This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Are we really a 'young country'? In some ways, we're one of the oldest... ancient indigenous presence (the oldest human remains found are the 40,000 year old Mungo Man) and geographically it's one of the oldest places on earth...
- To clarify, the phrase "young country" usually refers to the fact that Australia was Federated as a nation rather than a colony only at the beginning of the 20th century. "Young nation" would be a more accurate way to put it, but that's just not how the phrase worked out. However, you are right to acknowledge the indigenous for their own nation which came before the European occupation.
Viewer: ...not a single mention of Drop Bears. What's up with that?!
Scrounge: Added the note that koalas are never as vicious on TV or in movies as they apparently are in real life. If anyone out there has any koala bear horror stories, or wishes to stick up for the tufty-eared little savages, this might be the place to do it.
Morgan Wick: You sound like you have some of your own.
Looney Toons: He might just have kids.
Scrounge: I don't have either, actually, though I'm pretty sure I've worked retail long enough to have a healthy hatred of both.
Air Of Mystery: Koalas are always really sleepy when I've seen them. They're slightly more lethargic than the average housecat.
Randallw: If I can explain my recent edit. I'm Australian, as I said. I would support anything Menzies did actually our entry to WW 2 was also sucking up, and am myself a bit elitist towards the normal Australian population eg. I hate Vegemite, I don't drink alcohol, let alone beer, and I have zero interest in Australian Rules, and yet his sucking up to the mother country (England) and disparaging Australia pisses me off.
Ettin: And why do we need to know this?
Torri: back to Koalas how about their tenancy to blow up being walking eucalyptus oil bombs
Sabre Justice: Actually, koalas evolved into more or less the same niche as sloths. Due to a lack of predators that can climb trees, they can afford to be sleepy tree decorations. On the ground though...
Fast Eddie: too many quotes Please see
Administrative Policy.
Like America, Australia has two or three important cities on the opposite coasts and a whole lot of nothing in between. What we call "Flyover Country", they call "The Outback".
—America: The Book
A sick feeling of repugnance and apprehension grows in me as I near Australia.
— Diary of Sir Robert Menzies, Prime Minister of Australia, May 23, 1941
When I came to this land, all the God in me simply evapourated.
Come to Australia, you might accidentally get killed
— Scared Weird Little Guys try a tourism song
Just a note on the simpsons, the tabboo on women playing the digeridoo only applies to the traditionaly made ones, playing makeshift ones (such as ones made of a length of PVC piping) is not considered a tabboo, also, the gift store could just be trying to rip people off.
Grumman: Replaced this quote:
Australia is not without its dangers and every animal in the country can be classified as belonging to one or more of the three categories: Dangerous, Poisonous, and Sheep.
...with the quote that said author was ripping off.
I'm glad someone did mention the dropbears, that's some serious business that doesn't get reported enough. Don't take bush hiking lightly, tourists!
...more seriously, this reader gets the impression that, in the outdoors, someone from North America might be looking for the wrong hazards and things.
In North America, the poisonous snakes can be impressively large, but are for the most part (water moccasins excepted) not especially aggressive, and if one bites you, the bite may become gangrenous, and you could lose a limb, but you may not die. Australia's poisonous snakes are small, will chase you, and their venom will very likely kill you if you aren't treated with the appropriate antitoxin very quickly.
In North America, the largest spiders don't have much venom and it's the tiny spiders whose bite can kill. In Australia, there are funnelweb spiders bigger than tarantulas, with quite astonishingly nasty venom.
Australia doesn't have a lot of aggressive large predators, other than crocodiles.
Likely habits and habitats of local stinging or biting insects are not well known at all (I had to go to Wikipedia to verify that fire ants are found in some regions of Australia, for instance).
And so on.
Oh, and please forgive the American and Canadian tourists who try to convince you to say "a dingo ate my baby." They're the same ones who go to Ireland and try to get the locals to say "they're after me Lucky Charms."
MileRun: What would you guys think of a screencap of the Great War of the Australian Stereotypes (about
9:45 here
) as the page image?
Count Dorku: Quotes were getting excessive again, so I've put up a
Quotes Wiki page.
