"Australia is a psychotic, cold-blooded murderer that would swallow you whole if you so much as left the front door of your house."
In Real Life, Australia is a vibrant, diverse and multicultural country. The population is one of the most urbanised in the world (more so than in the United States or the United Kingdom). More than 80% of people live close to the coast,
while the interior is sparsely populated. In Hollywood, Australia is a primitive barren wasteland consisting entirely of Outback desert, rats, dingoes, crocodiles, kangaroos and some other marsupials, and occasionally a couple of rural people who run around wielding bowie knives and boomerangs. People talk with a grating accent, apparently a blend of Cockney English, New Zealander and vaguely British extraction called "Ostrayan" or more concisely "Strine".
In Real Life, Australian Wildlife is unique (the continent is one of the handful of megadiverse lands in the world), being dominated by marsupials rather than placental mammals. The dangers of the native animals have been noted by many — US President Barack Obama brought it up when he visited Australia — but most of these creatures only live in remote areas and/or are usually much less aggressive than widely touted, leading to Australia actually having a very low rate of native-animal-caused injuries and fatalities. However, in Hollywood, everything is trying to kill you, although any sufficiently ''cute'' animal, no matter how wild, is inexplicably safe, including mice.note This habit of making Australia a Death World often results in Australians being considered ludicrously tough and utterly lacking tact.
For those fortunate enough to avoid being eaten by the aforementioned crocodiles, life is one long beach party and all meals consist of shrimp on the barbie (actually called "prawns") and Vegemite sandwiches (pronounced "veeeeejeemoit"). If these stereotypes are absent, the setting is likely Sydney, Australia's most populous metropolis and bustling economic centre. It's the home of the famous Sydney Opera House, which all hotels naturally look onto. Australia's capital is actually Canberra, a city built precisely halfway between Sydney and the other major capital, Melbourne, as a concession to neither city being named the actual capital.
The first Australian colonies began as settlements of convicts sent over by the British. A fair few Australians claim convict ancestry with pride, truthfully or otherwise. Of course, with one of the world's highest immigrant intakes, Australians are, ethnically speaking, slowly becoming a sort of Convict/European/Asian/Middle-Eastern/Oceanian/African/Americas amalgamation.
Complicating this trope is that a lot of Australian humour involves deliberately playing up or invoking the stereotypes to mess with foreigners. Especially Americans.
For these reasons, it should come as no surprise that villains love this country.
Surprisingly, one aspect of Australia that is rarely (possibly never) played up is how important the Aussie mining industry is both historically and economically. In fact, as they have the best military in their hemisphere, perhaps the Dwarf checklist should be consulted. Gruff, gold-loving, blunt-speaking, funny-accented, alcohol-swilling, Elf-hating, boastful of their battle prowess and mainly just the fact that they are Dwarves. In comparison, some have noted New Zealand's "elvish sensibilities".
New Zealand is largely interchangeable with Australia in western media. This is especially ironic given that New Zealand's indigenous ecology almost wholly lacks native mammals of any kind, except for a few bats and some marine mammals. Also, its location is even more remote, being one of the last major land masses colonized by humans: the Māori arrived only in the 13th century AD.note Although New Zealand is jokingly often known as "Down Underer," boasting a similar outdoor physical culture.
For a more serious rundown on the country, see our Useful Notes page on Australia.
Examples:
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Advertising
- Commercials for Foster's beer spread the shrimp on the barbie image, though ironically Foster's (supposedly "Australian for beer") is quite possibly the most unpopular beer in Australia... and, of course, the fact that in Australia, "shrimp" are pretty much always known as "prawns".
- District 9
- Fookin Prawns.
- Nowadays, Fosters is pretty much an American beer with an iconic Australian name.
- Foster's is Australian for "Foreigner's Excuse For Aussie Piss"; it's very rare to find in six-pack form at the various liquor sellers, let alone being served in an Aussie pub. If an Australian is asking for Foster's, they're not homesick, they're just trying to determine if they're in another country.
Anime & Manga
- Balon (aka Valon, aka Varon) was given a stylized Cockney accent that most people mistook for an Australian accent in the 4Kids dub of Yu-Gi-Oh!. The abridged series naturally pokes fun at this.
- Jim Crocodile Cook in Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, on the other had, actually is Australian. In the Japanese dub, he often uses Gratuitous English, even more so than the British Pro Duelist Edo Phoenix or the two Americans, Austin O'Brien and Professor Cobra, who are both introduced at the same time as Jim.
- Epsilon, a character from Naoki Urasawa and Osamu Tezuka's collaboration manga project Pluto, was created, and lives, in Australia.
- Occurred in Black Jack when the title character head to the Outback investigating a disease outbreak.
- Australia is personified in the series Hetalia: Axis Powers. All we know of him so far is that he has green eyes and light brown hair, wears a big grin and has a pet koala (that sports a Slasher Smile of sorts) and a dingo. Fanon usually portrays him as a Boisterous Bruiser.
- The Principality of Wy give us this line when she realizes she's in Hutt River's house:
Wy: ...Hm? A Rolls-Royce? Incredible clean and organized facilities? A bilby? We're in Australia! - Chu in the English dub of YuYu Hakusho is a hard drinking okker aussie Boisterous Bruiser.
