Becoming more Australian

I grew up in Australia but was never especially patriotic. And I’d heard the Men At Work song, Down Under, on the radio my whole life, but never really liked it that much. It was released when I was only five years old, so I considered it “old music”.

But all that changed when I moved to Japan. I was working as an English teacher in Osaka and, like most other ex-pats in Japan, enjoyed hanging out with my colleagues in karaoke boxes. I was quite surprised to discover how different these places were from karaoke bars back home. In Japan, you didn’t have to have a great voice (or no shame) and stand up in front of hundreds of strangers to sing. At a Japanese karaoke house you shared a small room with only your own friends, and sang along (badly) together.

And that’s when my love for this song, Down Under, began. My teaching colleagues were from all over the English-speaking world, but every time we went out there were at least another two or three Australians there. One who’d been in Japan for a year or two had already caught the Down Under bug and insisted we plug its number into the karaoke machine every time we went out. It soon became a standard event, often the last song of the night if enough Aussies were present, and whenever I hear it now it takes me back to the karaoke boxes of Osaka.