A Happy Little Vegemite

Although I was born here, travel on an Australian passport, and structured my English major around as many Australian Fiction units offered by our national university, I fall short when it comes to many significant aspects of Australian-ness.

For starters, I don’t do the team sport thing. I’ve tried to get excited about cricket - I just love the all-white uniforms and the silly hats - but a game where two teams throw a ball at each other for days on end leaves me uninspired. While I gleefully admit an abiding fondness for the Welsh Rugby team (on account of their lush facial hair) rugby’s union and league leave me cold once the national anthems are over. Large hairy men manfully singing is somethign I find rather stirring. Ball skills, not so much.

I know I’m risking deportation for putting this in writing, but I also don’t do the valorisation of sports stars as heroes. I skip the Bradman song when I listen to Paul Kelly’s ‘Songs from the South’, and make loud, prolonged fart noises whenever a faded sports star wins Australian of the Year. I have no desire to listen to has-been swimmers justify their bad behaviour on primetime TV. If you so much as mention our nation’s preparations for that eight letter ‘O’ word within earshot of me…well, let’s just say that it’s a word that might start with an ‘O', but it ends with a very angry Peggy. The only coverage of the ‘O’s’ that I intend to watch is the Bondi Hipsters’, and the synchronised swimming with Tessy Halberton, because those ladies gadding about in a pool is just too funny to miss.

On a broader level, I don’t gamble – even on the Melbourne cup – and I don’t drink much at all. My skin burns more than it bronzes. I don’t rate our flag, or our anthem, even when sung manfully by the aforementioned large hairy men. My favourite part of a BBQ is MamaK’s coleslaw. Emus scare the shiznet out of me, hot weather makes me intolerably grumpy. Home ownership and a quarter acre block feel like an impossible dream, barring a lotto windfall – an even more unlikely turn of events given that I don’t gamble.

Before you tear up my passport, though, I do have a few things to say in my defence, things that, deep down, make me True Blue.

Australia has light like nowhere else in the world, a light I ache for when I’m away from home. It’s in my bones, it’s there I feel its absence. I love the fact that we are a democracy, albeit an imperfect one, and that anyone who wants to can go and see Question Time in the House (I went last week at the suggestion of my wise colleague. Take my advice and go, it’s a hoot and a half). We have beaches like nowhere else in the world, and air and water clean enough – for now, at least - to enjoy them. And how I love our writers, our artists, our musicians and our filmmakers, especially when they capture something of our light.

But all this pales into insignificance when compared to my most compelling argument for my Aussie status: I can’t imagine a pantry without Vegemite.

There’s nothing better on toast or crackers, particularly when topped with bubbly grilled cheese, slices of jade-smooth avocado, or globs of bumpy, cellulitey, cottage cheese. I even take a leaf out of PapaK’s book and top my scones with Vegemite. We’re hardcore patriots (even though Vegemite is owned by Kraft, which is American – it’s the spirit of the thing that counts).

Although divided on Vegemite’s nutritional merits – on the one hand, those B vitamins, on the other, all that salt - I can’t help but gravitate towards Vegemite when I’m feeling, in the words of Flight of the Concords, more Vincible than Invincible.

Case in point: I had the 24 hr virus from hell a couple of weeks ago. I’ll spare you the blow by blow, but let’s just say I was so sick I fainted three times. If vomiting were a sport, I’d be representing Australia at the ‘O’s’. The first thing I ate when I was well enough to hold food down?

Vegemite toast.

And just like that, I was on my way back to being a happy little Vegemite.