5 Stories So Australian, You’ll Think We’re Making Them Up
If we tell you that Australia is a crazy place to live because it’s at the bottom of the world and everyone has to walk on the ceiling, you might think we’re very ignorant. But then you hear the tale of Billy Hunt, who fled Port Arthur Penitentiary in Tasmania disguised as a kangaroo. His escape failed (so the story goes) because guards saw the kangaroo and aimed their guns at it, thinking a little kangaroo meat sounded delicious.
“On second thought,” you might say, “Australia fully lives up to its reputation.”
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That becomes even more clear when you learn of the time that...
Aliens Turned Out to Be Wallabies on Drugs
Crop circles are that thing where a bunch of plants in a field are flattened, making some pattern that’s viewable from directly above. They’re evidence of aliens, say people who believe that sort of thing, since such a design can only be etched from some object hovering in the sky. Exactly why someone in the sky would want to draw a pattern only visible from the sky itself is unclear, and crop circles are, in reality, always made by humans, often humans deliberately trying to bait UFO fans.
Well, they are almost always made by humans. They can also be made by animals walking repetitively in a circle, which is something animals generally do not do. Case in point: In Tasmania in 2009, farmers noticed a bunch of circles that popped up because wallabies kept walking around in circles. They kept walking around in circles because they were high.
They were high because this wasn’t a wheat field or a cornfield. It was a poppy field, used for making opium, and the wallabies who lunched on those poppies became intoxicated. You might associate opium farming with places like Afghanistan, but when we’re talking about legal opium, half the world’s supply comes from Australia. You can’t have codeine without Australia, and you can’t have Australia without wallabies.
The Bugs Got So Thick, a Train Crashed
In Australia, the bugs are deadly and want to kill you. Usually, that comes in the form of them simply biting you, but some critters are more devious than that.
Train tracks in different parts of the country have repeatedly had trouble with a species of millipede called Ommatoiulus moreleti. The millipedes are attracted to train tracks, for reasons we can only theorize about, and when a train crushes enough of them, the tracks become too slippery for the trains to properly brake.
Melbourne had big problems with millipedes holding trains up in 2002 and 2009, and the biggest incident happened in 2013 outside Perth. A train rolled over hundreds of millipedes, and the wheels got too slick to slow down. The engine plowed into a parked train in front of it, sending a handful of passengers to the hospital with neck injuries.
Ommatoiulus moreleti didn’t exist in Australia a century ago. It’s native to Portugal and was accidentally introduced to the continent in the 1950s. Still, by attacking humans, it’s proven itself to be as Australian as any native species.
The Time a Detective Got Down on All Fours and Played a Dingo
If you want to talk about Australia exclusively in terms of cultural stereotypes, you should practice your delivery of one line: “A dingo ate my baby!” But you should also know that that line came from an actual legal case, in which a dingo killed a baby and prosecutors refused to believe that happened, instead accusing the mother of murder.
It was a serious case, with all sorts of strange details you should read about. But it did come with its funnier moments, moments funnier than you’d expect from any story that begins with “a baby was mauled to death.” Early on in the case, detectives gathered in a bar to debate the parents’ credibility. Sergeant John Lincoln was the chief skeptic. And to prove his position, he left the bar and came back with one of these in his mouth:
It was a bucket of sand, weighing 10 pounds. Lincoln walked on the floor on all fours with this bucket (presumably grabbed from a nearby construction site) held up via the handle clamped between his jaws. He wanted to test out how long he could support it. Within one minute, he had to let go and drop it, which he figured proved a dingo couldn’t hold a baby for too long.
It would later turn out that a dingo really had run off with the Chamberlains’ baby, so this experiment had been flawed. Lincoln was different from the dingo in many ways. For one thing, the dingo had been sober.
An Autonomous Lethal Robot Guards the Great Barrier Reef
We don’t know for certain if the world’s changing climate will leave Australia a wasteland, where everyone straps metal to their body for combat. But we do know that the changing climate has had a visible effect on one part of the Australia — it’s led to bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef. We also know that the reef has another threat, a more animalistic one.
It’s called the crown-of-thorns starfish, and it eats coral. Bleaching is a disease, but getting eaten is death, so we need to deal with these sea stars if we want the reef to stick around. The answer? Metal combat, of course. We send down a robot that can hunt and kill the starfish.
The robot, called RangerBot, doesn’t kill starfish by such prosaic methods as lasers or bullets. Instead, it injects the stars with a derivative of bile that triggers a fatal immune response. RangerBot is also designed to identify stars on its own, working fully autonomously. We aren’t hearing much outcry about the possible dangers of this bot going rogue, and we assume it’s because everyone who voiced such concerns was already strategically bile’d to death.
A Drunk Trucker Went Nuts at Uluru
The two most famous sites in Australia are Uluru (also known as Ayers Rock) and the Sydney Opera House. The opera house is in the biggest city in the country. Uluru is in the middle of nowhere. The 1,000-foot monolith is hundreds of miles from the nearest real town and a thousand miles from the nearest big city. The only reason to show up there is to see the rock itself.
Still, in 1983, Douglas Crabbe found himself at a motel at Uluru, not because he was a tourist but because he was a truck driver. The motel had a bar. Crabbe walked in, and the bartender refused to serve him because Crabbe was already drunk. So, Crabbe returned to the driver’s seat of his truck, pointed the vehicle at the bar and slammed it into the building.
Five people died. Crabbe received a sentenced of life in prison, with his only defense being that he didn’t have any memory of what happened that night. “I was so drunk, I don’t even remember what I was doing” can absolve you of a great many faux pas, but mass murder is often an exception.
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