Australia questions.....

OK, I'll leave it here, boomerang.
I hope some of this useful to Mo.
Just yell if you need any extra material, OK?

http://www.goingrank.com.au/aboriginal-australia.html

Thank you all so much. I'll show him this! I know it will help fill in the gaps of his report.

I think he'll be especially interested in Australian rules football and people eating worms.

I think I'd like that pea soup + meat pie dish as those are two things I like very much on their own. How could you go wrong putting them together.

And I really miss dadpad.....

That's a pretty scary story....

I'm going to have to run off and read the rest of them!

But I do have to wonder about how many children had bad dream times from this one.

LOVE the flag.

The country's flag was one of the things he has to include and now he can include two!

Australia (formerly known as Burma) is called "the Land Down Under" because it previously was covered by the Indonesian archipelago as a form of camouflage. The form of government is tribal in nature, composed of two competing groups known as "the Labour Party" and "the Leisure Party." Disputes are settled by means of rock-paper-scissors challenges, or in the more traditional beer-boomerang-wallaby format. The national anthem is "Onward, Australia, You're Standing on my Foot!" sung to the tune "Let's Get Physical" as rendered by Olivia Newton-John. The capital is located in the backyard (also known as "the outback") of a bloke named "One-Eyed Carl" in Wodonga.

Australia was populated by giant dinosaurs (locally known as "marsupials") up until the Cretaceous Era, when they all left to form an ashram in Oregon. Australians are proud of a massive sandstone rock formation in the middle of the continent, which they have named "Fluffy." It is over three hundred meters ("kilograms") high and is available for purchase in the gift shop. The native inhabitants, known as "aborigines" or "Native Americans," flourished on a local diet of grubs and venomous spiders until the arrival of the pommy bastards ("British") in the late eighteenth century. An early attempt to lure settlers by referring to the land as a "penal colony" proved misguided, as it only seemed to attract the lowest and most vicious elements of society to Australia's shores. Later appeals, based on the slogan "Come to Australia and be astounded by the large variety of animals and plants that will try to kill you," proved only marginally more successful.

The national sport is kangaroo vexing. It is played on a field approximately four hundred meters round at night while nobody is watching. The national dish is scuba diver skewered on a stingray ("Irwin en brochette"). The national holiday is New Zealand Day, the celebrations of which are also shared with neighboring Papua New Guinea. Australians are known for their warmth and good humor as they calculate the number of days before visitors are devoured by the native flora and fauna. It should be noted, however, that locals take umbrage when confused with Austria, which is smaller, bumpier, and which contains far more obnoxiously drunken Australian tourists than Australia itself.

Wow! I'm just going to let him copy and paste that! Thanks!!!

Now, that brought tears to my eyes. Mo is going to ace the course when he turns that in.

Seriously.

I have a question about Australia. What is the law right now about the packaging of cigarettes by Brand name?

Are all the cigs now to be labelled as generic?

Hi everybody! It's Mo.

Thank you for helping me with my Australia project.

I really appreciate all the info. about Australia

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I know of some Country Pubs that still serve this, especially on Australia Day When I was in my 20's, they had pie carts on main streets in Adelaide. People would stand up, and eat the pie floaters at like 3am in the morning

The Pie Floater is a South Australian dish originally sold in horse drawn carts in Adelaide since the 1870's but the popularity has declined in past decades.

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The instructions pretty much is to heat your pie, and purchase a can of pea soup, heat it up, place it on the bottom of the bowl, add the pie once hot and tomato sauce (ketchup).. Some prefer to put the pie on the bottom and pea soup on top.. And, then there would be the home made pea soup which off course is sooo much better than anything from a can....

I didn't actually realise it was a South Aussie dish, not totally Australian across the board, but still Australian

I have a coupla ??'s off the top of my head about Australia.

Something I've never been totally clear on is the your summer/winter vs. the U.S. version.

What months exactly are what season exactly there?

