Everyone knows ‘she’ll be right, mate’ but is anyone wondering if I will be alright?

Don’t start a sentence with “Fantastic...” if your next words aren’t “Beasts - And where to find them”.

How I met The Boyfriend: - “What defines a burger?” he asked. “Anything between two halves of a bun” I replied. “Ok, I hold half a burger bun here in Australia, you hold one over in Italy. Everything between us is burger."

The boyfriend and his siblings (plus a dog) decided to take me on a two-day road trip down the coastline on the Great Ocean Road during one of Melbourne’s infamous random holidays, like a Royal corgi’s birthday or the Friday-before-ball-throwing-day.

I’m not even joking! That’s a real holiday in Victoria: AFL Grand Final Eve, look it up. No, don’t look it up, it’s like soccer. Unless you like soccer.

The plan was to do some mandatory Twelve Apostles sightseeing, something about a lighthouse, and have me try traditional food such as canned spaghetti on toast and the classic Vegemite.

Spoiler alert: Ew.

Returning with more questions than when I left seems a constant in my life.

First of all, when it came to naming places, Australians were very literal and also not literal at all. For example, we recently drove through the Lake Mountain area where one would expect to see at least two distinct things. As a mountain-girl who grew up on the shore of the biggest and bestest lake in Italy, imagine my disappointment when I encountered neither a lake nor a mountain. Granted, it was late so there could have been a pond somewhere but definitely no mountains.

I know there’s a place called Snake Valley around here and I won’t be fooled again! It’s probably a lovely meadow on a hill, or a mountain infested with spiders.

Australia: the land of fair go and false advertisement.

I was naive, back then, and had high hopes for this Great Ocean Road. Unfortunately, it turned out to be just a normal road. Even the Ocean was not great since the road faced a bay and not the vastness of the actual Ocean. Also, the famous Twelve Apostles were more like three-and-a-half piles of rock. Not twelve. And not apostles. I don’t know what I was expecting, to be honest.

I realised that might have been the first time I had ever seen the Ocean. Thinking back to when I visited any seaside location, neither Liverpool nor Tokyo quite hit the mark. So much for Romantic Wanderlust.

To celebrate the moment, I took a short video showing my 40 Facebook friends that I was, in fact, a mountain-girl at the Ocean. The boyfriend found it so amusing that he snapped a photo of me taking a video for my imaginary audience.

There is photographic evidence of it at the end of this post!

Then we took another Great Rural Road to reach the Great Ancient Lighthouse. Unexpectedly, that was the perfect location to spot koalas in their natural habitat, but we still had to point at the lighthouse and nod at each other while exchanging a few fun facts to officially cross it off our to-do list.

“Built in 1848 it’s said to be the oldest surviving one on the continent. For reference, my local mountain High School back in Italy was built in 1833.”

The sheer fact that anything in Italy was older than Australia itself was an endless source of amusement.

But then we saw the Great Koalas!!

If I had a Kodak I would have probably spent 90% of my available film on those.

For my imaginary Gen Z readers, a Kodak is a box that takes photos through a hole. Inside, there was a roll of film with a tiny version of your photos but you couldn’t look at them, you had to wait for the photos to be developed by a complete stranger… It made more sense back then.

I hope the girl in the picture is taking a selfie because that scenery doesn’t look very appealing. I wish I had her hat though! Courtesy of Canva PRO.

We couldn’t have asked for a better view of those chlamydia-infected balls of fur hanging on eucalypt trees for dear life and not giving a damn about us standing there and taking photos. All that cuteness was well worth the leech on the boyfriend’s leg, which he did not notice until that evening at our final stop for fish and chips.

I suspect the koalas were in on the leech accident. Maybe they were drop-bears in incognito. Also, that was the last decent meal I’ve had on the trip.

After the initial shock of seeing a slimy black thing hanging from his calf, the boyfriend pulled it off without expecting the never-ending blood flowing out of the bite. I’ve always prided myself as a problem solver so I immediately offered two Great Solutions to the issue on hand.

Or, in this case, on leg. Har!

1) He could use a sanitary pad around the leg to absorb the bleeding, trusting in the marvel of adhesive engineering that modern heavy-flow night pads offer.

2) He could opt for a crafty tampon-and-hairband situation, MacGyver style.

The next morning, bloodshed under control, the sibling gang (and the dog) convinced me to try every Australian’s comfort food: ‘spaghetti on toast’. The unusual appearance of the contents in the tin made me almost hopeful that it could be a fun experience worth sharing with my imaginary audience.

As an Italian, I’ve never felt more personally attacked by carbohydrates.

What made that canned goo so bad was knowing that pasta was the original culinary concept. Good pasta took a few minutes to cook. So, how was a tin filled with watery tomato sauce the best option for preservation? Was the pasta cooked by being soaked in there for months? Years? Do they ever expire? Who is the target customer? And why do they hate themselves so much?

Plus, these so-called ‘spaghetti’ looked like chopped-up noodles but had the consistency of butter, the taste of soggy bread, and the colour of my legs in winter. Not appetizing!

Since Australians failed my people on the pasta front, I held high hopes that, at least, their own concoction called Vegemite would be decent. I had nothing else to compare it to but it was bad enough to make me tear up.

Since then, I have packed a jar for my friends and family every time I went back to Italy. I don’t want to suffer alone.

As an Italian, I understood the reasoning behind creating a cheap and ‘healthy’ spread during war times when nothing better was available. We invented the edible masterpiece that is Nutella in 1946 when Australians were still bummed about losing the Great Emu War.

Again, I am not joking. They fought, and lost, a war against a large native flightless bird.

My people get war. My people are so good at war that we fought in both World Wars, and once even from both sides! We’re so good at war that our rations contained toothbrushes, yes, plural, and coffee, chocolate, and alcohol. Great for personal comfort and also for bargaining. Australian rations contained the saltiest darkest spread that tasted like reduced stock, charcoal, and tears. Who could blame them for choosing peace and being the laid-back people we all know and love?

Australians were so laid back that, even during the whole leech mishap, the boyfriend’s only statement was: ‘She’ll be right, mate’. The fancy translation would be: ‘Whatever is wrong will right itself with time, my friend’ but I didn’t know that. I thought the boyfriend somehow knew the leech was a girl-leech and that she would survive the match I was holding against her body.

“She won’t be fine. She bit you and you’re bleeding profusely. Why don’t you want to pick a feminine hygiene product like I said? I’ll burn this girl-leech! Keep the dog away.”

This is the story of how I improvised myself as a leech burner, on top of being a magpie swooped pistachio, and a spag-on-toast and Vegemite sandwich survivor.

How do they come up with cool titles in fantasy literature? Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, Queen of the Andals etc etc; even Bilbo Clue-Finder and Barrel-Rider sounds better than my made-up title.

After seven matches, I learned that leeches covered in slime and blood don’t burn easily and that people looked at you funny when you talked about pads and girl-leeches squatting with matches in the middle of a Great Parking Lot.

There was a fine line between optimism and apathy and the very Aussie ‘She’ll be right, mate’ balanced perfectly on that line. Italians could never.

We are passionate people and won’t keep calm unless it’s right after lunch when we’re full of carbs slowing us down.

Good carbohydrates, that is. Nothing from a tin.

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Directly from the archives, please enjoy this authentic photographic evidence:

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Culture shock is something only cool people experience...

There is no Blue Monday in Australia, mainly because it’s already Tuesday and also because it’s Summer.

Answering some frequently asked questions about food and fashion in Melbourne

Memorising the Acknowledgement of Country and other rites of passage