#11: Australia

Stuff That's Lame About England is a column about a grey, rainy island (or possibly archipelago) in the North Atlantic. The column is comprised of articles with no factual basis, composed without the benefit of any research whatsoever, and with any luck will contain several half-truths, misconceptions, and flat-out lies per article. It neither knows nor cares what the difference is between the British, the English, and the residents of the United Kingdom. It is a travelogue written out of pure guesswork with a dash of irrational xenophobia.

For the record, the closest any of us editors have been to experiencing that Sceptered Isle is Graeme's three hour layover in Heathrow on his way to Africa or whatever. But we've all listened to Oasis so we're basically experts.

First, a word about racism. I believe it is entirely acceptable to be racist against entire nations, as long as they're rich nations full of mostly white people. Both those parts are important. Being racist against Japan, a prosperous nation of non-white people: inappropriate! Being racist against England, a prosperous if depressing nation of the absolute whitest people imaginable: just fine. So in this column, I am going to be racist against Australia.


Australia is not part of England. It's sunny and full of weird animals, which is very unlike England, which is rainy and full of squirrels or pheasants or some shit, and I believe it is in a different ocean than England anyway. But Australia, as awful as it is (and it is very awful, according to some anecdotal evidence and two blog posts I am about to reference), is mostly England's fault. We all know that Australia started out as a prison for England, a nation so dumb they failed to realize that if you move people off of the various sad rainy North Atlantic rocks in the English archipelago and move them to a sunny place with palm trees and koala bears, they'll want to stay and maybe it's not exactly a punishment because ugh England. But England, as we know, thinks England is great, so they shipped their prisoners to a big island with beaches that would soon be populated by tanned blonde people who are all in shape and who all sort of look the same.

But Australia is more like England than America or Canada. They still spell things the British way, and they have peculiar accents in which the long "o" vowel sound is like "er," and they play those shit sports like cricket that the English use to pass the time before the rain and depression kills them, and they are uncontrollably drunk delinquents, just like England's youth. I know that seems like a broad generalization to make, to say an entire country is made up of drunk brawling white people, but I have some incontrovertible evidence that will prove once and for all that Australia is so awful.

1. When I lived in Montreal, these drunk Australians lived in the apartment above me. They were drunk and loud and destructive. Montreal has these weird communist laws about renter's rights and somehow the Australians got away with not having to leave a deposit, which worked out real nice for them since they were only there for six months, at which point they just left, apparently despite having a year-long lease. Worse: they left the water running, and a little while later my bathroom ceiling smashed down onto my bathroom floor, which is not where a bathroom ceiling should be, and for the next three months we had a skylight in our ground-floor bathroom through which a cheerful French man would often peek while you were taking a poop, mumble "Pardon!" or "Excusez!" and retreat through the skylight while you sat on the toilet, cursing those goddamn delinquent Australians.

2. Australia has a particular weakness for invasive species, due to it being basically the weirdest island on Earth. The worst invasive species on Weird Animal Island is the cane toad, which is just a normal toad, really, but it has no natural predators and took over the entire island, chomping down on crops and wreaking havoc on the weirder species there. That sucks, right? I understand, and I sympathize. Where I'm from, we have a very nasty overpopulation of white-tailed deer, which seem cute until they run like goddamn idiots into traffic all the time and kill people, which happens a lot. Also we killed all our mountain lions (whoops) so there's nothing really left to eat deer except us, and we like it okay, but we really prefer cow and pig and chicken, so there are tons of deer everywhere and I just hate them so much.

Which is to say, I get it. BUT! Just because I get it does not mean that Australia hasn't dealt with the cane toads in the most insane destructive way possible. Those lunatic prison surfers play golf and cricket (lol at cricket but not at this) with LIVING ANIMALS. They hit them with goddamn golf clubs! And cricket…clubs! Cricket sticks! Jesus Christ, Australia!

3. Apparently there are drunk parrots in Australia. My first reaction to that was, okay, animals sometimes get drunk. Here in America, we have these normal animals, like black bears, and they get drunk on fermented apples and berries sometimes and try to have sex with bird feeders and then we call animal control and they tranquilize the bears and throw them back in the woods to sober up, which is necessary but almost definitely unsettling for the bear ("the fuck did that bitch bird feeder tease go?"). Still, not that weird. Except okay I am not a scientist and do not know for sure but these parrots do not seem at all drunk. They seem really sick! Like, drunk animals do not typically suffer from "respiratory problems" or "discharge from nostrils, mouth, and eyes," nor do they pass out all the time and nor do HALF OF THE GODDAMN ANIMALS DIE when brought in for treatment.

The natural reaction of Australians to seeing this kind of illness, even Australians who have presumably gone through a year or two of public school and been granted an Australian Ph.D in bird science, is that these obviously sick birds are just drunk ha ha ha drunk birds. And the next day, they're not "attempting to recover their tiny bird organs from a devastating illness," they're hung over. Just like we always are!

4. Chris Lilley is funny a lot of the time but seriously his depictions of Asian people are basically just Asian blackface. This corroborates something I heard or maybe made up, that despite being sort of in Asia, or near Asia, or something, Australians are incredibly racist against Asians. Probably other races too but are there black or Hispanic or south Asian or other races in Australia? I feel like there aren't, going by my research which involved no research, so according to logic and the transitive property of racism, Australians are racist against those races too.

Australia: What happens when England discovers beaches.