Culture Shock! Australia

"Culture Shock! Australia: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette" by Ilsa Sharp is a guidebook to living in Australia. This book is not a travel guide, but rather a guide to the people and culture of the country. The main audience for this would be someone who intends to spend a lot of time in Australia, but it can also help business travelers, and even tourists. I know someone who just moved to Australia from Asia, and from what I have been able to determine, this guide appears to be fairly accurate. I am looking forward to my visit there, which should also give me a better idea on just how accurate it is. Be sure to get the latest edition, as it was updated in 2005 and it is clear from my reading that there were substantial updates. The author, Ilsa Sharp, migrated to Western Australia, and that personal experience clearly was a big asset to her in putting this book together. I did sense a bit of a bias towards Western Australia in her examples. To be fair, I was more interested in Eastern Australia, and so the bias may have been in my reading as well. In either case, she certainly does try to cover most of the country, and if I were to pick the one area where there was the least amount of information it would be Tasmania. The book is broken down into 10 sections. These include a quick introduction, followed by basic information. Next is a discussion of the people, the society, and moving there. It then gets to some more specific areas such as food, entertainment, slang, and business. It then finishes with an A to Z section covering many basic facts about the country, some key figures both historical and modern, and it even has a short culture quiz. As someone from the United States, this book is probably not as useful to me as it would be to someone coming from a much different culture. Not to say that Australia is just like the United States, but clearly the two are much closer than people from other countries from Asia and the Middle East. Even so, I think the book was fairly useful in understanding some of the societal differences between the two countries. This is one book that is easy to recommend.

I have travelled extensively in Australia on three trips between March, 2001 and November, 2002, and purchased this book to fill in information about Australian culture, lifestyle and current happenings where guidebooks are usually pretty thin. It almost did the job for me.The author, Ilsa Sharp who is an immigrant from Great Britain by way of Singapore, wrote this introduction to Australia for publication in 1992. She had only lived in Australia two years then. She has revised it four times since, in 1994, 1997, 2000, and 2001--or almost revised it in those years. Unfortunately her comments on things that are subject to change jump around so that the reader cannot tell whether or not they are current. There are lots of phrases like "Here's the drum, as the Australians say, the latest on property, at the time of writing, in late 1991..."(p. 156) For anyone who wants to know about purchasing property, comments about 1991 are just too old to be useful. This strangly "updated" edition stumbles over itself in this fashion on many topics, moves forward mentioning events in 1996, 1997 and even 2000 before slipping back into comments like "At the time of writing, the rule on importing aged parents is that..." without telling when this comment was written or whether the rule is still in effect in 2001. You may not care about the rule on "importing parents" but there are other issues handled the same way that you probably would care about. The book needs to be thoroughly up-dated and edited so that the reader will know what the current situation is.That said, there are many well-written chapters on things that do not change much in a decade: Australian language and slang, how Australians see themselves and how they are seen by others, Aboriginal experience and how Euro-Australians have treated them, the "leisure ethic," mateship and machismo, tucker (food), attitudes about working and about the environment, etc. These are worth the exasperating confusion left by the other stuff.The cover of the 2001 edition claims it is a "NEW EXPANDED EDITION." That may be, but what Culture Shock really needs to do is to get it all brought up to the present so the reader knows what's going on now. Would I recommend it? You bet. Much of the information is difficult to find elsewhere, and the author is on the mark in her witty commentary.

This book gave a feel for life in Australia. It is fascinating. "Customs and Etiquette" are more informative than facts and figures when understanding people from another place. Too bad our history and geography books aren't more like this book. Australia is a BIG place, so understanding the people is like understanding ALL Americans. Not so easy. I loved it.

I find this book very useful and funny at times. I have been to Australia many times and I am surprised not to know many of the customs and etiquette that make an Australian unique until I read this book. This book is especially very helpful to new permanent residents like me with the intention to live in Perth like the author. Highly recommended to people who is thinking of migrating to Australia.

Full-disclosure comment: I myself have not been to Australia. I review the book from the perspective of one who has known many Australians, though, and called a number of them friends.That said, this book rings true with what I've seen of the Australian people--an exceptionally diverse group who are, as Sharp shows, a more complex people than some give them credit for being. Those cultural facts that are particular to Australians are well detailed. Topics that are hot button issues inspiring strong difference of opinion in Australia seem to be detailed in a fair manner. Americans in particular may find the comparison of the Australian frontier/outback ruggedness ethic to our own cheerful Western cowboy self-reliance (so to speak) of great interest. They differ, but with similarities. Both have worked their way well into our respective national psyches.Someday when I hopefully visit Australia, I believe I'll feel better informed about the various dos and don'ts of Australian life thanks to this book. Recommend for anyone going to Australia, or who has a close Australian friend and wishes to better understand him or her.