Tuesday, 3 May 2011

Australian Social Decay


As we’ve been travelling around down under, we have become witnesses to the very real and underlying issue facing Australians since the turn of the new millennium: Kangaroos. Australia has always had its fair share of problems with the marsupials, but it seems they are the biggest threat to the country’s reputation since England beat the Wallabies in the 2003 Rugby World Cup. And you would not be blamed to assume that the Kangaroos’ undersized cousins, Wallabies, are the cause of the social decay here since that devastating defeat.

We decided to do some amateur investigative journalism and met a Kangaroo by the name of Skippy (what else) and felt the need to probe the reasons for their seeming disrespect for a society that has always lauded them as a national icon. ‘The reasons are fairly simple’, Skippy said. “We are regularly culled because they think all we do is loaf around all day drinking beer and making Joeys with no intention of working. Then they sell our prime fillets in the supermarkets for famed Aussie barbeques. Then there is the issue that has always plagued our race – the age-old question, what was God thinking when he created us? We are strange creatures, and we’re not the only ones. Take the Giraffe and the Platypus, for instance, they are in the same arc. It has always been a source of insecurity to us and it is almost ingrained into the younger generation.” Just as Skippy had finished explaining, two of his friends roared past in a pickup truck (ute) they’d just hot-wired from a neighbouring district. As they disappeared in to the distance, his Joey was bouncing around noisily annoying the elders. Why? There was nowhere for him to go. Skippy was using his pouch to keep his beer cool. It was a stark reminder of how a society can deteriorate as rapidly as it has here. We asked how he sees his race moving forward from this point, to which he replied, “I couldn’t give a Castlemaine XXXX.”
 
Charming, we thought. If Joe Mangle was still around, he wouldn’t put up with this.

No comments:

Post a Comment