Amanda Hocking

My Australia obsession is at an all-time high this week, and I’m seriously considering a visit. It’s just a very expensive, very long flight, and I’m not a huge fan of flying. If Australia were like an hour away, I’d probably live there already.

Here’s fun fact (although I’m not entirely convinced of the factual nature of this fact): When I was a small child, I really wanted to move to Australia. My parents told me that before they knew they each other, they had both separately made plans to move to Australia, but at the last minute, these plans changed. (I don’t know if they were really “plans” so much as “briefly wanting to,” but this is the story as I remember them telling me.)

Anyway, I became convinced that in a parallel universe, my parents had moved to Australia, met each other, and still conceived me. So in another universe, I’m Australian. And thus began my unnatural feeling of kinship to a country that is very, very far away.

Everything in Austrailia is just awesome. Every creature there sounds like Eric named them. (Wallaby? Koala? Didgeridoo? Okay, so the last one is an instrument, but still) And they all have bizarre super powers. Platypi lactate and have venom.

Then there’s the luscious Sydney Opera House. Toilets flush in a different way. Heath Ledger is buried there somewhere, or his ashes are spread out in Perth or something. And there’s the coral reef.

And everyone has fancy Australian accents. New Zealand is semi-nearby, and Peter Jackson has repeatedly shown me how gorgeous it is there. Isn’t Flight of the Concords filmed somewhere there? And I’ve seen Muriel’s Wedding and A Cry in the Dark like twenty times, so I’m all caught up on Australian culture. (It’s all ABBA and dingos, right?)

So yes, Australia is crazy awesome. And if I went this summer, it would be winter there. (But I don’t know what that means in terms of weather). BUT its still crazy expensive, and the flight is so long I could be incepted seven times over. (If you haven’t seen the hit film Inception, that reference I just made was really funny). 

So people of Australia, and the general Oceanic community – what do you think? Is Australia really awesome enough to risk crashing into that weird island from Lost on the incredibly long flight over? And what are the chances of me running into Daniel Johns on the street? And do you guys really have gold eagles the size of city blocks like in Rescuers Down Under?