Friday, Dec 4, I was off to a student-oriented national security conference on the southeast coast. I met the USCG representative, CDR Karen Jones, at the airport. She currently lives in Japan, where she works with CG’s Activities Far East. Man, do I want her job!!! It was a four hour drive down to Kioloa, to the Australian National University campus, and we stopped twice, once on a Scenic Outlook where we took photos, and then in "the historic town of Berry" where we went to a bakery and grocery store to grab fruit for the weekend. The CDR is super friendly and so sweet! A little on the quiet side but absolutely projects confidence. It was very cool to meet such an obviously competent (female) officer and she gave me some career advice, too, which is nice because the CG is going to write to me in December to ask where I want to be assigned...
As we drove farther south, following the coast, the highway shrank to a single lane each way. We drove through farm after farm with a teensy town every fifty kilometres. It was like driving through Iowa, except that every ten km we'd see another "wombat crossing" sign. Then we were in a huge forest, the trees banded with black from old bushfires. Finally we took a left off the highway toward "Kioloa Village," and the road turned briefly to gravel, then back to pavement. Now the trees were threatening to overrun the road. We passed a three-car parking lot with a single convenience store, a post office, and an ATM ("Kioloa Shopping Centre"). We turned east and the ocean was around us, to the north and in front, and at last we passed the tiny sign for ANU. We drove through the gate and over the cattle grid, up a track past a dozen or so wooden cabins, to a rather nice house at the top of a hill. From the hill we could see a few dozen cows and a gate that ringed three or four big fields--the campus, enclosed by ocean on two sides and with forest pressing in all round. The nice house belonged to the ANU Resident, who was working in his garden, and directed us back down the hill to a little gravel parking lot ringed by stones.
I had suspected, from looking at the map, that we would be in the middle of nowhere: on Google, the little dot for Kioloa is buried in a big green patch that, as you click to zoom out, just grows bigger and bigger and bigger. Sure enough, we were in the middle of nowhere. The campus is only used for research students who need access to the ocean: they bring their own sleeping bags and stay in the cabins, in solitary, silent pursuit of whatever the heck they're working on. There were no students there now, but there were about eighty of us: mostly young (20 to 30 year old) government workers from the Australian Department of Defence, Navy, Air Force, Army, military and civilian, Customs agents, Australian Federal Police, a few guests from the New Zealand Department of Defence, and four or five Master's students aspiring to jobs in the DoD. The speakers were ten or so experts from the above agencies, including the second-in-command of Australian Border Protection! Then, of course, my CDR gave a talk on the USCG's missions and abilities in the Pacific.
The conference was put on by the Kokoda Foundation, an Australian defence strategic think tank. WARNING--BORING SCHOLARLY RANT AHEAD What gives Australia a big advantage over the US, in terms of a Whole-of-Government approach to security challenges, is the comparatively tiny size of their defence department. It’s pretty incestuous—once you know one or two of the more important players, you have links to most of the rest of them. (Example…one of the speakers was an important member of Noetic, a consulting firm that gives billion-dollar advice to streamline government agencies; I had already met his wife at the US Embassy in Canberra for that Fulbright thing last month, when Mom and Dad were here!) The theory behind the conference is to get the best and brightest members of many Australian government agencies together and get them to exchange business cards. Yes, we had some intellectual discussion of current problems facing the agencies, but the most vital part of the conference was networking. What a brilliant idea.
BORING SPIEL OVER
Also, it was a lot of fun. Met a lot of cool people, my age and a little older, with really cool jobs. We all brought our own linen and slept in bunk beds, three to six to a room, which was a little weird (also significantly different from, say, the US Cantigny defence conference I went to in 2007, where they met every delegation at the airport with a limo…) And we basically had camping-out food: we grabbed paper plates and went down the line, where ANU’s campus cook and his three underlings, hired just for the weekend, served us pasta or wraps or key lime pie. Actually, the food was excellent; the curry Saturday night was to die for, and there was plenty of it. Still, there was a camping-out feel, especially because every night we finished around 11 and then sat around a campfire before going to our freezing cabins and braving the lukewarm showers.
Also, I accidentally swallowed my first Australian fly. The flies were UNBELIEVABLE. The campus smelled strongly of cow and every person walked in his own cloud of twenty or so flies. At one point, I almost reached for my camera because my toes were black and writhing with flies—I couldn’t even see half of each foot—but since it was in the middle of a lecture, I thought it would be rude. Anyway, the flies made it hard to concentrate, which was unfortunate because most of the speakers were excellent. At night—(we were packed for lectures on plastic folding chairs in a teensy cabin) there were big beetles, like June bugs but light brown and bigger, scratching and tapping in hordes on the screens. (The lecture cabin had screens. Our sleeping cabins, and the cafeteria cabin, did not.) The lintels of the entrances were thick with scattered beetle carcasses.
Apparently we were in Funnel Web Spider central, but the Aussies were quick to assure me that funnel web spiders live in their little holes in the ground and rarely come out to bother people. There were possums, and there were kangaroos. Some of the Aussies—“what? You’ve never seen a kangaroo up close?”—drove me down the road to a kid’s playground near the beach. I snapped dozens of photos of the mob of gray coastal kangaroos, consisting of a dozen or so smaller females, three with joeys, and one or two male kangaroos, taller than me, with immensely powerful legs. The joeys were funny, sometimes leaning out of their mothers’ pouches to nibble at the ground, sometimes just letting one leg hang out and burying themselves inside, so the mom looked like she had a strange horizontal growth, bouncing when she moved. Also, on the beach were endangered plover chicks. There are less than three hundred left in Australia, and three chicks had been born on this beach in the spring, but one of them got stepped on…so there were only two. We were cautioned, before heading out, not to step on one of them. I was especially careful. I didn’t want to start some sort of international incident by negligently crushing a baby plover.
We had about three hours off on Saturday afternoon, and most of us laid out towels on the beach, watching the lovely parent plovers running back and forth and foraging in the surf. We didn’t see either of the chicks. But that night, after a few beers around the campfire, four or five of us went out down the pitch-black road and through the woods. Kangaroos looked at us curiously in the dark, so that what you thought was a big tree stump would suddenly hop away as you approached. The moon rose orange and waning, but still huge. Despite its bright light, I thought I could see almost every star in the heavens: the band of the Milky Way, the Pleiads, upside-down Orion, the Southern Cross, and the Saucepan, which a member of the Federal Police pointed out to me. Yeah, sure, Australia. “The Saucepan.”
This weekend really taught me a lot about Aussie attitudes and the vast culture difference between our countries. I learned about the Lebanese race riots and the Aboriginal "problem," and heard federal investigators talking about the Labor and Liberal party and defence strategists discussing the streamlining of government agencies. I acquired enough business cards to fill a book, and soon I will start emailing people asking for interviews. This weekend really fired up my desire to work in international multilateral strategizing and information-sharing, and also, re-inspired my work for the USCG. Not to mention the key lime pie.
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