- In Code Geass, the Chinese Federation, the Euro Universe, and the Britannian Empire are the three major superpowers fighting to take control of the entire world... except Australia, which from the colours shown in the maps of the series, appears to be neutral. Possibly Australia is devoid of delicious Sakuradite, or possibly the three superpowers were disinclined to waste Knightmares on a costly boondoggle for what basically amounts to "murderous desert, with the occasional arable land".
- Of course, at one point when Schneizel decides that destroying lots of cities is a great way to achieve world peace, Sydney is among them. So something is there at least...
- Digimon Adventure 02 has a particularly strange case rife with compressed geography to drive home the point of where they are. During the Digidestined's efforts to eliminate Dark Towers around the world, Joe and Cody travel to Australia, landing in Sydney before heading up to the Gold Coast which, while doable in a day, is by no means a short or easy trip, especially for a pair of foreign early-teenage boys with no car. They notice that the locals treat the Dark Tower on the beach as an Unusually Uninteresting Sight, whereas a western show might've had the locals tear the bloody thing down before they'd have even gotten there. They do get backup from one of the local Digidestined, Derek; who is a blonde, tanned preteen surfer boy, very much in the spirit of this trope. In the last episode, Derek is in Sydney for some reason, probably to make it incredibly obvious what country he's in.
- Lucy-May of the Southern Rainbow is about a British family that immigrate from Yorkshire to Adelaide, Australia, in the 1800s. They're quite shocked to find out how different life in Australia is rather than England, but enjoy it nonetheless.
- Australia plays a major role in the Gundam franchise's UC continuity:
- In the Mobile Suit Gundam series, Sydney was struck by the original Colony Drop, leaving a massive scar that persists throughout the UC timeline.
- Zeon pilot Bernie Wiseman claims to be Australian (from Sydney, in fact) to get through a checkpoint in Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket, but the ruse falls apart when he talks about having snow at Christmas and sounds oddly cheerful for a guy whose home got hit with a colony less than a year ago.
- Torrington Base is a Federation installation near the impact site that appears in Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory and Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn. In 0083, it's the site of a Grand Theft Prototype incident with major repercussions, and it gets attacked by a giant Mobile Armor in Unicorn.
- Although Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans isn't part of the UC Timeline, the colony drop that happened in the backstory of the original Mobile Suit Gundam seems to have happened in the past of the Post Disaster timeline.
- The three central characters of Mobile Suit Gundam Narrative are Australian natives who were hailed as the Miracle Children whose precognition saved their community from the effects of Operation British.
Comedy
- Australian musical comedy duo The Scared Weird Little Guys wrote a song about
allsome of the dangerous animals to be found in Australia — "Come to Australia, you might accidentally get killed!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWFGd1nMa1A
- In his stand-up act, Greg Proops describes Australia as "Arkansas with a beach".
- Stand-up comedian Adam Hills parodied the national Anthem by putting it to the tune of Jimmy Barnes's Working Class Man. Most of the people who heard it honestly liked it better than real one.
- Dylan Moran doesn't think too highly of Australia:
Dylan: Why would anybody want to go there? What is the point of that country? I usually never leave the house but, we all went to Australia recently. The whole family. It was a ridiculous place. Located three quarters of a mile from the surface of the Sun. People audibly crackling as they walk past you on the street. That's why they all barbecue. You don't need to cook somewhere like that. You just bring the shit out, fling it on a grill, and it bursts into flames. It's not supposed to be inhabited. And when they're not doing that, frying themselves outside — they all fling themselves into the sea. Which is inhabited almost exclusively by things designed to kill you. Sharks, jellyfish, swimming knives. They're all in there.
Comic Books
- Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew!: An early villain was "Kongarilla", a kangaroo turned into a giant by a secret organization. Kongaroo hailed from "Aukstralia" (Earth-C's version of Australia).
- Judge Dredd: The series features Australia as the post-apocalyptic Oz. Most of the Oz-centric stories are either set in the megacity known as the Sydney-Melbourne Conurb; or in the heavily irradiated Radback (which is like the Outback, but with more mutant wildlife and radiation storms). “Ozzies” are portrayed as stereotypical 1950’s Australians, with the local Judge force content to make chit-chat with the citizens while enjoying a barbie on the beach.
- Nero: Kangoeroe Eiland takes place in Australia.
- She-Hulk: The unnamed Australian murderer in The Sensational She-Hulk #8. His first bit of dialogue is an incohherent string of Australian slang and his own lawyer refers to him as "the slimiest snake ever to crawl out of the outback".
- Spirou & Fantasio: The story in which Spirou and Fantasio go to Australia is actually centered around the opal-mining industry.
- Suske en Wiske: De Blinkende Boemerang takes place in Australia.
- Tomb Raider: There was an issue of the comic supposedly set in Australia, but which actually appeared to be taking place in The Wild West as everyone walked around with a pistol on their hip and there appeared to be no organised law enforcement of any kind.
- Transformers: One place the mining industry did get some time in the spotlight was in Dreamwave's Transformers: Energon run.
- X-Men: For a period in the late '80s the X-Men went further underground than usual and operated out of a hidden base in the outback (requisitioned from a band of cyborg Road Warrior rejects) with the aid of a mysterious Magical
Native AmericanAustralian AborigineIndigenous Australian teleporter. This was one of the few places where they mixed up both Sydney and the outback. (Odd, considering Chris Claremont has been to Sydney.) - Y: The Last Man: The goal of the main character Yorick throughout most of the series is to get to Australia to meet his girlfriend Beth, who was in Australia researching Aboriginal culture. In this universe, post-Gendercide Australia has become the single most powerful navy in the world, based on having the only female piloted submarines, and the entirety of Sydney has become a heroin addicted slum from south-east Asian pirates smuggling drugs into the country.
