Listen to Fifteen here, for the USU awards at Verge Gallery
Welcome to the Australian citizenship test. Answer the following twenty questions. To pass the test you will need to answer fifteen out of twenty questions correctly. You have forty-five minutes to complete the test. You cannot bring anyone to help with the test. If you cannot read English, you can listen to the questions.
1. Which of these is a role of the Governor-General?
○ The appointment of the Head of State
○ The appointment of the state premiers
○ The signing of Bills passed by the Australian Parliament
2. What is the name of the legal document that sets out the rules for the government of Australia?
○ The Australian Commonwealth
○ The Australian Constitution
○ The Australian Federation
3. Which animal/s appear on Australia’s coat-of-arms?
○ Possum
○ Emu and Possum
○ Possum and Opossum
4. What Australian children’s shows are you vaguely aware of, but have never actually seen?
○ Around the Twist
○ Hi-5
○ The Wiggles
○ Actually you did get the Wiggles, back in Kansas.
5. What is back in Kansas?
○ An ebbing, of sorts– of oak-tree-streets which cast flashing shadows over the handlebars of too-small bicycles, of video-store soda and the low rolling prairie which blankets your old school. Of different lives, and scattered thoughts– the ebbing of a turned-around moon.
○ These things– they’re not particularly universal. They would never appear on the Australian citizenship test.
○ Still, everyone grows up somewhere. And when you listen, you find these things living– whispering– in the possum-burrows between the questions.
6. Which of the following do you find in the possum-burrows between the questions?
○ On Halloween, your cat Cleo would stealthily follow you around the block as you trick-or-treated, keeping a quiet eye on you. Down the road you visited a house with a secret passage in the study, leading to a little observatory in the attic with a working telescope. Every Halloween they invited you in to take a tour and collect miniature Snickers for your plastic pumpkin-bucket. Cleo could never come in, so she always waited patiently outside.
○ On your childhood bedroom window were see-through stickers that were meant to be temporary tattoos, but you fucked up and forgot to remove the plastic bit before getting them wet. They were annoying to peel off when you sold the house. Cleo died, a year before it was sold.
○ You were fifteen, when you moved.
7. Which of these is a responsibility of Australian citizens aged eighteen years or over?
○ To have a current Australian passport
○ To attend local council meetings
○ To vote in elections
8. How old are you, now?
○ Twenty-six.
○ You’ve been here for more than ten years, now.
○ You have yet to lose most of the American accent. On the concrete slabs behind your house, you whisper-practice Aussie slang to the possum in the mandarin tree.
9. You sometimes ask, what is it about possums? Why have they burrowed into this test?
○ They scheme in the long Australian nights, framing the not-quite-stories, collecting the things you forget for when you need them again.
○ They are a film-grain snapshot of the waning sky, over red brick apartment buildings baked lavender, over the crowded gums in the alleys of the inner west, the gums and figs and foreigner Jacarandas outside the window near the desk that you type this on and
○ they keep quiet conversations of the moving between-things.
10. Maybe
○ it’s because you can find possums in America, too,
○ although they’re not quite the same.
○ Opossums, maybe, you’re not sure. More gangly and toothy and a little bit more feral.
11. Which of these statements about state governments is correct?
○ All states have the same constitution
○ The states have no constitution
○ Each state has its own constitution
12. How do you become an Australian citizen?
○ You leave uni early one day, to visit the large brick building near railway square.
○ You wait for an hour or so, sitting alone against the long white walls.
○ After a brief interview, you enter a big room of old computers to take a twenty-question test that is hard to fail. The memories of that day slip out of the cracks of your mind, slinking sandlike between your toes and into the damp Australian clay waiting outside.
13. What do you do after you become an Australian citizen?
○ You navigate down the short escalators to the thinning afternoon crowd of railway square, where old folks crouch-sit against the hostile, metal pseudo-benches of 2017.
○ You can get the 428 down Broadway to get back to uni, but you decide just to walk instead, back to the physics building where so much of your life seems to reside these days.
○ There’s a possum who lives on the roof there, occasionally popping into the Slade lecture theatre to take careful notes. You think of him, often.
14. Some years later,
○ you lock eyes with the possum while drinking tinnies on the School of Physics balcony. He wants to know how you have been going. You say good, life is good here, do you want a beer? He is a teetotaler possum, though. That’s alright, we have some of those Bundaberg ginger beers, they’re pretty good too. He takes one and scurries away, up the imported Jacarandas lining Physics Road.
○ Some years later, outside the windows of your bedroom, possums walk back and forth on the telephone cables.
○ You see them out of the corner of your eye in the morning, before you fall back asleep.
15. Some years later, again,
○ the possums walk back and forth on the nerves that run up your spine,
○ pressing little fingers into the soft spots of your brain
○ where Cleo stalks you from the bushes, as you try to remember the answers.
16. Which arm of the government has the power to interpret and apply laws?
○ Executive
○ Legislative
○ Judicial
17. There are a few possums you have befriended over the years
○ so you invite them over for beers and reminiscing. They ask
○ about Cleo. You scattered her ashes an hour before driving to the airport, to come to Sydney.
○ The possums remember too. It is perhaps your only memory of that move.
○ You cried on the front doorstep, in the warm summer air.
18. Who are these possums?
○ Of course, there is the possum from the physics building,
○ and the one who eats your backyard mandarins.
○ There is the possum who peed on your eski when you left it outside the car while camping in Tasmania with your ex.
○ There is the possum you saw at the Jewish youth group camp when everyone was supposed to be cooking, but instead they rushed outside to see it, burning the pasta.
○ There are the scattered families of possums in the hushing insobriety of Callan park, running between the wards behind the sunset and
○ there is the possum who cleans the bowls badly at Flavour Place on Anzac Parade and
○ the possum that takes you there in his beaten up Subaru hatchback so you can share time over Szechuan spices and those rolled up beef things you put into the broth, and–
19.
○ –all the possums gather in your Sydney backyard, drinking beer and hanging from the hills’ hoist.
○ They gather in the backyard of your old house in Kansas, too- American opossums and the like. (You finally return back to visit, nine and a half years after moving. They sound much the same.)
○ They gather when you forget, when you need them to, and when you don’t,
○ and in the questions on Australian citizenship tests, they gather, poking and prodding you
○ for some semblance of story,
○ but possums do not write so
○ you have to listen closely to their whispered conversations,
○ of the moving between-things,
○ of Cleo on Halloween and red-brick apartments in the pink reflections of windows and on telephone lines and Hi-5 and balconies and spicy Chinese soups and in the legislative branches of the government and the role of the governor general and in the spaces between the questions in an office building near railway square maybe they gathered just enough for fifteen answers
20. Which official symbol of Australia identifies commonwealth property?
○ The national anthem
○ Australia’s national flower
○ Commonwealth coat of arms