The land down under
Информация - География
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At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, underdog Ducan Armstrong upstaged the great American Matt Biondi to win the 200m freestyle. (Australians like to beat Americans.) The win was made extra enjoyable when Americans accused Armstrong of "surfing" the wave created by Biondi. Only thing more enjoyable that seeing Americans defeated, is them bitter as well.
*Sydney Olympics - The Sydney Olympics were labeled the best ever games by IOC[29] president Juan Samaranch. What makes this a particularly sweet accolade for Australians is that they followed the Atlanta Olympics - staged by Americans.
*A Sydney Australian football match was once stopped after fans smuggled a pig into the stadium, wrote the name of a big-boned player on the pigs side and then released it onto the ground.
*Dawn Fraser - Dawn Fraser is the only athlete to ever win gold in the same event at three consecutive Olympics. At the 1964 Olympics, Dawn Fraser marched in the opening ceremony and wore a custom made swimsuit. For these breaches of protocol, the Australian Swimming Federation banned her from competition for ten years.
*Rod Laver is the only male tennis player to win the grand slam and he did it twice.
*Jeff Thompson once bowled a ball that was calculated to be at least 160 kms per hour which makes him the fastest bowler of all time. He is reported to have said that the sound of the bowl hitting the batsmen skull was music to his ears.
*Cazaly - When charging from their trenches, Diggers would yell "Up their Cazaly" in tribute to the ruckmen Roy Cazaly. "Up there Cazaly" was later made into a song that reached number one on the charts.
*Susie Maroney is a swimmer who from time to time feels inclined to swim long distances - such as Cuba to Florida.
*The day of the Melbourne Cup[30] (a horse race!) is a public holiday in Melbourne.
Cities and States
*Sydney - Australias first and largest city. Also known as Sin City. Wanted to be Capital of Australia but its convict stigma counted against it.
*Melbourne - Wanted to be the Capital of Australia on the basis that it was the home to the Australian establishment and was not founded by Convicts. (Founded by John Batman; son of a Convict)
*Canberra - Because Sydney and Melbourne kept bickering over which city should be the capital of Australia, it was decided that neither of them would be capital and instead, a new capital would be built in the middle of them both.
*Hobart - Australias second oldest city. The too-frequent visits by French explorers concerned the British authorities and in 1803 it was decided that a colony should be established on the island to secure British territorial claims. Convicts were then sent.
*Newcastle - Newcastles coal deposits were discovered by a party hunting escaped Convicts. Sydneys difficult Convicts were then sent to Newcastle to mine the coal. Known as an egalitarian city where miners and winemakers share a beer or a fine drop.
*Adelaide - Claim to fame is that it is a City that has lots of Churches. Adelaide is the Capital of the only Australian state never to have received Convicts.
*Perth - The last Australian state to receive Convicts. It has been said most of them now work in parliament or business.
*Brisbane - In 1824, a southern state governor sent a party of difficult Convicts to found a new settlement in Queensland. These days, southern state children send their difficult parents to Queensland to retire. Also a Mecca for Southern State teenagers who upon finishing school, head north for a week of booze and debauchery.
*Tasmania - The island state is one of the worlds major suppliers of licit opiate products. The government maintains strict controls over areas of opium poppy cultivation and output of poppy straw concentrate; major consumer of cocaine and amphetamines.
*Long fence - The dingo fence in Australia is the longest fence in the world, and is about twice as long as the Great Wall of China.
Language
australia fact flag history
*Waltzing Matilda - Waltzing Matilda the title of Australias most famous song, is German for carrying a backpack.
*Bludger - Australians refer to lazy people as bludgers. The word is derived from bludgeoner which is a prostitutes standover man.
*Larrikin - A larrikin is a comical, roguish individual who is prone to rowdy and unruly behaviour. The term was coined from an Irish policeman in a Melbourne court, claiming the prisoner was "larkin about".
*POME - Australians refer to English people as Poms or Pome. This is an acronym for Prisoners of Mother England. May have originally been an abbreviation for pomegranate which is Convict rhyming slang for immigrant.