- Young Justice: When Young Justice visited the Sydney Olympics, there were kangaroos bounding through the Olympic Village (which was seemingly situated on the side of a cliff within easy eyeshot of Sydney Harbour).
Fan Works
- Child of the Storm has Australia being a land with Everything Trying to Kill You, and its natives being crazy buggers who epitomise the most badass part of the Humans Are Survivors trope that applies to all of humanity In-Universe as a background Running Gag. For instance, it is noted by Loki in the sequel that the grand scale reality warp at the end of the first book, which jumbled up time and space and had lingering effects (i.e. lots of long extinct species reappearing across the planet), and when he gets to Australia, he states that "Australia now has its formerly extinct range of horrifying giant creatures to add to its current range of horrifying small to medium sized creatures. The locals are, of course, delighted and celebrating by trying to find out how such formerly extinct creatures taste when barbecued." Several Australian reviewers admitted that, yeah, this is basically what would happen.
- Semi-sarcastically referenced in Empty Arms, where Laurel's idea to deal with Slade Wilson is to simply call the Australian intelligence service and ask if they're looking for him. Turns out they are, and have developed weapons specifically for him, allowing him to be easily defeated. Offscreen no less. Leading to this exchange with a stupefied Oliver.
Oliver: But— but they wouldn’t have even had the cure.Laurel: I guess they had something else up their sleeves, then. Don’t most Australians have to fight deadly wildlife on a regular basis?
Film — Animated
- The short film Bilby is about a bilby finding a lost albatross chick in the Australian Outback.
- When the heroes of Finding Nemo need to find Sydney, Australia, a helpful school of fish arranges itself as a likeness of the Opera House to confirm that it's where they want to go. Finding Nemo also features what must be the highest-rent dentist's office in the world, what with the stunning harborside views and the price of Sydney real estate. Well, he was doing work on the Prime Minister in one scene...
- Scooby-Doo! and the Legend of the Vampire has the Mystery Inc. gang visit Australia for vacation. They arrive in Sydney before traveling through the outback to a rock festival being terrorized by the Yowie Yahoo (a giant vampire drawn from two real Australian myths — the Yowie, a Bigfoot or Yeti-type creature, and the Yara-ma-yha-who, a red frog-like vampire creature said to hide in fig trees and feed on unsuspecting travelers using suckers on the ends of its feet and hands). It also features, according to some, the worst (or, at least, the most bizarre) attempts at an Australian accent ever heard.
Film — Live-Action
- Probably originated with "Crocodile" Dundee, which spurred an interest in this Flanderization of Australia. Note the movie was made by Australians and often cited as them enjoying playing up the image to mess with tourists, and it's even done In-Universe. The titular Mr. Dundee plays up his wildman-living-off-the-land bit to further impress the tourists, and Mick does this to his best friend (by pretending to not know what day of the week it is), leading to the memorable line "Doesn't know, doesn't care. Lucky bastard!"
- Priscilla, Queen of the Desert contrasts the sophisticated gay scene of urban Oz with the outback culture.
- Averted in The Proposition, a western that characterizes 1880's Australia as a god-forsaken hell-hole. Since most of the inhabitants are immigrants or first generation, very few have anything approaching an Australian accent.
- Godzilla: Final Wars has a scene that takes place in Sydney, Australia in which Godzilla slams the American Godzilla into the Sydney Opera House and kills him instantly with his thermonuclear breath. Considering that director, Ryuhei Kitamura went to the School of Visual Arts in Australia, it's not surprising that it was featured.
- Baz Luhrmann's Australia is the most Australian thing to ever Australia: It was directed by an Australian, written by Australians, stars two Australians, was co-funded by Australians, filmed in Australia and had its premiere in Australia.
- Chasing the Sun involves a car race through the outback. In one scene, the protagonists are driving from Darwin to Alice Springs, and look out the window and see Ayers Rock to their left. The most glaring error, of course, is that Uluru is actually SOUTH of Alice Springs... but that's just the most glaring error. There are a good ten others.
- Point Break (1991) concludes on Bells Beach, Torquay — actually filmed in Oregon. The real Bells Beach is a good 2km from the nearest tree — and it's a eucalpyt, not a pine.
- Van Diemen's Land relates the largely true story of a convict who escaped from Macquarie Harbour (a prison on the edge of seriously inhospitable wilderness) with a number of companions, and survived his walk to more civilised parts by eating them. The sequel Dying Breed focuses on the cannibalistic inbred bogan descendants of the original villain protagonist.
- A Cry In The Dark A.K.A. Evil Angels is based on the true story of the Chamberlain family, whose daughter Azaria was taken from their tent by a dingo whilst camping at Ayers Rock. This film is infamous for Meryl Streep's accent (sometimes mocked as a failed Australian accent, it's actually a reasonably successful — but undeniably memorable — imitation of the New Zealand-born Lindy Chamberlain's actual accent) and the line 'a dingo ate my baby!'
