Fun Australia facts

By Todd Stadler · Monday, June 18, 2007 10:42pm

Julia and I are traveling to Australia in a few weeks to visit the in-laws. (Ha! And your in-laws live in Scranton! Neener!) Julia's brother-in-law James is a native Aussie, and he and Julia's sister now live north of Sydney.

Anyhow, I've been reading up on Australia, and thought I'd share some interesting facts I've learned:

• Australians often refer to their country as "Oz", due to their poor spelling habits. Kansans also refer to their land as "Oz", due to a movie that was filmed in California. This is just one of many similarities between Australians and Kansans.
• Some people think of Australia as a city-state, but it is more accurate to refer to it as a city-state-island-country-continent. The city of Australia is broken up into six boroughs (such as New South Wales and Queensland) — seven if you count the borough of Northern Territory, which no one does.
• One popular drink in Australia is something called "bee-uh" (orthographic variations exist due to Australians' aforementioned poor spelling habits). It was developed in the 1800's to enable people to sit through cricket matches. Bee-uh is commonly consumed in units called "three".
• "Torres Straight Islanders" refers to people living on islands off the coast of Australia, near Manly Beach. Australians take their heterosexuality very seriously.
• Australia is frequently referred to as "The Canada of the South Pacific". Along those lines, you will sometimes hear it called "South Canuckistan", "The 52nd State" (Canada is the 51st since it's closer — sorry Puerto Rico; you snooze, you lose), and "The Southern Great White North". Also, kangaroos are sometimes called "Australian mooses".
• Many places in Sydney — such as Kings Cross, Hyde Park, Paddington, and Oxford Street — were named after places in London, owing to very drunk British sailors being unsure of where exactly they'd landed. Sydney's other place names, such as Woolloomooloo, were the result of a series of dares involving a set of Scrabble tiles, also undertaken by the aforementioned drunken sailors.
• Subsequent research fails to bear up the previous statement that Kansans refer to Kansas as "Oz", but they should consider doing so, since "Kansas" sounds sort of dull and flat.