After living in the UK for three years, my accent has faded, my tan is non existent and my number of brain cells has severely decreased. One persistent thing however is the amount of what I consider to be dumb-ass questions still coming my way, about riding roos and whatnot. No disrespect, these questions may not appear to be stoopid to those who ask them. I was in the same boat before I moved over here, I thought it rained all the time in England, imagine the naivety! Here’s the shit that isn’t true, look away now if you want to continue to believe we all wear hats with dangling corks.
- We don’t drink, nor have the majority of us heard of Fosters. The hardly patronizing-brewed-by-all-the-hard-working-sunkissed-sheilas-and-blokes-down-under malarkey has everyone fooled. It’s brewed in fucking Manchester! Imagine those ‘Brad and Dan Helpline’ adverts if they were reversed, probably a couple of toothless builders called Ian and Tony telling callers ‘she’s yours once you’ve spat on her mate‘. The clever Aussie beer drinkers generally gravitate toward necking Toohey’s Extra Dry (TEDs) if not for the ‘clean, crisp taste’, for the better advertising.
- We’re not all sun bleached, sexy, blonde beachy types. They’re the Swedes. Australia is the fifth fattest country in the world in 2012, dropping from first place in 2008. A shocking quarter of Aussies are obese. And we hang shit on Americans! Childhood obesity is one of the main concerns, with 23 per cent of kids being overweight. One clever blogger on the PerthNow site puts the epidemic down to mandatory helmet laws, saying kids rode to school before they were made to wear helmets and that these laws have ‘a lot to answer for‘. Other mothers are blaming McDonalds for making their kids fat. Anyone under the illusion that Australians are intelligent? Not anymore. Sure, we smoke less than other countries and we like a little backyard cricket to get the blood pumping… we just cool off afterwards with a barbie and a carton of lager.
- We don’t watch Home and Away or Neighbours. Why? For the same reason you don’t watch Coronation Chicken Street or whatever it’s called. Because there’s other shit to do! However, there is an exception for expats as a good old Neighbours Omnibus is how I like to unwind when I’m a combination of home sick and hungover, mostly because I can’t reach the remote and refuse to get up. And the terrible acting fuels my melancholia. But generally, Australians care about what goes on on Ramsay Street as much as our Prime Minister cares about legalizing gay marriage. Come on Julia, South Africa is more advanced than us. Get your shit together.
- It’s not always 35 degrees and sun bathing. Sometimes it’s 46 degrees and people burst into flames in the street. Then there’s the middle of winter where if it gets to 10 degrees people won’t leave the house for fear of losing toes to frost bite. If an Aussie tries to tell you it’s always hot and amazing they’re winding you up big time, much like I like to do in telling people it’s common for flights to Australia to be delayed due to difficulty in landing as there are kangaroos on the runway. However compared to the UK, the weather is pretty amazeballs. In Western Australia (the left side of the map) summer fluctuates between 25-45 degrees and winter is harmless, sometimes getting down to two or three degrees on cold mornings. I’m with you Poms on this one, they know nothing of pain.
- Although lots of us would like to, we don’t use kangaroos as transport. The main reason for this being if you tried to hijack a roo, you’d more than likely have your throat ripped out. Cast your memory back to ‘Killaroo’, the first episode of The Mighty Boosh. That’s pretty much a factual nature doco -apart from the notion that squeezing its balls will kill it. They all seem like sweet Skippy’s from afar but they are vicious bastards. There have been countless cases where kangas have mauled dogs as a result of being chased, holding them under water, kicking and boxing and/or tearing them apart with their insane claws. My own dog has made several trips to the vet after being punctured by a kangaroo claw. Commonly found squashed on highways, kangaroos are a real traffic hazard, they’ll go straight through your windscreen if you hit one. I grew up in bush land and we used to have to spray them with the hose cause they’d be on the lawn eating the grass. Then there was the time one lonely roo found itself hopping along the high street outside the bank in town, that was weird. You can see why they’re out for murderous revenge though, they’re hunted by the blacks and boxed by the whites.
Keep an eye out for Dispelling Myths About Australia Part Two: The True where I’ll be confirming all the hearsay about killer jellyfish, crocs and snakes and include a short history on ‘those brown people’ that used to rule the land before you lot came and shot them all. In the meantime, for any pressing questions, tweet my ass @BrodiSnook.
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