“I don’t like Australian people,” says the main character in the new British TV drama Everything I Know About Love. The problem, according to Maggie, is that Australia has perfect weather all the time and that Australians act “like it’s an achievement”.
This is an unfair attack on our country.
Australia gets a special mention in Everything I Know About Love.
Here’s the point: people in Melbourne have never thought their weather is perfect. They have always described it as shithouse, which is a meteorological term invented to describe Melbourne weather. Secretly, people from Melbourne enjoy the eccentric moods of their climate, believing themselves morally superior to those who live further north.
People in Brisbane and Perth, on the other hand, do believe their weather is perfect but – fair go – they are correct. You can hardly criticise someone for noting a simple fact. Darwin? Well, in Darwin they don’t so much have weather as a system of annual mood swings.
But back to Everything I Know About Love. It is Sydneysiders who have the right to feel most aggrieved by the criticism levelled by Maggie – who, it should be said, is only cranky because her best friend scored the handsome Australian.
Our weather is not perfect. We just pretend it is.
Nell (Marli Siu), Maggie (Emma Appleton), Birdy (Bel Powley) and Amara (Aliyah Odoffin) in Everything I Know About Love.
Even though Sydney has four seasons – three of them perfectly pleasant – Sydneysiders ruin it all by refusing to believe that one of the seasons is called winter.
We pay the price of our delusion each year, at about this time. “Heating,” we say to ourselves, “we don’t need heating. We live in Sydney. It’s pretty much a tropical city. Essentially, it’s South Singapore.”
That’s the Sydney attitude. You see people in the park. It’s five degrees in the shade, with a wind chill factor borrowed from Alaska and half the blokes are in shorts.
Sure, they might have a footy jumper on, maybe even a beanie on their sconce, but for the typical Sydney male, it’s always summer below the waist. You can see the goosebumps from five metres distant, and they tremble as they talk to you.
“You’re not a bit cold?” you might inquire.
“Oh, no,” they say, “I’m boiling. We’re in Sydney.”
The women, meanwhile, place heavy insulation over some parts of their body, while leaving other sections naked to the weather. It’s as if a plumber was lagging their pipes and ran out of materials halfway through.
What do visitors make of this eccentric, refusal-to-face-facts behaviour? What do they make of the chapped lips, the wind-burnt cheeks, the frost-bitten toes peaking from a pair of thongs?
Certainly, people arrive from Toronto, or Outer Mongolia, or the Faroe Islands, and say: “I’ve never been colder in my life”.
Invite them for dinner and they’ll come in the door, take off their overcoat, gloves and fur hat, and then – three minutes later – ask if they might put them all back on again. They are too polite to make the enquiry: “Haven’t you people heard of heating?”
Perhaps, instead, they’d prefer to eat in a restaurant. Pop over to Church Street, Parramatta, and there’s a choice of large, comfortable restaurants, every one of them entirely empty, since all the patrons insist on eating at tables placed on the street outside, preferably in a howling gale.
It’s like an acclimatisation camp for Antarctic explorers.
“Perhaps you’d prefer a table inside,” the owner might politely inquire.
“Oh, come off it, mate. It’s Sydney. We’re boiling.”
Adding to the problem is the way the buildings are constructed. There are tents which have better insulation.
Whack up a bit of fibro, place a few galvo sheets on top, and call it a house. “No need to go to too much effort” has been the view, “the climate is so mild.”
“Have you considered double glazing?” the visitor from Toronto might ask. “Or some pink batts in the ceiling? Or even a draft excluder across the large gap below the front door, through which a blizzard is blowing?”
“No, mate,” will come the answer. “It’s Sydney. We’re boiling.”
Meanwhile, over at Bondi, or Manly, or Coogee, the winter swimmers are at it – plunging themselves into the icy water, preferably before dawn.
“Unpleasantly warm,” they declare through chattering teeth, as they haul their blue-tinged bodies from the icy water.
Of course, soon all this will pass. We’ll be back to spring, summer and autumn, and the Goldilocks city that we enjoy for most of the year: neither too hot, nor too cold, but just right.
Yet why can’t we, each April or May, admit the obvious and say, Game of Thrones-style: “Winter is coming”?
Maybe it’s to our credit. We insist on finding perfection in the imperfect; we shoulder aside our doubts and pretend that Goldilocks is in charge all year long.
Delusional? Maybe. But at least we can take credit for pretending it’s perfect. Maggie may be right, we “act like it’s an achievement”, but that’s because it is.
Read more by Richard Glover
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