that experience.) I still marvel at swimming in the South Pacific when it is snowing back home. I never quite adjust to seeing Orion upside down or steering by the Southern Cross instead of the Little Dipper.
My computers arrived intact. It took but an hour to locate power cords to get their batteries recharging. Within a day or two, I got the funny phone connector that put my modem back in touch with the world. Two days later, I had the cables I needed to drive the laser printers I'll be using here. My good friend John O'Brien, of Whitesmiths, Australia, gets credit for all those hardware successes.
Software has been more of a problem, but not insurmountable. My e-mail now gets as far as John's computer across town. It is still a patchwork to get mail those last few kilometers. I paid an earl's ransom for Bitstream fonts that refuse to slide down a serial cable because they were installed with a parallel interface in mind. Twice I have made frantic calls to the U.S. to have someone read passages from manuals I thought I could leave behind.
It is still a miracle to me how quickly I reestablished diplomatic relations with the other side of the world. Faxes, modems, second-day package delivery, MS-DOS, Windows, and UNIX all work much the same here as back home. Many things cost more, a very few cost less. Already, I am back in the business of editing and writing.
Of course, I couldn't spend a year here without a lot of help back in Kansas. Look at all those other names on the masthead. They have to work that much harder because their editor is a bit further out of reach. I can look out my office window in our rented house on Mackenzie Point and watch surfers dashing into Tamarama Bay. Occasionally, that inspires a twinge of guilt that my decision to come here has demanded so much help from others. (Only occasionally, mind you.)
There's no place like home, to be sure. But it's also nice to go over the rainbow at least once in your life.
P.J. Plauger
pjp@plauger.uunet.com