Vampire Buddha: Removed a huge pile of
natter:
Don't do what Donny Don't does
- "Not the most popular beer" is an understatement the only time this troper has ever seen Fosters being sold let alone drunk was when he was in London.
- This Troper has it on second-hand authority that most Australians refer to Foster's as "That piss we sell to Americans." Just thought that was a fun fact...
- However, it is probably good to note that there is a bit of a culture difference here. To an Australian (such as this troper), all alcohol, regardless of whether it is 300 year old, finest wine, or rotgut, is known as piss. Although we do mostly sell Foster's to Americans.
- Foster's is still terrible. XXXX is slightly better, in the way that dog piss is better than cat piss. (don't take that literally)
- So would that make Foster's "Australian for: beer that's been processed through an Australian"?
- And why is it called XXXX? Because Queenslanders can't spell "beer".
- Really its just that the marketing department didnt want to call it "piss"
- Hey! Screw you. All us Queenslanders know you spell it beir.
- Yeah! Us Queenslanders are too busy drinking Bundy Rum and hitting each other... with our faces
- Each other? This Victorian thought you hit cane toads?
- Are you sure you don't mean with your faeces?
- VH1 pointed out the absurdity of this premise in the film, where it was portrayed that Australians were so backward, they were unfamiliar with automobiles.
- Auto-whats?
- Cars, mate. Damn Yankees and their fancy speakin'.
- Yeah, sorry about that.
- While we're apologising, I'll say sorry for Nicole Kidman in general, acting and appearance wise she's Keanu Reeves in a skirt.
- You also gave us Hugh Jackman. It's all good.
- It was still ridiculously popular down here.
- Though this troper would point out that Canberra is a better choice, as it has very dark places that are close to civilisation and is already used by a number of amateur and researching astronomers. Though we have a hard enough time being more than a synonym for the federal government within Australia, so expecting people overseas to know the sorts of things that happen here is expecting way too much.
- This troper would point out that what the average person would consider "dark sky" would be unacceptably bright to an astronomer. Canberra is on the edge of the worst light pollution in Australia.
- Not to mention that the Stromlo Observatory, a major astronomical research station, was destroyed when this entire city burned down. (Okay, maybe only a handful of suburbs were burnt but a hell of a lot of the surrounding bushland went up in smoke.)
- ...who is (of course) played by an Indian-English guy which in one way is closer to Australian than an American. At least the other intelligent and sensible guy is a Korean played by an actual Korean.
- ...who really can't speak Korean very well.
- Marine...the Raccoon...
- And yet Knuckles is an Echidna.
- Well, in the original Japanese, y'see, she was The Idiot from Osaka (i.e. she spoke Kansai-ben). And given that Kansai is the south, and she's from an island, well...
- He's Australian? This Troper thought he was English. Either they got the accent wrong or I heard it wrong.
- This (Australian) troper found him to be a passable Aussie. Thanks for standing still, wanker!
- Came off to thios troper more as an English backpacker who is trying to pretend to be Australian, and failing miserably.
- This also Australian troper found it perfectly passable strine.
- Star Wars Clone Wars was on TV while This Troper was playing TF 2. It turns out that the Sniper sounds like Jango Fett (and his army of clones). Which is unfortunate considering that Jango had a New Zealand accent.
- The clones were played by Temuera Morrison, who has possibly the strongest Kiwi accent on the planet. To this (Kiwi) troper, the sniper sounds like an American trying to do a cockney accent and failing miserably.
- It's some of the best bad strine ever. Now let's cut out Nattering.
- The developers of TF 2 addressed this complaint by pointing out how ridiculously inaccurate all the other character's accents were as well.
- To be more precise they said "[sic] we though it was appropriate that he was about as convincing an Australian as the Demoman is a Scotsman, or the Medic a German." As you can see here.
- They ran from New Parliament House in Canberra (btw, the city was never mentioned by name in the episode) to the American embassy; the distance was roughly accurate, though nothing else was. (There are no souvenir shops between, and they'd have to cross a busy road to get from one to the other).
