Reaper Man

29

The continent referred to in this quote is Australia (which means that we are talking here about the Wizards of Oz, right?), where there exists a brand of beer called ‘XXXX’ (pronounced ‘Four Ex’), produced by the Castlemaine Tooheys brewery. A New Zealand correspondent tells me that the reason the beer is called ‘XXXX’ is that if it had been called ‘BEER’ the Australians wouldn’t have been able to spell it. Ahem.

(The actual origin of the name ‘XXXX’ lies in the number of marks used by Castlemaine to indicate alcoholic strength. Most European beers today are of 4X strength, with some being 3X or even 5X.)

The corks around the pointy hats refer to the supposedly traditional headwear of Australian Swagmen: Akubra hats with pieces of cork dangling on strings around the wide rim in order to keep the flies off the wearer’s face. Needless to say, you can live a lifetime in Australia and never get to actually see somebody who looks like this. Monty Python’s ‘Philosophers’ sketch is a good send-up of the stereotype.

Since then, the stereotype has been reinforced by a series of Australian Tourism Commission ads promoting Australia in America and Britain on 1980s television, which featured Paul ‘Crocodile Dundee’ Hogan saying something along the lines of: “Come on down here, and we’ll throw another shrimp on the barbie for you” (‘barbie’ = barbecue).

At the risk of boring you all to death with this, I must admit that I am curious as to the exact wording of that Hogan ad. I have received extraordinary amounts of mail about this annotation, and so far there have been seven different phrases mentioned, namely:

So, can anybody tell me (a) whether the ad said ‘shrimp’ or ‘prawn’, (b) whether the “for you” was actually part of the sentence or not, and (c) whether these poor animals were in fact tossed, thrown, chucked, slapped, shoved, popped, or simply put on the barbie?

Finally, an Australian correspondent tells me that “Don’t come the raw prawn with me, sport” is a local saying having a meaning somewhere in between “Pull the other one, it’s got bells on” and “Don’t give me that crap”. Use this information at your own peril.

Annotation update: Some time after the above annotation appeared in APF 7.0 I received email from a correspondent who had actually managed to obtain a compilation video from the Australian Tourist Commission, containing all the ads Paul Hogan did for them in the 1984-89 period. Among those was, indeed, one he did for the internationally targeted campaign, at the end of which he clinches his spiel by saying:

I find it highly ironic that the actual mystery verb turns out to be one that was not mentioned by any of my previous correspondents…