Dear USA: When You Were Awesome
I Fucking Love Australia
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Dear USA: When You Were Awesome<br>A letter to America from the boy in western Sydney who was once your biggest fan
I Fucking Love Australia<br>May 14, 2026
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You might be cool, but you’ll never be purple safari suit cool.<br>I was 5 years old at Saint Mary’s South Primary School when I first fell in love with you.<br>Her name was Miss Hess. Blonde hair. An accent I’d never heard before in my whole short life. I remember her standing at the front of our kindergarten classroom and being absolutely mesmerised. I asked her where she was from. She told me she was from the United States of America. Somewhere down south. Alabama, maybe. I don’t remember exactly. I didn’t even know what a United States even was at the time. What I remember is the way the words came out of her mouth. The roll and lilt and warmth of them. They sounded like the films we’d already started watching. They sounded like everything good.<br>A 5-year-old in western Sydney doesn’t have the words for “I am infatuated with my kindergarten teacher because she’s from a magical place.” But I was. Completely. And from that moment, you had me.<br>That’s how it started. With a blonde American lady at the front of a New South Wales classroom, telling a barefoot Aussie kid about the country she’d come from.<br>You can build the rest of a life on a foundation that small. I did.<br>Because you were the greatest country on the face of the bloody earth. Everyone knew it. Everyone said it. The dream was to go there one day. To stand under the Statue of Liberty and look up. To stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon and look down. To walk over the Golden Gate Bridge. To get a photo at the Empire State Building. To lose your shirt at a Las Vegas card table. To take your kids to Disneyland. To eat a hot dog in Times Square.<br>You sent us Hollywood and we ate it whole. You sent us Indiana Jones and Marty McFly and Han Solo. You sent us Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin. You sent us the moon landing on grainy footage and we watched it in school assemblies. We were hypnotised by the technologically of an advanced civilisation as if we were still rubbing two sticks together trying to discover fire.<br>When Crocodile Dundee went to New York, I went with him. Every Aussie kid did. We sat in our lounge rooms half a world away and walked the streets through Mick’s eyes and the whole thing felt close enough to touch. Like maybe one day, we’d get there too.
When I was a teenager, my uncle bought a Rambler Matador. Big American sedan. Chrome you could see your face in. Then a Rambler X. Big two-door coupe. He called it the big American job and I’d run my hand down the panels like I was touching a piece of the country itself. I felt so proud sitting up in that front seat turning heads everywhere we’d go.<br>He’d go to Vegas every chance he got. Come back with stories. The casinos. The lights. The buffets the size of a school hall. The way the air conditioning hit you when you walked into a hotel lobby. The way the dealers called you sir. The way the whole place seemed to exist on a scale Australia couldn’t compete with.<br>I’d sit there as a teenager and listen to him with the same wide-eyed awe a 5-year-old had for Miss Hess. You were still the dream. Still the place. Still everything good and big and possible. The richest people on the face of the earth. Wall Street. Manhattan. Texas. California. The kind of country a kid from western Sydney could only get to by saving every coin for a decade.<br>Friends would come back from their own trips with their own stories and I’d absorb every one of them. The skyline at night. The redwoods. The size of a steak. The taste of a Coke from a glass bottle. You were a country, and you were also a feeling, and you were also a promise.<br>And then one Tuesday morning your towers fell.<br>I remember exactly where I was. I remember the heaviness in my chest that didn’t lift all day. I remember the pounding headache that wouldn’t quit. I remember feeling physically ill in a way I couldn’t put words to, because what I was feeling wasn’t shock or fear, it was grief. The grief of a kid watching the older brother he idolised get sucker-punched on live television.<br>We watched the people jumping. We watched the firefighters running in. We watched a country built on optimism take the worst hit of its history. And we cried for you. Not the polite kind of crying. The proper, shoulder-shaking, can’t-believe-this-is-happening kind.<br>We had our own dead in those towers too. Australians who were just there for work, for love, for a long weekend. They died with your dead and we mourned them together.<br>It was the Musketeer thing. All for one. One for all. That’s what we were to you and that’s what we believed you were to us.<br>And when you went to war, we went with you. Bush invaded Iraq on the back of a lie about weapons of mass destruction and somewhere deep down a lot of us knew...