Pommy Bashing

I was accused in last week’s blog of not being very funny, so here’s a joke to kick things off: how do you get a Pom out of a bar? Turn on the tap.

No, I don’t understand it either, but I think it has something to do with the representation over here of the English taking a somewhat relaxed approach to personal hygiene. There’s a similar joke about hiding a stash of money under the one place that a Pommy would never look - the soap dish.

Contrary to the notion of the Brits supposedly possessing the ability to laugh at themselves, there is a committee of 14 ex-pats based in Perth and Melbourne who seem determined to disprove the rule: the British People Against Racial Discrimination (BPARD) complained to the Advertising Standards Board when beer brand Tooheys went with the slogan “cold enough to scare a Pom” on their campaign posters in 2006. (That’s another stereotype, the one about the Brits drinking beer at room temperature). The ASB confirmed that the term Pom was not derogatory and cleared the ads, despite the organisation’s spokesperson David Thomason claiming that the word was comparable to terms like “wog, wop, dink, dago, coon and abo.” He continues: “The worst you hear from the Barmy Army is that Aussies are sheep shaggers and you all live in a penal colony.”

This is all news to me, but clearly these terms are bandied about jovially and without malice, usually during large sporting occasions like, for example, the Ashes, where both sets of fans give as good as they get. Incidentally, when this story broke in Australia, News.com.au went with the glorious headline “Don’t call us Poms, say Poms” which, you have to admit, is really quite funny.

You really can’t be expected to live in Australia if you don’t possess a substantial tolerance for creepy crawlies. Leave remnants of food out for more than five minutes on a kitchen work surface and you’ll return to a trail of ants performing the can-can on your breadcrumbs. Flies appear to taunt and heckle you in huge, buzzing numbers. The other day I saw a cockroach, a big one too, rapidly fleeing from under a hump of dry clothes, but these are mere grazes compared to the plague of destruction wrecked by the likes of the Redback, a spider distinguished by a lightening bolt of bright red across its small underbelly, which can render a human quite helpless with a single nip.

It’s the females who you need to keep an eye on: despite their small size, they can lure lizards into their webs, some up to four times their size, and their inhospitable side makes them quite violent lovers, famed for eating the male after copulation. Conveniently, Redbacks are common around Queensland, and I’m told they like small, dark, damp places like, say, the inside of your shoe. “Just give them a shake before you put them on.” That’s some damn good advice right there.

This stuff is unheard of in England, but Australia is sparsely populated, and creatures are free to roam amongst the relative obscurity. Queensland is still a mostly untouched, tropical landscape with acres of baron desert a mere 30 minute drive into the west. A population of some 4.5 million people (that’s roughly the same number as Liverpool) live in an area the size of Western Europe. And (get this), throughout such a vast expanse of unrelenting land, only three roads will take you west and even then you’d probably be quite mad to consider driving out there, not at least without some heavy duty sunscreen and a shotgun. Anything could be out there in such a large and open wilderness, and what an absorbing thought that is. Entire species have fought and survived without much human interference, building up ingenious natural defences that you can’t help but admire, if only from a rather sizeable distance.

For example, you can’t move for cane toads here, and they can get quite feisty at night time, but even these seemingly innocuous creatures have toxic skin, and many animals have perished after ingesting their tadpoles. (Interestingly, the toad is native to South America and was only introduced to Queensland as a means of pest control to help reduce the numbers of cane beetles, so called for their destruction of the local sugar fields. Only 102 were introduced in the 1930s, but it seems that the toads have had other things on their minds besides killing beetles, as the number is now somewhere in the region of 200 million, with their migration patterns heading ever increasingly south at a rate of 25 miles a year. Such an infestation helps to clarify just why the border police here seem so inherently paranoid).

But if the danger’s not in your back garden, then consider the seaside, where you might feel innocently obliged to pick up a cone shell, largely in part due to its intricate and beautiful design, only to disrupt the sleep of the small sea snail lurking inside, who fire poisonous harpoons in self defence. Some species are called ‘cigarette snails’ because (and how Australian is this) you only have roughly the same amount of time to smoke a cigarette before the venom takes hold and summons you to the big clam in the sky.

Disturbing, yes, but then consider what’s in the sea itself: upon a trip to Coonarr Beach, a stretch of pristine east coast shoreline upon which you could feasible walk for several miles without encountering another human being (and that’s on a busy day), eagles circle the ocean looking for shoals of fish, but no matter how tempting it looks, my girlfriend warns me not to go in. “If there are a lot of fish, that probably means that there are quite a few sharks out there.” Oh, righto.

I’ve had quite a few of you asking about how the quiff is holding up in these sub tropical temperatures. Well, it’s going pretty well, and thank you for asking. Although at a recent encounter with a hairdresser (and I believe that this incident may just about warrant the name ‘quiffgate’), where upon asking for an Elvis Presley look (circa 1956), I instead receive a Ronan Keating look (circa 1994) - razor short sides and spiky, not curled. But thank you for your concern people - I’m sure Quiffwatch will return in due course.

And while we’re readdressing cultural stereotypes, I enjoyed fresh shrimp on the barbie the other day, and delicious they were too, even if the little creatures were still keen to put up a bit a fight right up to the very end. Which goes some way to proving the point that the best way to cook these crustaceans is in boiling water and not on a barbie; pop them straight into brine and the shells are much easier to peel. And the Australians don’t even call them shrimp - they’re prawns. The phrase itself was concocted for a series of commercials presented by Paul Hogan for the Australian Tourist Board in the 1980s aimed at the overseas American market where the notion of barbeque is already quite familiar, not to mention ‘shrimp’.


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘Good News Week’ (Ten)

Current affairs panel show which, like the BBC’s ‘Mock the Week’, gives a sizeable platform for stand ups to blow gags and banter, as well as accommodating for larger personalities to show their lighter side. Like current Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, who famously appeared on the sit-down Q&A section of the show earlier in the year. It’s presented by Paul McDermott, a prick-haired former novelty singer with a tendency to laugh at his own jokes.

Regular panel members include Akmal, an Egyptian Uncle Fester, and Tom Gleeson, dressed as an IT technician. Gleeson plays the cheery-faced geek card and is understandably popular here: he’s as much a safe pair of hands as finding Alan Davis on a ‘Q.I.’ line up. Other panellists include Mikey Robins, a version of Tony Blackburn as a platypus, and Fiona O’Loughlin, a Catholic comedian whose steady recovery from alcoholism is, for some rather cruel reason, constantly lampooned. On this week’s episode, she’s also giving up smoking. “If I have to give up one more thing it’ll be my will to live.” She takes the jibes in a self-deprecating manner akin to nearly all Australians that I’ve met, and still manages to be one of the funniest people on the show.

The game is set inside a Rubik’s Cube with intermittent musical asides, most notably from American-born soul singer Marcia Hines, who can be found on the judging panel for ‘Australian Idol’ and delivers two faultlessly rehearsed renditions of ‘You Make Me Feel (Like A Natural Woman)’ during the one show, proclaiming her ageless talents as “black don’t crack.” She’s not particularly funny, rather just happy to be there, as the teams dissect top international news items with a light sprinkling of bad punning (which works) and an undercurrent of Islamophobia (which doesn’t). Of course, you’d have better luck learning about the week’s news if you read the back of a Vegemite lid. And, what with all of Channel Ten’s commercial breaks, it feels like the show goes on for days.