- The Howling franchise changes location to Australia in the third movie, Howling III: The Marsupials, focusing on marsupial werewolves (and it's as silly as it sounds).
- The events of Razorback happen in the Australian outback, which seems to be filled with dangerous wild boars and psychotic pet food factory workers.
- Welcome to Woop Woop also focuses on deranged pet food factory workers. Giant Kangaroo god also makes an appearance.
- Quigley Down Under is set in Western Australia in the late 19th century. Other famous Aussie Westerns include Ned Kelly, Mad Dog Morgan, and The Outlaw Michael Howe.
- The Princess Bride is one of the few films to reference Australia's convict past: "Australia, as everybody knows, is populated entirely by criminals." It also shows Iocane, the deadliest poison in the world, as being found only in Australia. Of course, the story takes place in Renaissance Europe, roughly two centuries before Australia was even colonised.
- The Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen film "Our Lips Are Sealed" is rife with this. Some of the stereotypes in the film include a kangaroo, a bunch of girls named Shelia, and everyone in Australia liking surfing. Of course there are subversions such as when the girls arrive at their new school dressed like they're going on safari and just get gawked at.
- Mad Max, made by Australians, is set in an Australia Just Before the End, while the sequels are in an Outback filled with lawless punks After the End.
- Although Fair Game is set in the present day, the Outback is portrayed as a sparsely populated desert wasteland where desert punks and sex-starved hunters butcher kangaroos and harass vulnerable women.
- The slasher films Road Games, Wolf Creek and Savage Crossings feature villainous serial killers who prowl the Outback in search of fresh victims.
- In Sweetie, Gordon, Kay, and Louis take a trip to a jackeroo ranch in the outback.
- The secondary antagonists of The Cars That Ate Paris are hoons: sociopathic Greaser Delinquents who race bizarre custom cars similar to those in Mad Max.
- The Right Stuff shows Gordo Cooper going to a station near Perth where he is to communicate with John Glenn by radio as the latter's orbital flight passes over. While there, he meets some Aboriginal men who dance and play the didgeridoo around a fire.
- Sirens is set in Australia, where a British minister and his wife visit the home of famed painter Norman Lindsey. The repressed wife is fascinated by the free-spirited models and learns to embrace her sexuality. Notably not set in the outback or a major city.
- Force of Nature: The Dry 2 shies away from the dangers of the outback to show the less commonly seen, but no less deadly, alpine wilderness.
- The Royal Hotel is set at a bar in the Australian Outback, and most of the local population consists of drunken, sexually entitled miners.
Literature
- Terry Pratchett's The Last Continent features the land of XXXX (aka "Terror Incognita"), which parodies all things Downunderese, including Mad Max, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Waltzing Matilda, Ned Kelly, "Crocodile" Dundee and the actual country of Australia, although they did expressly leave out cricket. There is a distinct difference between the citizens of Bugarup, with their University, Opera House and Gay Pride Galah, and the outback characters, who follow all the stereotypes and tropes on this page and then some.
- Upon asking a magical library for a list of dangerous animals in Fourecks, Death gets swamped by a tidal wave of books. Then he decides to ask for a list of safe animals, and a single sheet of paper reading "some of the sheep" flutters down. It is noteworthy that there are no deadly snakes in XXXX. This is because the spiders killed them all.
- It also includes one of the most accurate descriptions of the danger presented by a kangaroo: "I could disembowel you with a kick."
- An expression of cricket is shown by the line "...all you need now is to be good at some damn silly bat and ball game that no one's invented yet..."
- Rincewind has no real trouble surviving in this environment, mostly because he assumes that anything he doesn't know about in great detail is likely to be lethally dangerous, often in ways nobody would expect, which is basically true in XXXX.
- The platypus has been described as a duck designed by committee. Exactly what happens here with the UU faculty.
- The "Swampland Trilogy" of "Swampland," "Tankworld," and "Endsville," by S.R. Martin. It's all set in Australia, and starts with a really bad flood season. Gets a bit creepy with fish girls and creatures who have been fused with bikes. Definitely one for more the "Everworld" crowd than "Animorphs".
- America (The Book) describes all Australian culture as "a by-product of their perpetual drunkenness". As in, after a few tinnies you can begin to make sense of Geoffrey Rush, and Vegemite becomes edible about the time you're dying of alcohol poisoning. Not that any self-respectin' Aussie is going to succumb to piss poisonin'.
- The above-mentioned Discworld novel The Last Continent proposes that the perspective-altering beer is the cause of the Vegemite. Also, time travel.
- The Tomorrow Series by John Marsden, was a popular series of Young Adult novels released in the early 1990s, where Australia gets invaded and occupied during Australia Day by an unnamed foreign power (read: Indonesia) and a group of kids, who were out camping at the time, start a vicious campaign of guerrilla warfare against them. No, really. For books aimed at kids in high school, it leaned a good way towards the darker side of the scale, giving readers a pretty frank war story featuring firefights, death and sex (for which the schoolboys rejoiced). A movie has been made.
- Douglas Adams wrote an hilarious essay on the Subject of Australia.
- Russell Braddon's "Year of the Angry Rabbit" has gonzo Australian politicians Taking Over the World, only to have the country overrun by carnivorous Killer Rabbit outbreak. (It also, in 2000, has Nixon being elected President of the US in "the eighth attempt".)
