Best Mate

By Scott Vignos
The following was excerpted from Scott’s Australia web journal and reprinted with permission.

Living with another family is a different experience from what I’d expected. My room at school in the U.S. is a mess. Dishes accumulate in corners and piles of clothes reside on most of the furniture. Before coming to Australia, I knew living with another family would be a three-month exercise in diligence and self-discipline. Luckily, my new home is truly a bachelor pad—no hand-blown glass trinkets to break, and the furniture and matching carpet, both a comfortable brownish color, are able to disguise the worst spill.

Caption: Jim Andrews prepares dinner for his host son and family.

Jim Andrews, my host dad, originally came from a Maori village on the west coast of the North Island of New Zealand. A carpenter by trade, he immigrated to Australia in the ’70s to find a job, as many Kiwis do. Thirty years later, and despite his best efforts, he has permanently relocated to “the biggest island.”

The Andrews family grows with my weekly discoveries of a new son or daughter. And on every trip to the market or milkbar, it seems a new cousin is introduced. They are old and young but all wave to Jim, usually before he recognizes them.

I have nightly conversations with Jim. After dinner, we usually settle into the kitchen with a cup of coffee or tea, the first of several. The topics are diverse but are initiated by Jim taking a sip of tea, setting his hands on the table and making a customary opening statement: “Look, the (plural noun) are bloody wonderful (type of plural noun),” and we proceed from there.

He tells me about his childhood in rural New Zealand. I hear about his family, the ones still in the village and the ones who now live in Australia. We cover Maori culture, politics, the construction industry, food, education, art, occasionally religion, and always Australian footy and rugby—the dominant psyche at Jim’s house. These ruminations fill the better part of the evening, evolving on an indefinite timeline unless a big match is on TV or I have plans. Steven and Mike, two of my host brothers, sometimes join us and on rare occasions, the whole family drops in for the topic of the night.

On a recent Sunday morning, Jim woke me at nine. “C’mon mate,” he says, “we’re going on a Tiki Tour. Get your coat on.” Bleary eyed, I followed him to the car where Steven was patiently waiting, in the same state of half-consciousness as I. “Now, I don’t know what you’ve seen of Melbourne, but today, I’ll show you the Real McCoy,” Jim says, starting the old Peugot and backing out of the driveway.

You won’t find the Tiki Tour in any guidebook. This tour, I soon learned, is a survey of all the sites in the Melbourne area that are significant to Jim Andrews. We drove between the buildings he helped build and meandered past pubs that he frequented with other Kiwis in his youth. We pulled alongside an empty lot and Jim stopped the car. He pointed to the intersection. “Right there,” he motioned, “the story goes that one of our chiefs put his spear in the ground on that spot when he visited Australia before the Poms showed up. We’re going to build our heritage center there. Come back in 10 years, it’ll be all up and running by then.” As we pulled away I strained my body around to look at the spot. I had a hard time imagining a mighty chief planting his spear on a deserted street corner, but to Jim, it was the most important stop.

At some point during my stay, 14 Manica St. became home. It’s strange how it happened. Our group spent almost three weeks traveling in the mostly barren interior of Australia. During the final leg of our tour, as we made tedious progress across the sweltering red desert, I realized that going home to the comfort of Jim’s bachelor pad sounded pretty great. My conversations with Jim stand out among the best experiences I had in Australia, as does attending my host brother’s high school graduation and watching the Brisbane Lions win the footy championship on TV, to the dismay of everyone in the room. If I ever make it back to Melbourne, my first stop will be to the suburb of West Brunswick to drop in on the Andrews for a reunion.

Scott Vignos is a senior at Carleton College, where his majors are Sociology and Anthropology. He studied abroad with the SIT’s program on “The Multicultural Society in Melbourne, Australia.”