News From Down Under Comes to Up Top Aussies Via Oceanside Magazine : Expatriates: An Australian native provides a link between the old country and the new for those now in North America.

Arnold Wilson is a good-natured, back-slapping native Australian living a lonely life far from his mates back home.

The ex-Northern Territory policeman and maverick bush pilot, who once flew planes into the starkest outposts of the vast, sunburnt Australian outback, now works as a salesman for an American home-building firm in the state of Washington.

Sometimes, his longing for meat pies, Vegemite and bitter Aussie beer is almost palpable. Because over here, news, culture and cuisine from Down Under are about as plentiful as kangaroos bounding about the forests of the American Northwest.

Recently, however, Wilson established a link across the Pacific through an unlikely middleman--a North County woman who many homesick Australians consider to be the human switchboard of their distant culture, keeping expatriates in touch with their homeland and each other.

Aussie-born Elizabeth Kemmis is editor and publisher of the Australian Expatriate, an Oceanside-based monthly magazine marketed for the more than 140,000 Australians in the United States and Canada.

For many of her countrymen, Kemmis’s magazine is the first word on events back home, offering insights not only on Australian business ventures abroad but also chronicling the fears and foibles of their often-hectic North American lifestyles.

“That magazine is the umbilical cord for many Australians living here,” said Wilson, an Olympia, Wash., resident. “We’re just starved for news from back home. Australian newspapers are just so expensive to get here. And the American papers give us precious few clues of things going on back home.”

But the Australian Expatriate, readers say, is filled with items from both Up Top and Down Under.

Along with Aussie news and cultural items, the magazine also offers regular columns explaining the nuances of American law and culture--anything from finding a lawyer and changing one’s immigrant status to buying a home in the frenzied California market.

There’s also a monthly essay on aspects of the Aboriginal Dreamtime--discourses on the age-old tales native Aborigine tribes use to describe the origin of life on earth--and business ads from fellow expatriates. A recent one read: “Your Aussie Mate in Real Estate.”

Wilson also contributes an occasional “nostalgic poem” about some aspect of Australian life. For editor Kemmis, the magazine is an extension of the pioneer spirit that helped settle a rough and untamed continent--Aussie mates helping each other with emotional support and words of advice in a new-found business and cultural network.

Kemmis, a Melbourne native who previously worked in San Diego as both a business investor and newspaper editor, saw a niche for her magazine when she realized that, other than the magazine Bulletin--the Australian equivalent to Newsweek--there were few American forums for Australian news and culture.

Since starting the magazine last November, Kemmis has uncovered a surprising new domestic market--Americans looking for ways to sate their curiosity about Australia, the strange island continent the natives call Oz.

While the fledgling magazine originally was slanted toward Australians, she said, Americans now account for one-fourth of its 7,000 subscribers. Now, each month, the magazine addresses questions from information-hungry Americans on everything from emigration procedures to vacation ideas.

“For many Americans, Australia is like the last frontier,” said Kemmis, a cheerful woman in her mid-40s whose words glide along with a lilting accent. “The American West had its own rough and rugged past. People relate to that when they think of our country.

“They’re curious about the land and its people. Ninety percent of Americans included in a recent survey, in fact, named Australia as the place they would most like to go on their next vacation.”

Jerry Coolman is one of the curious. The production manager for a North County community newspaper has never visited the land Down Under. But that doesn’t stop him from subscribing to the Australian Expatriate.

“I just like to look at the ads,” he said. “They tell me a lot about the people. I’d like to go there someday for a visit. But for now, it’s like reading about a place I may never get to. The magazine may be as close as I’ll ever get.”

Last week, an American college professor called Kemmis to request several back issues of the magazine. Later this year, Russell Wells will lead a group of Jesuit students on a tour of Australia. The magazine, he said, is a good place for them to begin their research.

Wells, who teaches an Australian sport and culture class at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y., said distinct media images have fed America’s curiosity about the distant land of blue skies, engaging people and oddball creatures, located 7,500 miles west of California.

More than 80,000 Americans live in Australia, he said. Last year, more than a million people worldwide applied to immigrate there, and the government accepted 140,000--making it about as easy to get into as Harvard.

“Australia is still the flavor-of-the-month,” Wells said. “It’s an English-speaking country that’s not located in the Middle East. It’s a safe place to go. And Australia has always had that certain mystique of being both strange and familiar.

“It’s within 50-square miles of being the size of the continental United States, with 16.5-million residents--about the population of Texas. It’s a huge continent with literally two roads that go east and west.

“For its part, the media has played up its mystery with ads showing the marsupials, the koalas and the kangaroos. And then there’s the residual effect of the ‘Crocodile Dundee’ films. They really lit the flame over here.”

The mention of the films, featuring Australian actor Paul Hogan as a happy-go-lucky outback roustabout, evokes a bitter-sweet reaction with Kemmis.

While she doesn’t deny the films’ promotion of the Australian image abroad, her magazine attempts to illustrate how the culture of her much-misunderstood homeland is more than just the rough-and-tumble outlaws who inhabit its romantic heartland.

“Not all Australians just sit around and drink beer,” she said.

The misunderstandings, Kemmis says, often stem from the Australian accent which, despite its charm, sounds raucous and provincial to many Americans.

“It’s the way we speak,” she said. “But we’re not all a bunch of ockers (roughnecks). Even the most educated Australians have that accent. There is culture in Australia--including ballet, opera and the emergence of Aboriginal art. And I don’t know if most Americans realize that.”

While Kemmis says her magazine isn’t controversial, a two-part essay in its first issues detailing the differences between Australians and Americans raised the hackles of readers from both cultures.

The essay, written by an Australian free-lancer, in part explained how Australians are less status conscious than Americans and how the healthy Aussie cynicism is often misinterpreted by the natives here, who often view them as crude, critical and conceited.

“We got letters from both Americans and Australians criticizing the story and supporting it,” Kemmis recalled. “It certainly got us started with a bang.”

But Kemmis receives mostly positive mail from Australians thankful for the new link Down Under. “I’ve had mothers call about the essays on the Dreamtime legends, saying it’s a way for children to keep touch with the culture back home.”

Jane Leonard, a Del Mar realtor and Australian expatriate, said the magazine has helped her establish contact with Australians throughout the United States--many of whom are congregated in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“While I like the Southern California lifestyle very much, I’m still Australian,” she said. “The magazine helps me keep in touch with that, as well as sort through some aspects of the American culture we find curious at times. “A friend of mine,” she said, “is captivated by the number of times Americans change their living room furniture.”

Kemmis remains fascinated, however, with Southern California and its hustle-bustle culture, a place where women are judged on their performance--unlike the sexist attitudes she left back home.

“And I love the expressions people use here,” she said. “Probably the moment I felt most at home in California was the day I sat at a traffic light wearing a pair of reflective sunglasses and these two young men drove up with surfboards on their car.

“ ‘Hey, dude lady,’ ” they said. “ ‘Cool shades.’ ”

Even after 14 years in San Diego, there is still as much Australia in Elizabeth Kemmis as there is in her magazine. Her home office is covered with remnants of her homeland--colorful posters of the Great Barrier Reef and Ayers Rock, the mysterious outback national monument the Aborigines call Uluru.

But there is one small point where Kemmis draws the line in her close connection with the Australian Expatriate--the national love of Vegemite.

While the magazine carries ads for the vegetable extract most Australians eat like peanut butter, Kemmis won’t touch the stuff.

“I hate it. It smells,” she said, wincing at the thought of the thick, brown spread. “Not all Australians like Vegemite--at least not this one. Oh no. No way.”