- In A Sunburned Country: Bill Bryson toured the Australian continent, dealing with the various stereotypes about the land down under as appropriate. He was one of the few authors to actually mention Australia's mining capabilities.
- The Newsflesh novella How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea. Regular Australia not enough for you? How about zombie Australia? Ironically, Aussies tend to regard the zombies as just one more hazardous animal, much to the consternation of tourists.
- The New Humans: A Cape Punk novel set mostly in Australia during the 1960s.
- In the books of Agatha Christie, Australia (and sometimes South Africa) is home to criminals and unscrupulous adventurers, seemingly as a holdover of both Christie's own Victorian upbringing and the country's founding as a British penal colony. Like Eaglelanders, they are often portrayed as foolish, backward, or morally lax compared to proper Englishmen and women. Many of her blackmailers and servants who steal from their employers spent time in Australia, as if the country itself attracted criminals. The Corrupt Corporate Executive in Christie books often made their fortune in one or the other, such as Simeon Lee in Hercule Poirot's Christmas having discovered a number of diamond mines in South Africa. In Sad Cypress the villain has spent time in New Zealand and at some point she had to leave very quickly, to avoid being arrested.
- In The Nutmeg of Consolation (from the Aubrey-Maturin novels), Dr Maturin is stung by a platypus in the Australian wilderness, and only barely survives the experience.
Live-Action TV
- British Work Com Supernova is set in the outback. This makes sense, though, because the setting is an observatory which would benefit from being in the outback what with the lack of light pollution.
- Australia didn’t exactly go unnoticed in JAG. One of the recurring characters, Mic Brumby, was an Australian naval officer originally on exchange duty in season 4. In season 5 the production team actually went to Sydney to film the two part episode "Boomerang" on location in Oz. The fact that the creator and executive producer had an Australian wife is probably the chief explanation for all this.
- Lost is notorious among Australian fans for its completely incorrect accents (with the exception of Emilie de Ravin, who is Australian, and even then she has drawn criticism), its hilarious geography goofs (judging from the view out the window, Boone's hotel room seems to be hung in mid-air over the harbour) and the fact that anyone in Australia (shown in flashbacks) seems to be less intelligent and with less common sense than the main characters.
- The problem was mainly in the show's first season. They began to improve in the later seasons, casting authentic Australian actors for minor roles (such as the undertaker in "?"). However, in season 4, they cast a British actress as Claire's mother, who has arguably the worst Australian accent on the show.
- Ironically, the minor characters "Captain Gault" and "Hendricks" are played by authentic Australians even though there is no reason for their characters to be Australian. Also, Charles Widmore, a supposedly British character, is played by Alan Dale, a New Zealander.
- The problem was mainly in the show's first season. They began to improve in the later seasons, casting authentic Australian actors for minor roles (such as the undertaker in "?"). However, in season 4, they cast a British actress as Claire's mother, who has arguably the worst Australian accent on the show.
- In an episode of Minder, Arthur Daley somehow manages to find himself in the middle of inhospitable outback and in real danger of dying of thirst a few hours drive outside of Sydney. Never mind that anywhere he could have driven to in that time would be urban sprawl, rolling farmland or on the coast.
- Flight of the Conchords features the Australian/New Zealand interchangeability as a running gag, and for at least one episode, a plot point.
- It generally portrays Australians as inherently unpleasant and mean-spirited towards New Zealanders (even the Australian ambassador makes a crack about a sheep being Miss New Zealand). The one seeming exception is an Australian woman who Jemaine had a drunken tryst with who, despite being rather grungy and unusually proud of her heritage as the descendant of a prostitute and a convicted rapist, seems rather pleasant. Until she and her roommates steal all of Bret and Jemaine's stuff.
- This is reasonably grounded in reality as most Australians see New Zealanders as their younger siblings and taunt them mercilessly (despite the fact that they're actually rather fond of them).
- Also features a nice Crocodile Dundee Parody when the pair are being mugged in the states
Brett: You call that a knife? That's not a knife.
Jamie: Umm, yeah, it is.
Brett: Oh, yeah, it is. Run away.
- Farscape was filmed in Australia, and one episode where John Crichton returns to Earth (well, not really, but he doesn't know that at the time) has him crashing on a beach outside Sydney — where most of the episode's action takes place.
- Star Trek has a few references to Australia, but has yet to have even a minor character from there. Or New Zealand for that matter. The closest they've come is Nella Daren, a character played by an Australian access who speaks in a non-Australian (for the most part) accent and whose nationality/ethnicity is not mentioned.
- In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine a time-travel episode taking place in mid-21st century Earth involves a hostage situation where a friendly mook decides he wants to flee to Tasmania, defending his choice of refuge as the origin of actor Errol Flynn. As he and the others prepare to make their Last Stand against government forces, he cocks his gun: "It's probably raining in Tasmania anyway!" * chick-chick*
- Also on Deep Space Nine, Sarah Sisko who is Ben Sisko's biological mother, left Ben and the father Joseph after giving birth to Ben. She went to Australia, spent 3 years there as a photographer then died in a hovercraft accident.
- Starfleet set up a survival school in Australia that Captain Archer and Trip Tucker spent several weeks in the desert at. Hoshi Sato mentions having a pen pal in Brisbane.
- The Vulcan embassy to Earth is in Canberra. Vulcans and Australians living in close quarters could be interesting.
