This article oringinally appeared in The Age in January 2000
IT CAN be a jolt to the system to realise that you have turned into a Bukowinan. I speak from experience.
Once a golden, hairless-skinned youth, the bloke who now looks at me from the mirror is swarthy, with black whiskers, dark-circled eyes and bouffant that is truly unruly in its East European lushness. It's a shock, because I was once pure Anglo.
For the geographically undereducated, the Bukowina is the shaded bit in a Venn diagram that covers Ukraine, Romania and Moldova. It is a region on the eastern side of the Carpathian mountains, peopled by scattered German-speaking immigrants, Armenians, Hungarians, Poles and Ruthenians, surrounded by forests full of trolls and goblins and ancient folklore. The original Dracula castle is in a nearby suburb.
Since the 14th century, the Bukowina has been a playground for armies of Romanians, Turks, Russians and Austro-Hungarians, so it's no wonder some hirsuteness crept into the local population.
As a multi-ethnic province, its name has several spellings: Bukowina or Buchenland in German, Bukowina in Polish, Bucovina in Romanian and Bukovyna in Ukrainian, all of which mean "land of beeches". Homonymically, though, it is as close as it gets to being like the Gold Coast.
My grandparents married before the war, in Chernowitz in present-day Ukraine, moving to Austria, then Germany. They arrived in Australia the same year as television, but with less fuss. Crowds didn't stand for hours outside shop windows to watch them. Instead, they stared at them on buses and at the beach.
Krakowiecki ("Krah-ko-vee-et-ski") was changed to Krakowiki early on to make it easier for locals to pronounce. "Krak-a-weeky" could be a slogan for light beer.
My mother grew from young wog girl into young New Australian woman with hint of accent. She married a local fellow steeped in Anglo culture, which came to dominate my upbringing: cricket, Shakespeare, cryptic crosswords, dirty limericks ("A handsome young man with a sock ... ").
Dad was not hairy and I identified not only with his culture but also his smoothness. I was an Anglo, just like him, and ignored the facts that German had been my first language, that I had worn lederhosen and that every week at nana's place we ate bratwurst, sauerkraut, speck, rolladen, potatoes baked with carroway seeds and golden-crumbed wiener schnitzel fried in an inch of oil and, for dessert, poppyseed cake, stollen, strudel, apfel pfannekuchen and honey tortes.
High school was a multicultural affair. We Anglos would go surfing in the afternoons -- with a couple of Greeks, a Cypriot, an Aboriginal kid, a Chinese Malaysian and a Hungarian who were also in our gang. We called each other "wog", "spic", "convict", "chink" and "Abo" because we were mates. I was one of the convicts.
Dad died when I was 23 and that's roughly when the serious body hair first stirred, as though his Anglo existence had been a bulwark against the coming of the foreign follicles.
The journey from Anglo to Bukowinan has been slow, steady and unstoppable. Hair that once was not, now very much is. My Bukowinan genes behave like a slow-burning fuse: as each day ticks over a new hair pops into existence ... sping! spip! snup! One day I'll look in the mirror to find that I've exploded into full eastern Europeanness.
As I edge towards my late 30s, the evidence of my new identity is plain: my whiskers are darker and thicker; the modest thatch on my chest has widened and now cascades downwards in a black torrent; the trailing hairs at the back of my neck have returned from a reconnaissance mission down my spine, accompanied by reinforcements who station themselves on my shoulders. The overall effect is of being halfway through a slow-motion man-to-werewolf transmogrification. The Anglo is long gone and I have a Bukowinan old age to look forward to.
The point of all this? I wish I knew. I could make the trite observation that it's not what we eat or read, or what sport we play, that defines us as Australians. I could discuss the nature of personal identity -- the difference between how others see us and how we see ourselves. Or I might try to wrap things up with a pithy piece of wisdom passed down through the male line of my family that you could mull over and perhaps pass on to your children.
Instead, I'll note that for some people it's easy to accept their ethnic identity.
It's something that grows on them.
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