TOUCHING up a Singapore Airlines flight attendant, giving drinkers "wedgies" at Oktoberfest and pilfering bar mats from Phuket bars. Australians love to travel and are, it seems, finding ever more unorthodox ways of extending time overseas - even if it means bunking down in the lock-up.
"Australians go everywhere, and everywhere they go they get into trouble," a senior official from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade says. "It makes you proud."
The department's consular division in Canberra has 55 staff, and half of them work full-time on the 1500 cases of Australians in strife overseas. Some involve death, missing persons and medical evacuations, but many are of the Annice Smoel "bar mat bandit" variety, trivial incidents that account for a large slab of consular resources.
"Touching up cabin crew is quite common," the official says. "On Singapore Airlines, for instance, even grabbing a stewardess by the wrist can get you an 'outrage of modesty' charge, which we see a bit. And Australians, usually women, can't seem to keep their fingers off stuff when they are transiting through airports, either. We had a woman caught stealing toiletries in Bangkok Airport last year."
Men, on the other hand, are better at "offensive behaviour like pissing in pot plants and crashing jet-skis".
Midair meltdowns are also common. Terrance George, 57, of Melbourne, hit the headlines last week for lashing out at flight attendants who tried to move him from his seat on a Qantas flight to London. The navy officer had reportedly been making unwanted advances to a fellow passenger.
"Often alcohol is the catalyst," the source says. "Two years ago we had three young Australian men who went round at Oktoberfest giving people 'huggy wedgies', where you walk up, hug a person and yank up their underwear. They thought it was hilarious but they were arrested and we had to help them get legal advice."
A Sydney barrister, Ben Clark, says offences that are regarded as innocuous by most Australians can be serious overseas. In February he represented two Sydney men who were jailed for two days in Phuket and ordered to pay $1000 compensation for stealing a 50-cent picture from a street vendor.
In Thailand, says Mr Clark, "penalties for crimes committed at night are far more severe than if the same crime were committed during the day".
And the Land of Smiles is a clear favourite with Australian travellers. "Our embassy in Bangkok gets by far the largest volume of Australians behaving badly of anywhere in world," the official says.
The 1958 novel The Ugly American by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, describes how the United States is loosing the struggle in Southeast Asia because of arrogance and failure to understand the local culture.
In the novel a Burmese journalist says "For some reason, the people I meet in my country are not the same as the ones I knew in the United States. A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land. They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They're loud and ostentatious." The phrase "ugly Americans" came to be applied to Americans behaving in this manner.
In our times the term "ugly Australians" can be equally applied to Australians overseas who behave in a similar manner and for the same reasons.
People, who would otherwise be model citizens in their own country, seem to loose all restraints once they leave their own shores. Very much like children who are allowed to stay away from home for a day. What a pity that we have to show our worst selves to our hosts overseas!