- Sally uses Australia as an analogy for her relationship to Steve on Coupling. As his girlfriend's best friend, Sally tells Steve that she is like Australia — mysterious, distant and with areas of great danger. Steve thought she meant that she had a lot of convicts.
- The "Three Bruces" sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus, with Philosophy professors from the University of Woolloomooloo Australia.
- Then of course we have Daniel Osbourne in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Oz. The name of the band he's in? Dingoes Ate My Baby, after the Azaria Chamberlain case. He's played by an American Seth Green, suggesting the character might be an Australia fanboy.
- An early Australian promo for Dexter had Dexter giving an interview in character to an Australian interviewer. The interviewer asked Dexter where he would want to live if he had to live in Australia, to which he replied "Adelaide, because it's the serial killer capital of Australia." (actually a media Urban Legend). Cue pissed off reactions from the Mayor's office, the Board of Tourism and various other parties when word of it got out. The promo didn't air in Adelaide, nor anywhere else for that matter.
- Terra Nova was filmed in Queensland. Arguably the most colorful character was Boylan, the Aussie bartender and ex soldier. Given how poorly Australians are often portrayed in US shows and the mistakes the show arguably made along the road to cancellation, it was an interesting thing to get right.
- As Allison Pregler has noted, Baywatch seemed to have a thing for Australian characters that were arrogant but incompetent. This may have related to the fact that Australia generally excelled in world lifesaving, swimming and surfing events (and frequently beat the American teams, at least when Baywatch was on air).
- The Transatlantic Equivalent of Are You Being Served? was a spinoff of sorts, in which Mr. Humphries decides to work in a Melbourne store for a while. All the episodes, save one, were re-stagings of episodes from the original series, save for a minor tweak here or there to fit the new setting. Suspiciously similar substitutes filled out the rest of the cast.
- In Once Upon a Time Belle's kingdom appears to be a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of Australia. Emilie de Ravin plays Belle, and gets to keep her own accent. Her father and mother are likewise given Australian accents. But considering the source material is set in France and the names Belle, Maurice and Collette are French, this confuses the issue even further.
- In Arrow, Slade Wilson — aka Deathstroke — is reimagined as an Awesome Aussie who is the most badass character in the series; he trained the title character in how to fight; later went insane, gained super strength and a slight healing factor, and survived getting shot through the eye with an arrow; then came back and became the season 2 Big Bad; then became not-insane, lost his superpowers, spent years locked in an underground prison, and was still able to kick infinity levels of ass while teaming up with Green Arrow. Why was he able to do all that? Because he used to be a part of ASIS, the Australian military's covert ops unit. So basically, because he's from Australia.
- An episode of Modern Family has the family taking a vacation there. Phil starts out warning the others about how dangerous the country is and confident he'll be able to guide them through it, only to suffer all the worst it has to offer himself. A local then tells him this means he's accepted as an honorary Australian, as the place is hardest on its own.
- Doctor Who provides an example in Tegan Jovanka, played by Australian actress Janet Fielding. Tegan was snarky, assertive, brash and not willing to put up with anyone's crap, even if their address of record was "a time-travelling police box that's Bigger on the Inside". She once described herself as "a mouth with legs"note , due to her outspoken nature. Quite a few of her lines reference Australia (in the Big Finish audio dramas, she's taken more than one potshot at places like Brisbane), and her "often-spoken expletive"note "rabbits!" most likely is a reference to headaches rabbits have given Australian farmers since their accidental introduction into the biosphere.
- The spinoff series The Sarah Jane Adventures revealed that by 2010, Tegan went on to fight for Aboriginal Australian rights after her travels with the Doctor.
- In Hamish and Andy's Caravan of Courage - Australia vs. New Zealand, Hamish and Andy choose to represent Australia (in a attempt to prove which "country" is better) by visiting "outback" areas that showcase this trope pretty well, specifically in Queensland and the Northern Territory.
- The Last Man on Earth was notable for having an Australian actor, Cleopatra Coleman, play an Australian character who got stuck in the US when the virus hit. In one of her early episode, she off-handedly mentions that she 'did time in Adelaide' (i.e. served a jail sentence), Adelaide being less-well known than Sydney or Melbourne to non-Australians.
Music
- The song "Down Under" by Men at Work, obviously. Look for the koala plushie. Surprisingly they made it to complain about the Flanderization of Australian culture. That buggered up pretty quickly.
- Icehouse's song "Great Southern Land" averts this trope by offering a more realistic and patriotic picture of Australia. It was actually written in response to "Down Under", which singer Iva Davies interpreted as symbolizing the exact Flanderization that Men At Work targeted. In an ironic twist of fate, he was told to downplay the song's Australian roots by management.
- "We'll surf like they do in the U.S.A. / We'll fly down to Sydney for our holiday / On sunny Christmas Day / Australia, Australia" — The Kinks' concept album Arthur (Or The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire) tells the story of a man emigrating to Australia from post-war England.
- Tim Minchin's Not Perfect: "This is my country, and I live in it; it's pretty big, and nice to walk on"
- Ben Folds is a known Australia-phile, having lived in Adelaide for several years and dated mostly Australian women, including his second wife Frally, who gave birth to his twins. He even wrote a song about it, "Adelaide," making sure his listeners all know that "the beer is better in Adelaide." Frally herself is in on the track via Studio Chatter from a cell phone call from her Ben took while doing a vocal take.