- This editor does not believe nitpicking such details to be wise, considering that the episode also expands greatly on the hitherto unknown ancient Australian tradition of Giving People the Boot, to the point of revealing the formerly secret Boot-flag of Australia. Not to mention revealing that the Prime Minister spends his free time floating naked in a tire on a billabong drinking beer.
- And is called Andy. I'm sorry, when the hell was this? Did it go Keating-Howard-Andy without me noticing?
- Not so weird. It became common knowledge just before the last election, that our rather nerdy soon-to-be-Prime-Minister Kevin Rudd had actually got drunk and visited a strip club back before he entered politics. The Australian reaction of "Aw, he like a beer and a sheila, he can't be that bad" may have helped him get elected.
- It's probably a direct parody of former Australian prime minister Bob Hawke, who held the world record time for downing a yard glass (11 seconds!).
- Then there's the idea of an Australian being perplexed by a bullfrog. I doubt there's many of us who are going to let one of those things come near us and live, let alone not recognising them, with what Cane Toads have done to us.
- The second question, incidentally, is often a Troll asking about sheep.
- You've got to roll the dice for them, but snakes are actually pretty good roleplayers.
- This Australian troper finds them a not altogether unpleasant place to experience genuine American cuisine that is otherwise difficult to find here.
- Oh. Well, that's all right, then. Cheers!
- Cheers, big-ears!
- Same goes, big-nose!
- This Troper got a chance to dine at one of these restaurants while visiting his grandfather in London (Ontario). Basically, it's a bunch of Americans trying to act like Australians IN CANADA! The best part? The bathroom doors have mock-aborigine stick figures representing the Men's and Women's rooms. There was even a wavy stickman - In. A. WHEELCHAIR!
- This Aussie troper dreads what they probably charge you for some Roo.
- Their menu is online. Guess what they don't serve? And their hamburger doesn't have an beetroot on it, either.
- This Aussie troper didn't even realise they were meant to look Australian. She thought it was just another extremely American chain that had stuck up some touristy Australiana to avoid the inevitable uncomfortable feeling one gets when buying from foreign chain stores after being pestered with "buy Austrlian" ad campaigns for years.
- But wait, it get's better. Outback Steakhouse aired a series of commercials, beginning during Superbowl XL, featuring Jemaine Clement. We shall leave it as an exercise to the reader just to spot the problem here.
- Just by the way, Australia also has cattle. Lots of them. But apparently sheep have better PR.
- Or they're thinking Oz is the same place as New Zealand as we have around 10 sheep per person
- I think Australia exports more sheep than beef. That might affect foreign perceptions.
- And just to throw in another desert stereotype, there are populations of feral camels in the outback. Apparently they've been careful not to release elephants out there, in case they too thrive. ...Although, shockingly, elephants aren't quite as desert-equipped as camels.
- And, again, to improve your sense of the absurd, Australia also exports a fair number of its surplus camels abroad. Specifically, Afghanistan. Ice-to-Alaska exports have been called off due to excess domestic demand. There's a drought on, you know.
- We actually have one of the largest breeding camel breeding populations in the world.
- We also have lots of uranium out in the desert. That's right, the heart of Australia is the human equivalent of Kryptonite.
- Did we mention that we've lost one of our Prime Ministers? Yes, lost. Harold Holt once decided to go swimming at Cheviot Beach near Portsea, Victoria and no one ever saw him again. It didn't help that certain stretch of beach is notoriously full of riptides and has literally sunk dozens of ships. The best part? They named a swimming pool after him.
- Especially since his armour was supposedly beaten out ON A BUSH FORGE! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!
- You're forgetting that he also CURSED THE JUDGE WHO HAD HIM HANGED. 'When the judge uttered the customary words "May God have mercy on your soul", Kelly replied "I will go a little further than that, and say I will see you there when I go"' The judge died 12 days after Kelly was hanged, from a carbuncle.
Churba: Erm, Why does the article state that most Australians don't know what the superbowl is? To introduce you to one of our sayings, Pigs arse. We know what the Superbowl is, thanks to the large amount of American media we get in the country, we just don't give a crap about it or the results thereof.
