A LETTER FROM THE OUTBACK

Tourists are swarming into Hong Kong again this summer, but Peter Sherwood doesn’t expect his aunt to be one of them

Got a letter the other day (an old-fashioned one with envelope and stamp) from my old uncle Kevin in outback Australia. He’s never left Queensland.

G’day Peter, I think the wife has gone mad, she wants to go to Hong Kong. Maybe you can talk her out of it. Says she wants to see that big Buddha statue you’ve got there. She’s obsessed. I told her, It’s just a fat bloke sitting down staring into space, and there’s lots of blokes like that down at the local pub.

And when it comes to big things we’ve got loads right here. The Big Banana is 13 metres long, and the Big Pineapple is huge. Our 10-metre Big Potato is solid concrete and we’ve even got 40-tonne Larry the Lobster and a Big Prawn. But, no, it has to be the Hong Kong fat geezer.

Worse, she read about the Seven Summits. You’ve done a bit of mountain climbing so you know about that, but she’s comparing our Seven Iconic Big Things to bloody great mountains. I tell you, Peter, she’s not well.

Just yesterday, she got hold of a fancy Hong Kong tourist brochure that says you’ve got seven million people there in 1,000 square kilometres. That’s insane. Around here there’s seven people per 1,000 square kilometres and I don’t like most of them. Beats me how you all get along.

She reckons you’ve all moved to China now. How the hell did you move millions of people all the way to China? Anyway, she won’t leave it alone. Like a starving dingo with a dead wombat, she is. Wants to go shopping for God’s sake! Hey, the local shop is only a three-hour drive away and it’s got everything and fresh bread on Fridays. You can get fertilisers, seeds, weed killer, tractor parts, chicken catching nets, cattle prods… everything you need. Lamb detailers, wool-bale stencil ink, castration rings and poultry leg bands… I don’t understand it.

Oh, and Chinese food. Rabbiting on about fried rice. What’s that all about. Everyone knows you don’t fry rice – you fry steak and chips. And that sweet and sour pork can’t be good for you but try telling my missus that. And she wants to fly there! I don’t like the idea of sitting in a plane for half a day with 300 strangers. Out here we don’t see that many people in 40 years. And if it’s illegal to barbecue, what are you supposed to eat? And what if you want to go to the toilet? No, I don’t like it at all, but lately it’s all about noodles, thin noodles, fat noodles, and spring bloody rolls, whatever they are. Anyway, there’s a Chinese restaurant in Brisbane and that’s only an eight-hour drive away.

She said something about gambling in McCow. What the hell is that? Some Chinese place named after a Scottish heifer? I don’t get it. We get five years of drought and can’t grow a damn thing, then next thing you know we’re up to our asses in muddy water. If you want to gamble buy a farm. Write back, Peter, and tell the wife you saw the Buddha thing and prefer our Giant Koala.

All the best, Kev.

Peter Sherwood has lived in DB for 20+ years. The former head of an international public relations firm, he is the author of 15 books and has written around 400 satirical columns for the South China Morning Post.