- John Williamson, singer and songwriter.
- CJ McMahon likes to make humorous reference to his home country's customs onstage while touring abroad, especially when it comes to the famously Australian usage of Country Matters.
"Over in Australia, if you don't say "cunt" at least a hundred times a day, you go to jail for being a shit cunt."
- The aptly-named Come To Australia, listing many reasons to visit Australia — specifically, its "wonderful wildlife and fabulous fauna".
Professional Wrestling
- The first NWA International Tag Team Champions, The Fabulous Kangaroos, who were huge Foreign Wrestling Heels of the 1960s.
- Outback Jack is coming!
- Madison Eagles being named Number 1 on the PWI Female 50 confirmed a golden generation of Oceanic women's wrestling. Emma, Billie Kay and Peyton Royce, Toni Storm, and Dakota Kai are wrestlers from Australia, or from other Oceanic countries that moved to Australia and became known from their work in the nation's wrestling scene.
Theatre
- Parodied in the stage musical version of Xanadu (1980), where the Greek Muse Clio disguises herself with a ridiculous Australian accent and Australian mannerisms to pass as the human Kira. This works as an Adaptational Explanation for Olivia Newton-John's real accent from the original film.
Clio/Kira: I swear to you, sisters, by the fires of Hephaestus — I mean, (switches to Australian accent) by the fires of all the shrimp on the barbie — I will help this Sonny Malone to fulfill his destiny!
Video Games
- In Need for Speed II, the 'Outback track' goes from the usual Sydney landmarks to Uluru and back on a single racetrack. Luckily, Australians still find this kind of thing very funny.
- A couple addon cars for III: Hot Pursuit on PC include both the latest Ford Falcon and HSV GTS.
- High Stakes on the other hand allows people to live out their Blue Heelers fantasies by putting you behind the wheel of a Victoria police Holden patrol car.
- Beneath a Steel Sky is set in a dystopian future Sydney. It's never explicitly stated, but the range of characters with Australian accents, the prologue set in the Outback and the "ancient" map of Sydney's underground train system are clues. All of which makes it more absurd that most of the cast speak a variety of British accents, except for the protagonist, who has an even more inexplicable American accent (and uses British phrases.)
- Sonic the Hedgehog:
- Knuckles is an echidna, an Australian monotreme.
- Marine the Raccoon from Sonic Rush Adventure is a Motor Mouth who uses every single Australian slang word ever invented, and then some. She'd be The Scrappy for that (and may still be considered one), but the other characters react as if she is that annoying.
- The Coconut Crew, also from Sonic Rush Adventure, are koalas (who have very different eyes from other Sonic characters, by the way).
- Ty the Tasmanian Tiger, a platformer series, is set in a fictionalized, Funny Animal version of Australia. However, having been developed by actual Aussies, it manages to pull off an Australia that's not all outback and sheep. There's rainforests, obscure examples of Aussie lore, and relatively few musical tracks that abuse the didgeridoo. Did we mention the fact that all the Funny Animal koala people have two thumbs?
- Team Fortress 2: Background character Saxton Hale is best described as Crocodile Dundee in charge of a major company. That company's name is Mann Co., its motto is "We sell products and get in fights!", and it sends out form letters that depending on the boxes ticked are either about thanking someone for submitting a potential product or telling a thief that he should watch his back because Saxton Hale is coming for him.
- Then there is the "transformative mineral" Australium, which is only discovered in Australia, managed to turn the country from a "nation of idiots" into an extremely advanced society that outpaced everyone in the world in terms of technology, allowing them to have shiny buildings, streamlined cars, monoplanes, teleportation, cloaking, an entire spectrum of mustache science, and every single innovation in the last 40 years... in 1890.
- According to the comics, all Australians (including women) are relatively dumb, muscular, constantly fighting, and always wear mustaches. The Sniper, on the other hand, is not. Nor are his parents, judging from one photo. As it turns out, the Sniper was actually born in New Zealand; only his adoptive parents are Australian.
- Australia has a few entries in the highly Hollywoood-Atlasized (well, usually Tokyo-Atlasised) Fighting Game genre:
- Jeffry from Virtua Fighter (a sailor who merely circumnavigates the country)
- Raptor from Darkstalkers, the zombie rockstar who chomps on people with his decomposed chest-cavity. Possibly some sort of perverse homage to the late, great Bon Scott of AC/DC — where else did they get a dead Aussie rock god from?... Plus he's skinny enough!
- The tormented Cosmic Plaything Zappa, of Guilty Gear fame. His biography lists him as born in Australia, although it's never said how long he lived there, nor does it come up in conversation or...well, anything outside one line in his bio.
- Craig Marduk of Tekken, although his accent is about as Australian as Abraham Lincoln. It is suggested that Jun had placed Alex and Roger in Australia, which would be either a blessing or a curse.
- The Fatal Fury series features Raiden (also known as Big Bear), a huge Australian wrestler.
- Kano from Mortal Kombat. Granted, he was originally American-Japanese, but the design team decided to retcon him into being an Australian. This was due to the movie, where Trevor Goddard portrayed him as Australian.
- The famous Ryu vs. Sagat fight was depicted in the animated movie in a grassy field during a thunderstorm. The Alpha games have this in Australia.
- The Grand Theft Auto series has a long running joke about a fictional war against Australia.
