Australia Day

Despite what it says above this blog the date is 27 January - the day after Australia Day.  It might only be 26th January in the good old USA where Google are based,  but here in Oz it's definitely the 27th.  If only the States were just one day behind most of the rest of the world in political maturity instead of thirty years.  Still, you can't have everything can you?  Anyway, Pea and I have spent a lot of time watching the cricket today.  Actually for much of the time we were watching separate crickets.  Pea was watching the one on TV involving several men dressed in pretty colours and I was watching the one on the deck.  Quite a big one he was, and quite energetic too, hopping all over the deck like a ............cricket on a hot deck.  That is he was until Bubble appeared.  Bubble is one of Pea and Chook's tame butcher birds and a well known murderer of insects and arachnids.  I've often seen her sitting on the deck rail with her beak full of huntsman spider - legs wriggling like a forkful of animated spaghetti.  Yuk!  Give me bush chocolate any day.  Anyway, my poor cricket didn't stand a chance and he hops no more.  Bubble made short work of him so I had to join Pea in watching the silly men on the telly.  In a typical Pommie display of bad sportsmanship England beat Australia.  Any self respecting cricketing nation would have let the Aussies win on Australia Day, but what can you expect from a nation that used to make a living by pinching other people's countries.  Never mind, they've handed most of them back now and the Empire consists of a small pork pie factory in the Mediterranean and a three star beach resort in the Caribbean.

Pea says it wouldn't be Australia Day without some geezer in a battered akubra hat appearing on the telly arguing that "Waltzing Matilda" should be our national anthem.  Let's think about that for a moment shall we.  For a start it's a British tune written in the early nineteenth century.  How many Aussies would want a national Anthem written by a Pom.  At least the words are Australian and their author Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson was born in our fair country, near Orange in New South Wales.  But, do we really want the national anthem of Australia to be about the demise of a suicidal itinerant sheep thief?  Probably not.

Chook, sticking up for her country of birth says that it's all about being the underdog and the struggles that go along with that.  "Bollocks!" Said Pea, rather harshly.  "Aussies also idolise Ned Kelly as a so called underdog and he was just a common dumb crim who stole from rich and poor alike and kept the bloody lot for himself.  He wasn't exactly Robin Hood - more like Robbin' Everybugger.  You Aussies reckon his actions were due to the persecution of his family by the colonial powers of the time, but thousands of people suffered the same oppression - and worse, without feeling the need to rob and murder innocent citizens."
Chook then mumbled something about the Poms being just as bad in their admiration for Dick Turnip - the highwayman or whatever his name was.  Pea said.  "That's different."
  "I thought it might be." Replied Chook.

Yes indeed friends, Australia Day in Pea and Chook's house was not peaceful, but at least I've learned the meaning of the phrase "Australia Day Fireworks."  I can't wait for next year.  Meanwhile I suppose I'll just have to wait for another cricket to turn up and entertain me.