Australia has a history of catastrophic imports. One of our most famous was the decision in the 1930s to bring cane toads in to control pests that were damaging sugar crops. It's debatable whether they did that effectively, but there is no question that they were extremely effective when it came to breeding. Having few natural enemies here, these poisonous creatures now number about 200 million, and experts are desperately working to figure out how to stop their spread from Queensland into other states.
So what does this have to do with our attempt to bring our American Thanksgiving to Australia when we moved here? Hang on - you'll see.
Part 4 - A Very Australian Thanksgiving
Linda, Jason and I had been in Oz about four weeks when Thanksgiving rolled around. We were in a furnished apartment while we looked for a house, and we all felt a bit homesick and out of place in this new land. A Thanksgiving dinner seemed like the perfect remedy to the blues.
This would be Linda's first real encounter with Oz shopping as it existed then. Coming from the land of 24-hour grocery stores stocked with just about anything you could think of, she wandered into the local Woolies to discover that A) turkeys in Australia were about the size of large pigeons and B) even at that size they still take several hours to cook. Which posed a problem since we couldn't start cooking until early evening when we got out of work.
There actually was a C, as well. For it was that night when we discovered that Coopers Ale was a lot stronger than the beer we were used to in the US. While it undoubtedly helped to allay the blues for Linda and me, Jason was still too young to join in.
Probably because of that fact, Jay's memory of the night differs from Linda's. (I have no memory of the night myself.) Linda remembers the Thanksgiving dinner being very late. Jason also remembers dinner being late, but he insists it consisted of salami and cheese because the turkey wasn't going to be done until sometime around sunrise. Poor Jay - the move here was a difficult transition for a 14-year-old.
Anyhow, we decided to do better the next year. By then we were in our first house in Oz, and we had become friends with several other expat Yanks at work. As November rolled around, we all started remembering the great feasts of other Thanksgivings, so we invited them and a few Aussie friends to come to our place for the holiday. We would make the turkey and basics, and the cost of admission was to bring the dish that you most loved from your family's Thanksgivings.
It was obvious that a few of our friends had come from homes with a serious lack of understanding about nutrition, but nonetheless the day was a great success, So much so, in fact, that more friends started wrangling for a seat at the table next year.
No worries, mate! The more the merrier. We were up to two tables the next year, and I recall Linda having to make a turkey the night before in order to make a second on the day. Well, like cane toads, this thing just kept multiplying until it was pretty much out of control.
By our fourth Thanksgiving here, we were feeding more than 40 people. We were renting trestle tables, plates and cutlery, buying wine and beer by the pallet and figuring out pretty quickly that a four-burner stove and oven were put to the test to feed that many people.
One of our Australian friends volunteered to do another turkey for us and bring it, and we accepted gratefully. Our local friend had never cooked a turkey, however, and she didn't know that you were supposed to remove the plastic bag of giblets and other bits that is stuffed inside the cavity. The plastic had melted, and I always wondered if the bird had picked up an odd taste. No one complained, but then again, I only served that turkey to the people I didn't like that much.
The first time Linda or I gave thanks that day was when that dinner was over and everything cleaned up. We realized that we had imported a holiday with no natural enemies, and it was growing rampant threatening to destroy everything in its path.
So we did the only thing we could. We moved to a new house that was too small to hold a feast.
And now over many, many years, we have learned to be wistful as we miss Thanksgiving in America and happy we are missing it in Oz. This year on Thursday, I had lunch at a Thai restaurant with Jason and Lora. That night Linda and I had chili con carne and Matt came in a little later. It may not have been the traditional celebration, but it was nice just having time with the kids and not having to remember the names of 40 people, half of whom I had never met before.
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