"Do you reckon?"
"Yeah, I reckon."
"Really? You reckon?"
"Yes. I reckon."
This is how conversations with my Swedish friend Johan usually go. He had claimed, a few weeks into our friendship, that Australians say the word "reckon" in general conversation a lot. Far too often. I disagreed, and so ever since then every time I've dropped the R-bomb into a sentence, he's repeated it back to me.
"I reckon we should eat here."
"Oh yeah? You reckon?"
Sigh. It turns out that Australians – and this one in particular – really do say the word "reckon" a lot. We also say "heaps". And we use the gloriously contradictory phrase "yeah nup" as well.
These are things about Australians that I didn't realise. And I would never have even thought of these linguistic tics as our own unless someone from outside the country had pointed them out.
But that's the way travel is: you go to discover new things about the world, and you wind up seeing your own country, and even yourself, in a completely different way.
I "reckon" I've learned so much about Australia by leaving it. Some of those discoveries have been trivial, like our use of a certain word, while others have been more profound.
I've discovered, for starters, that the characteristics we Australians think of as being uniquely our own are actually far more universal.
We're not the only larrikins on the planet. Far from it. Go to plenty of other countries, even those where you'd expect to find monotony and conformity – places such as China, or Iran – and you discover irreverence and humour. People are funny there. They're eccentric; they're rebellious. Compared to some, Australians are actually pretty straight-laced.
Similarly, this idea of "mateship" isn't our own. In other countries they value friendship too. And we might like to think we're laidback, but we're actually studious and hardworking compared to the inhabitants of many other places.
When you travel you also realise that Australians have some unusual obsessions.
We're crazy about coffee, we're in love with the idea of brunch, but perhaps most of all we really, really like real estate. Owning it, and talking about it.
In plenty of other countries people want to buy homes, but the level of mania attached to the purchasing of a property empire in Australia is off the charts.
Real estate prices climb ever higher here, and the goal of ownership becomes more exclusive, and yet the obsession grows. In other countries that seems a bit weird.
Being away from home for long periods also teaches you that we do food here incredibly well. Not our own food: everyone else's food. We steal it, we adapt it, we fuse it, and we love it.
I'm always asked which Australian foods I miss when I travel, and my answer is: Thai food, Greek food, Vietnamese food, Italian food, Chinese food, Indian food, Malaysian food – all of which you can get in any Australian city.
But it's not all good news. With the benefit of distance, and the chance to view how the rest of the world works and how it perceives us, you realise that
Australia might be the lucky country, but it isn't always perfect. And we really don't like talking about that fact.
There are some deep issues with race in Australia that go completely unacknowledged by most of the population. To the citizens of many other countries, our treatment of the Aboriginal population, and our inability to reconcile our colonial past, seems shocking.
It's an obvious problem to outsiders, and yet barely spoken of in Australia.
The Adam Goodes saga? The blackface incidents? The life expectancy gap? These are glaring signs to other people that something is up here. And yet we just can't see it.
On the flipside, however, Australia handles multiculturalism extremely well.
There are some very insular, monocultural societies out there, where racism and xenophobia are deeply ingrained. But you realise Australia isn't like that.
We're a successful, peaceful, diverse society (save for a few pockets of insanity).
There aren't many countries like it in the world.
And there are other things we do well. Australia might have a lot of rules and regulations, but everything works over here. There's order. We don't have many problems with crime, we don't have violent political upheaval, there are no sports-related riots, and we don't have chaotic traffic.
We have a reliable democracy. We have shops filled with all of the things we need. We have money to buy those things. Everything here is safe, neat and orderly – which, you realise after travelling for a while, is how us supposedly laidback larrikins like it.
Still, I reckon that's something worth celebrating.
b.groundwater@fairfaxmedia.com.au
See also: Australia, the land of the idiot
See also: The 10 things Australia does better than anywhere else
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