From Wonglepong with Love

Here’s a fun if ultimately juvenile way to spend an arvo: trying to find funny Australian place names. There are many, ranging from Humpty Doo in the Northern Territories right down to Wagga Wagga in New South Wales. The more bizarre locations derive from ancient Aboriginal terms, ranging from names of specific tribes to proverbs, landmarks and respected elders - as in the word ‘bunda’, which means ‘important man’, which when conjoined with the German word for mountain, ‘berg’, creates the name of my current location: Bundaberg.

But still, it’s hard to not crack an immature smile at any of the following: Boing Boing, Wee Waa, Tittybong, Wonglepong, Burrumbuttock, Humpybong, Moolooloo, Woolloomooloo and Bong Bong. But then even the colonialists weren’t seemingly without a sense of humour: there is a creek in South Australia called Cock Wash, while a rather steep mountain in Victoria has been christened Mount Buggery.

All of which leads neatly onto the origins of place names, and just how many locations coined by homesick English settlers are still in circulation today. In an attempt to populate their own piece of Blighty down here in Australia, you will encounter many townships in the country that still hold very recognisable British namesakes, like Ipswich, Croydon, Hungerford and Scarborough in Queensland, to locations in New South Wales like Newcastle, Kendall, Tottenham, Epping and Exeter. There’s a Peterborough in South Australia, a Sheffield in Tasmania, a Highbury in Western Australia and an Ascot in Victoria. This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise considering the names of the states themselves, with Victoria obligatorily named after Queen Victoria, similarly to Queensland, while it was Captain Cook’s original idea to name the whole country New South Wales, in recognition, allegedly, of the Welsh countryside which Cook believed bore a striking resemblance to Australia’s east coast.

I’d like to question Cook’s reasoning here, mostly because when his vessel, the Endeavour, first made contact with the eastern shores of Australia in 1770, he was surveying the botanical wilderness of the accurately named Botany Bay, which is where he first made contact with the natives, noting that “they appear'd to be of a very dark or black Colour but whether this was the real colour of their skins or the C[l]othes they might have on I know not.” He would then run aground in Cooktown (named thereafter) for seven weeks after crashing into the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest living thing and an area of truly outstanding natural beauty. Now, I’ve been to Wales a few times, and my recollections are somewhat different. That’s all I’m saying.

I was told about Pulled Apart by Horses’ debut on the Triple J radio station via text message. They’re a scrawny bunch of shouty ragamuffins if ever there was one, and while I was drumming in Leeds band Wintermute, we played a number of live shows together and grew to be very good friends. If I think of memories of Leeds, then surely Tom screaming “I’ll make you dance with my balls of fire” on their track 'High Five, Swan Dive, Nose Dive' is pretty much up there as a leading thought. Or maybe the time when we stumbled into the recording of their first EP (we were practising in the same pub at the time) and assisted by shouting backing vocals into the microphone.

Their album is out now on the Transgressive label and their appearance on a Triple J playlist is big news, not solely because it’s the only decent radio station here, but mainly because it broadcasts across the whole country. Local station Hitz FM is particularly un-listenable, boasting about playing ‘today’s best new music’ before launching into 'Come As You Are' by Nirvana (from 1992), or some godforsaken nu-metal record from the late 90s. Its interpretation of ‘new music’ appears to be based solely on playing ‘Bad Romance’ by Lady Gaga three times in one day.

Huge things beckon for these chaps, which is an exciting prospect, and should hopefully be enough to keep them within easy reach of antiseptic and band aids for a very long time. 


AU Tube: Understanding Australian TV
‘Border Security: Australia’s Front Line’ (Seven)

The main reason I wanted to talk about this particular programme is, of course, to discuss rabbits. They may be cage-dwelling bundles of cute, floppy eared domesticity in Britain, but Australia’s relations with the unassuming European rabbit has been quite tumultuous to say the least.

This is largely thanks to an early Somerset-born settler named Thomas Austin, whose pioneering expeditions in the mid nineteenth century saw him eventually acquire 11,736 hectares (around 45 square miles) of land in Victoria. Austin was a member of Victoria’s Acclimatisation Society, whose ill informed if not malicious intention was to introduce new plant and animal life into their new and bountiful environment. Yet Austin’s intentions when he asked his brother to send over 24 grey rabbits from England (along with ‘five hares, 72 partridges and some sparrows’) was less of an attempt at preservation. He wanted them so that he and his guests could enjoy a spot of game shooting. “The introduction of a few rabbits could do little harm and might provide a touch of home, in addition to a spot of hunting,” is how Austin put it at the time, which is just about the gold standard in the history of understatement. Nothing could have been more profoundly to the contrary.

