The Sun-Herald

WHO WE ARE: Things you didn't know -- and probably shouldn't -- about Australia

To learn what Kyle Sandilands, Baz Luhrmann and Poh have in common, go to The Tribal Mind.

A column by David Dale, published in The Sun-Herald, 13/12/2009
AS YOU KNOW, Australia celebrates Thanksgiving in May, while the Americans celebrate in late November. You didn't know? But it was revealed just the other day by Hollywood Reporter magazine, in the course of a story explaining how Australia managed to see the year's final episode of the series Flashforward a week ahead of America (they'd postponed their showing because of the Thanksgiving day holiday, while we had no reason to postpone because we already did our celebrating in May).

As part of its brief to explain Australia to Australians, this column collects things said about us by other countries. The report about our May observance (I wonder what the Los Angelenos imagine we are giving thanks for each year) is just one of many peculiar commentaries in the collection for 2009. Here are some more examples:

Australians love car crashes
That was the headline in The Guardian (London) on August 11. It said: "Australians are peculiarly fascinated by car crashes ... Australian films present hours of compelling evidence - movie crashes explode or unfold in distinctly Australian ways. The national flair comes across not just in the surrounding scenery but, more important, in the style." The report was based on a monograph called "Antipodean Automobility and Crash: Treachery, Trespass and Transformation of the Open Road", by Catherine Simpson of Macquarie University.

Australians are "hopping mad" about plans to create kangaroo and emu flavoured potato chips
The New York Daily News reported this on December 5. It explained: "Critics say the snack food encourages people to eat the country's coat of arms, which features the iconic Australian animals." The story quotes a spokesman for Smith's Crisps as saying the chip is actually vegetarian, and ends with the witty line: "No word from down under on whether there are any plans for cooking up a complementary dip flavor." (Der! Beetroot, of course).

Captain Cook was not a captain and did not save his crew from scurvy
This calumny appears in a paperback called The Book of General Ignorance (derived from the British TV series QI). It claims Cook was only a lieutenant when he bumped our shore, but "You still hear 'Captain Cook' trotted out at dinner parties (though very rarely at Australian ones)." What does this do for our rhyming slang: "Have a captain at this"? "Have a lieutenant at this" just does not work. The book scorns the notion that the non-captain fed his crew lemons to ward off scurvy: "The truth seems to be that Cook simply ignored it. The journals of his fellow officers indicate that it was widespread on all three voyages ..."

The Book of General Ignorance also asserts:

Ayer's Rock is not the biggest rock in the world
Allegedly that title belongs to Mount Augustus, or Burrungurrah, in Western Australia, which is two and a half times bigger than Uluru. The book says: "The final sting in the tail for Ayers Rock snobs: Mount Augustus is a monolith - a single piece of rock. Uluru isn't."

The word "kangaroo" really does refer to the two-legged native marsupial
The book mocks the theory that "kangaroo" means "I don't know" -- the answer allegedly given by Aboriginal people when the first English explorers asked them "What is that animal called?" It says the word "comes from the Guugu Ymithirr language of Botany Bay, where it means the large grey or black kangaroo, Macropus robustus".

This puts The Book of General Ignorance in dispute with the first book ever published about Australia-- A Narrative of the Expedition To Botany Bay (1789), wherein Watkin Tench (a marine lieutenant in the First Fleet) reveals that the Aboriginal people he met were under the impression that "kangaroo" was an English word for any strange-looking animal (because they used "patagaran" for the marsupial). For more detail, go to this episode of this column: Is it a sheep? Is it a cow? No, it's super pat.

But one detail in Tench's book seems to conform with The Book of General Ignorance. He refers at all times to the "discoverer" of Australia's east coast as "Mr Cook" -- never captain.

Go to Comments to add any data you may have, to challenge these foreigners on their perceptions of us, or to add your own Australofallacies.

David Dale is the author of The Little Book of Australia -- A snapshot of who we are (Allen and Unwin). For daily updates on Australian attitudes, bookmark blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.