For instance (and this isn't exact/official, but you'' get the drift)
March, April, May - is Spring
June, July, August - Summer
Sept, Oct, November - Fall/Autumn
Dec, Jan, Feb - Winter

What months do you call what season?

Also, the moon. Above the equator we see the man in the moon. That is, when it's full.
I looked online the other day to see what the official man in the moon looks like, and I was somewhat surprised to find that not everyone sees the same lunar features as the same features on a face. To me, the M in the M has a large open mouth, and big mournful eyes, like he's crying.

I've heard that south of the equator, the moon is seen as something else. One of those things is a lady dancing, but I can't see it. That's probably because I keep trying to see a flaminco dancer, and I'm sure it isn't that.

Those grub things....do you eat them while they are still alive and moving?
Bleech.

I can actually help you with this one...

Native Australians are descended from the original modern humans of the planet i.e. Cro Magnons, and one of the neat things about Cro Magnon hunting weapons is that you don't have to guess what they looked like or how they worked:

Hunting fruit bats with a boomerang; I'd really hate to be a Beretta or Browning salesman and have to sell this guy a shotgun, he plainly does not need one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DDHxOqFkAs

Hunting kangaroos with atlatls (which the native Aussies call 'woomera':
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwNbwPVFkSc

The atlatl was the signature weapon of all Cro Magnon people. The fact that neither the Bible nor any other Jewish literature knows anything about it or about stone tools or weaponry in general is evidence that the familiar pre-flood people of the Bible are not descended from Cro Magnons, i.e. that there was more than one saltation of modern humans on the planet. The atlatl played a major role if not the most major role in ridding the planet of Neanderthals and other hominids.

I thought there were still a couple of pie carts around?

I only ever had a pie floater once, but I used to get hauled to the pie carts regularly for friends' three am munchies.

I hadn't seen any.. Just googled and found this






I was a shocker, especially when they bought in dim sims and chips.. Never went home after dancing and drinking without going to the pie cart first ...

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The seasons are the opposite of northern hemisphere ones. The thing is, I understand in the US you guys start at the equinoxes or solstices....whereas we go by calendar month.

So...our Summer begins on December 1st, Autumn on March 1st, winter on June 1st and spring on September 1st....thus the seasons are simply reversed, but the way in which humans demote them is more complex.

I think you guys start seasons officially on the 21st of these months? I'm not sure.

As far as I know, the moon is the same. I've never noticed a difference when visiting Europe or the US anyway.

Most Australians have never eaten a witchetty grub....they're mainly food for indigenous folk who have maintained enough culture to still hunt and gather. I imagine tourists get to try them on some tours if they want to, or if you are out with indigenous people and they find them you might get to try them.....or if you're not indigenous but you get a taste for them I guess you could get some out bush if you know where to look.....I am not sure how big their range is.

I do not see how they are any more blecch than oysters, for instance. That being said, I'd probably not be able to gather up courage to eat one unless I was out bush as part of work and was invited to eat one by local people. It'd be rude to refuse. It'd bloody well have to be cooked, though!

I have never seen one, but I hear they are pleasant but gritty. I think they can be eaten raw or cooked. Like oysters, I guess.

They'd have been a great food source for hunter gatherers...I gather they are very nutritious.


I'd be interested

Yep...as south Aussie as frog cakes.

The seasons are reckoned here on the basis of aspects of the sun--the solstices and equinoxes. So, calendars will show, often, a red letter day for, say, March 21st, while the weather man will tell us exactly what time of day the equinox will occur.

Many "seasons" are meaningless in parts of the planet without the traditional markers familiar to western European culture--such as leaves changing color in the autumn, cold winters, hot summers, etc. Many places on the planet refer to climate events such as a rainy season, a dry season or a monsoon. Seasons are great for us here in the temperate zones of the northern hemisphere, but they begin to lose their meaning as you go south in North America--can't say for Europe.

Balfours, aren't they SO Australian?

Couldn't ever eat those, hated them too sweet and eweee.

Yep....they look cute but.