Ozzies, the Australians' nickname, is pronounced "odzize", they speak English because the first colonizer, James Cook (1776), was British.
Well, they speak English, it's quick to say, they don't speak English like the English... which is still bullshit because when you listen to Keith Richards and Kate Middleton, you have a hard time imagining that they are born in the same area.
They don't play rugby like us, they are the image of their country, where nature is fiercely violent. But they make me dream.
They don't sail like us, they won. America's Cup », like their New Zealand neighbors, this is unheard of for us. But they still make me dream.
They were world champions in 500/MotoGP (Doohan, Stoner, Gardner and also Gary Hocking in 1961, obviously on an MV Agusta) that again is unheard of here. And I still dream of it...
That said, except for a few years, Australia was French. La Pérouse passed through Botany Bay in 1788, twelve years too late in fact, before crashing into the rocks of Vanikoro, a dirty corner of the Solomon Islands. .
It is also said that in 1793, when Louis XVI mounted the scaffold erected on the current Place de la Concorde, his last question would have been “ Do we have any news from Monsieur de La Pérouse? »
Australia makes you crazy, it makes you famous and it even makes you lose your mind!
The proof…
We are in the southern hemisphere, so our heads are upside down compared to us but gravity means that the “Ozzies” do not fall into the sidereal void…
One thing, though, the first time I went there, we checked and filmed in Paris the direction of rotation of the water draining into the bathroom sink.
Arriving upside down, the first thing we did at the hotel was to turn on the tap and realize with howls of laughter that it was turning upside down...
Gravity certainly, but not in all directions... Towards the right in the northern hemisphere, towards the left in the south, this is due to the rotation of the earth or Coriolis effect...
Years after this experiment, scientists demonstrated that this phenomenon is real, but on a larger scale than the sink.
In short, I was lucky!
So let’s go up a bigger scale… The Phillip Island circuit for example?
He turns... left! “QED” or “Quod Erat Dimostrandum », At home we say “QED” but actually… we are not at home!
Absurd ? Yes but funny, it’s so far away and so big that we have time to think about it…
Come on, here we go, 21 hours by plane, 9 hours time difference, the country is fourteen times larger than France with three times fewer inhabitants, in width it is 4000 km, approximately four times the distance Brest-Strasbourg… No, we are not at home. But in the end it's the dream, everywhere every second.
Welcome to the Ozzies (and their upside-down heads and therefore their upside-down circuit)!