For starters, the fresh pastures and mild Australian winters proved incredibly habitable for rabbits who, being completely new to Australia, enjoyed the freedom of having no natural predators. So they started breeding like, well, rabbits: an average litter size can be between four to eight bunnies, and the female rabbit can produce seven of these a year. Couple that with the fact that new born females can start breeding from six months old and we’ve got a quick and considerable number of rabbits on our hands. So much so that the bilby - Australia’s rabbit equivalent - would almost be driven to complete extinction in the shadow of their new rival. Rising rabbit numbers feasted on native plants and dived into young trees, particularly jeopardising the topsoil on valuable farmland which would take hundreds of years to recover.

One suggestion was to build a giant rabbit proof fence to ebb the growing tide, and three were eventually built in Western Australia. The biggest stretched for over 2,000 miles and was completed in 1907 after taking six years to build. It is now known as the State Barrier Fence as it crosses the state from the north to the south - an incredible feat of engineering which, at the time, cost £337,841 (just under £20 million in today’s money) and, quite annoyingly, didn’t work. European rabbits are known for jumping to an incredible height, as well as being highly adept burrowers. Shooting was (and still is) advised to help control population growth, but this would prove just as futile. Authorities have now turned to more biological means, like the horrifically sounding ‘rabbit haemorrhaging disease virus’ which is highly infectious, causing fatal organ failure and causing a rabbit to be ready for stewing in just under 24 hours.

Although it is unfair to label the fault solely with Thomas Austin and his 24 furry friends (indeed, many other settlers would follow Austin’s lead in introducing small numbers of rabbits into Australia), the current population of European rabbits is predicted to be somewhere over the 200 million mark.

I mention all of this merely as a means of understanding why Australia is so precious, almost to the point of paranoia, with regards to the stability of their sumptuous and unique landscape. Much of the plant and animal life in Australia cannot be found anywhere else in the world, and even the slightest outside interference (like Austin’s 24 rabbits) can cause an awful unbalance. A few weeks back I mentioned the introduction of the cane toad from Hawaii which was designed to feed on the growing numbers of sugar cane beetles busily munching through crops in Queensland, but the toads were quick to concentrate on procreation instead. Since the introduction of 102 toads in 1935, they, like the European rabbit, now number in the hundreds of millions.

Now let us consider those really, really small living things, like micro-organisms found in fungus - like, say, the chytrid fungus, which is currently threatening the lives of many Australian frog species since its introduction into the country. How it got here is a matter of some considerable debate for environmentalists, whether a poisoned specimen somehow entered the country or infected water was at some stage released unknowingly. Regardless, it’s here, and the fungus remains the single biggest threat to amphibian life and the main cause in the decline of over 385 different frog species. Then there is the plant life: the Australian government spends $3.5 billion a year on the management of weeds. It is second to land clearing as the biggest threat to the country’s biodiversity. Half of Australia’s most poisonous weeds have crossed the border deliberately - ‘a third of which as garden ornamentals’.

And so we finally get to why a Chinese lady was having such a hard time from Nadia, a quarantine office at Melbourne airport, on this week’s episode of ‘Border Security’ - a long-running behind-the-scenes look at the day-to-day life of customs officers at Australia’s busiest airports - especially after failing to declare a huge amount of nuts, seeds and plant life buried in her luggage, despite the strict instructions which greet passengers upon entering Australia. Quarantined goods include all foodstuffs, animal products, skins, feathers, wool, bark, dried flowers, fruits and herbs, right down to soil on your shoes and ‘biological specimens including tissue culture.’ Our disgruntled visitor causes a big drama and refuses to budge for five hours after being issued with the on-the-spot fine of $220.

Also featured is a British backpacker trying his best to look unassuming when traces of morphine and methadone are found in his suitcase. More alarming is how closely he seems to resemble me. His interrogation doesn’t go well, particularly when he refuses to visit the toilet alongside a customs officer, but they let him through regardless. “Maybe I look like a dirty, seedy criminal type,” he says, “Maybe it’s the beard.” Speak for yourself, mate.