John Lacey

This probably isn’t a post so much as a collection of related anecdotes.

From Yahoo! With Love
In 2000 I was explaining to my room mate how to sign up for a Yahoo! email account. I distinctly remember saying to him, “You can either sign up with the Australian site and have an @yahoo.com.au account or you can sign up with the other site (@yahoo.com) and be international man of mystery!”

He looked at me for a moment and said, “But I am Australian!”

JohnSouthOfSydney
When I signed up to YouTube I adopted the moniker JohnOfJordan. People frequently ask about the origins of this name and I quickly feign for an explanation more interesting than ‘it popped into my head one day.’ John Of Jordan is John The Baptist or St. John in the Christian tradition. A remarkable stream of consciousness for someone who is patently non-religious. Even stranger still was that I found myself in a church bearing this character’s name a short while after joining.

Though it still begs the question: why John of Jordan? Why not JohnOfAustralia or JohnSouthofSydney?

When I started on YouTube there was no Australian version of the site. Indeed sightings of Australian YouTube users were sporadic beyond the handful who had already garnered a degree of fame (Caitlin Hill, Blunty3000, CommunityChannel, HughsNews, etc.). My friends were – and still are – predominantly American on that website. When I did happen to come across an Australian there, they were invariably doing culturally cringe worthy things like making odes to Vegemite or talking about Koalas. I didn’t want to fall into those traps. I wanted to be known as John, not John: Token Australian.

I guess it probably didn’t help that I adopted a fake American accent in my early videos. Or that I did promotional videos (again with fake accent) for a gathering in Mexico. Infact when I turned my hand to fake British accents, one individual wondered: “Why is it so hard for americans to do a remotely decent accent?”

When I made a video about my visit to The National Zoo and Aquarium, an American accused me of lying; he had been to the National Zoo, and that wasn’t it. Obviously we were talking about different nations.

Geographically Challenged: John comments on Facebook

NOWRA SHOWGROUND, NOW A HO GROUND
Microsoft Word spellcheck routinely suggested “Nowhere” as a substitute for my home town of “Nowra.” Certainly most of my contemporaries were inclined to agree with the Microsoft stance on the subject.

My friend Daniel recently remarked about the proliferation of anti-Nowra groups on Facebook. He identified the following groups. I’m sure they will give you an indication of the contempt felt for the place I live in.

• I escaped Nowra without spawning
  A group for anyone from Nowra whose friends all became breeders and townies after high school.
• Support Nowra Jail Now!!!
  Why ruin some nice town when you can dump it in Nowra?
• Bitch Please, You don’t scare me… I went to school in Nowra!
  This group is dedicated to those who went to school in Nowra and survived.
• The ‘I live in Nowra’ Support Group
  A Place where Nowra People that are able to read and write can come to meet, and ex-residance [sic] and those who may have visited… been forced to live in… or escaped alive from Nowra can share stories!

Ironically I’ve always loved this place. Both my hometown individually and the nation as a whole. But I’ve always felt compelled to try to identify as an individual first and foremost, rather than an Australian national. I don’t particularly want to represent cliched ideas regarding this country just because it might make me more entertaining or palatable to an international audience.

Obviously I’m a bad Australian.



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Categories: Personal Universe
Tags: Australia, JohnOfJordan, national identity