*The name Australia comes from the Latin Terra Australis Incognito which means the Unknown Southern Land.
*Seppo - Australians may refer to Americans as Seppos. This is an abbreviation for Septic Tank which is rhyming slang for Yank.
*Drongo - Australians may refer to fools, idiots and hopeless cases as Drongos. Drongo was a 1920s racehorse that showed promise but never won anything in 37 starts. In the 1940s, the term was applied to recruits of the Australian airforce.
*Digger - Australian servicemen are referred to as Diggers. This term comes from miners on the Australian goldfields of the 1800s.
*Kangaroo - The name for the Australian marsupial Kangaroo came about when some of the first white settlers saw this strange animal hopping along and they asked the Aborigines what it was called. They replied with Kanguru, which in the native language meant I dont know .
*Moomba - The city of Melbourne has a cultural festival using the Aboriginal word Moomba. It seems the festivals initial organizers asked the local Aborigines to suggest a name, and were told that moomba means lets get together and have fun. The grateful organizers subsequently used the name.hindsight, the organizers really should have been suspicious that lets get together and have fun could be expressed in two syllables. In reality, moom means bum, buttocks, or anus, while the suffix ba means in, at or on. So moomba actually means in the bum.
Mysteries
*Stolen baby - On August 17, 1980, Lindy Chamberlain, the wife of a Church minister, told authorities that a dingo took her baby Azaria from their campsite near Uluru. Curiously, the Australian public was more inclined to place faith in the character of a wild dog rather than in a ministers wife and as a consequence, Lindy was convicted of murder. Some years later, her conviction was quashed yet still, some Australians are adamant that the dingo was innocent.
*Dropbears - Dropbears are an evil species of koala that fall from trees and attack humans. The evil strain of koala dont actually exist. The story was created to fool Americans.
*Yowies- Like the Nth American big foot, the yowie emits a vile odour and screams offensively. Numerous sightings of Yowies have turned out to be escaped mental patients or hermits in jungle attire.
*Lost Prime Minister - In 1967, Harold Holt, the Prime Minister of Australia went for a swim at the beach and was never seen again. Theories about his disappearance include kidnapping by a Russian submarine, eaten by a shark or being carried away by the tide.
*Bunyips - Bunyips haunt rivers, swamps, creeks and billabongs. Their main goal in life is to cause nocturnal terror by eating people or animals in their vicinity. They are renowned for their terrifying bellowing cries in the night and have been known to frighten Aborigines to the point where they would not approach any water source where a Bunyip might be waiting to devour them. Some scientists believe the Bunyip was a real animal, the diprotodon, extinct for some 20,000 years.
*Megafauna - 20-30 thousand years ago, Australia was home to Megafauna; giant species of marsupials including a wombat the size of a rhino, meat eating kangaroos, kangaroos three meat tall and lizards 7 meters long. It is not known exactly what happened to them. One theory is that were hunted to extinction by Aborigines or that the Aborigines use of fire destroyed their habitat. Another theory is their habitat was destroyed by the progressive drying of Australia.
*The Bradshaws - The Australian Kimberley is home to a mysterious form of rock art known as the Bradshaws. The art is dispersed in around 100 000 sites spread over 50 000 sq. km. Although the arts pigment cant be dated, a fossilised wasp nest covering one of the paintings has been dated at 17,000 + years old. This makes the art at least four times older than the pyramids.Bradshaws depict people with straight hair and poney tails. One painting even depicts a boat, with a rudder, and 29 people on board. Unlike other Aboriginal art, it is not known what purpose the Bradshaw paintings served. Graham Walsh, the foremost expert on them, has suggested that they might be a form of iconography(picture writing) painted by a now extinct Asiastic race.
*Marree man - In 1998, a huge engraving of a Aboriginal warrior appeared in the Australian outback. It was 4km long, held a throwing stick, was bearded and had a penis which was estimated to be 200m in length. The markings appeared to have been made by a tractor pulling some sort of plough which created furrows 10m wide in the difficult terrain. To this day, the