- While most of the animal characters in Crash Bandicoot are Australian, Dingodile has the stereotypical Bogan accent. The first two games in the franchise have also taken place on the fictional Wumpa Islands in southeastern Australia.
- One of the minor factions in Syndicate was the Tasmanian Liberation Army, who take over Australia at least, but are described as always being too drunk to be a major player for world domination. The world map in the sequel Syndicate Wars asserts the language of Sydney is "Low English" (compared to "High English" in London) and their main industry is brewing. Tasmanians themselves might say that this isn't necessarily too far removed from the truth...
- The English voices of the two characters from Gran Pulse in Final Fantasy XIII have Australian accents. Appropriately enough, Gran Pulse is an over the top Death World full of horrible monsters such as the Adamantoises (gigantic tusked tortoises the size of shopping malls), Gorgonopsids (think Dingos but with toxic breath), Megistotherians (giant Gorgonopsids), King Behemoths, various Cieth and The Undying...and the dreaded Tonberries. And that's just the wildlife. Pulse's Killer Robots and giant Killer Robots can still be found in the ruins of Pulse's mining facilities and cities. All presided over by a mountain-sized Giant Robot god made out of lava that eats Adamantoises. And also, ironically, Gran Pulse is a planet underneath the smaller, inhabited "moon", Cocoon. So to the people of Cocoon, Gran Pulse is literally "the land down below".
- In the Halo universe, Sydney is the capital of the Unified Earth Government, and is also home to HIGHCOM Facility Bravo-6 (the Hive), the formal headquarters of the UNSC military. This was presumably so that potential invaders like the Covenant could become better acquainted with the wildlife. There's also Recurring Extra Private Chips Dubbo from the original trilogy; fans attribute his apparently exceptional survival skills to his Australian origins.
- In Tony Hawk's Underground 2, you get to visit Australia (Well actually Sydney). Looks right except that there's a Butterfinger ad where, in Australia, Butterfingers are never advertised.
- Mass Effect:
- Miranda Lawson in Mass Effect 2, while not specifically outed as Australian, is voiced by Australian actress Yvonne Strahovski, who not only kept her natural accent but also acted as a model for the character's looks.
- Urdnot Wreav wants Australia for helping the humans. He wants to live in a place more terrifying than his own Death World. Australian fans responded en masse "We welcome our new alien overlords...if they can handle the place."
- Escape from Monkey Island features Ozzie Mandrill, an Australian property developer and expy for Rupert Murdoch. He bests Guybrush in a bout of insult swordfighting (no thanks to using a whole bunch of Australian slang that neither Guybrush nor the other pirates who challenged him have heard of before), and turns out to be working with LeChuck to find and control the Ultimate Insult.
- The newer Resident Evil games has the Black Tiger, a giant Australian funnelweb. In real life they are that hard to kill and even deadlier, yes the T Virus makes it go through Badass Decay.
- Dead Island is actually based on Papua New Guinea but has a strong Australian population, Palanai more resembles a Australian resort and several of the playable characters are Australian.
- The Continuity Reboot Mirror's Edge Catalyst takes place in southeastern Australia although there are no hints in the game proper about this: you'd have to actually examine the game's world map to realize this. The original Mirror's Edge has absolutely no clues as to where in the world it occurs in.
- Forza Horizon 3 takes place in and around Gold Coast, and features lesser seen settings such as rainforests alongside the typical Outback.
- Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! takes place in a moon called Elpis, whose inhabitants are rendered as stereotypical Australians. Its nickname is even "Up Above", pun very much intended.
- In Doom Eternal, the forces of Hell has invaded Earth and slaughtered billions of humans all across the globe — except Australia, which is completely untouched. Were the inhabitants too badass or was the wildlife too terrifying for Hell itself? You decide.
- The later entries in the WipEout series have the Triakis team, a weapon manufacturing company that gets its name from a genus of sharks (though not one that actually lives in or near Australia). Their vehicles typically have the best shield stat in the game.
- Averted in Mega Man 8. Clown Man's stage is in Australia, but no stereotypical elements of the country are present.
- Dragon Quest IX has the town of Upover. The place's always hot due to being located at the foot of an active volcano, the local wildlife is particularly murderous, the inhabitants pepper their speech with "Strewth!" and "Crikey!", and alcohol is a major part of their life.
- Webbed takes place in a fantasy version of Queensland. The Big Bad is a bowerbird, a kind of bird native to Australia known for collecting colorful objects to decorate its nest (as the one in the game does), and the characters frequently use typical Australian expressions such as "G'day".
Web Animations
- Two members of hololive EN Gen 2 Council are Australian:
- Hakos Baelz has a faint accent and confirmed in a Q&A stream that she lives along the east coast.
- Tsukumo Sana has not outright confirmed it, but she has a thick accent, likes meat pies, refers to McDonalds as Maccas and has to catch herself using "we" when referring to Australians in general. Contrary to certain memes regarding the land's associated wildlife, they're both absolutely terrified of spiders (save for the daddy longlegs) and Sana asserts that eating them is not an Australian thing; that's just Haachama.
- Haachama, one of the Japanese Generation 1 members spent a considerable amount of time in Australia, including finishing high school there before finally leaving in late 2020. Her time in Australia wasn't particularly great for her as the family she was staying with were relatives but treated her poorly and the general lack of Japanese immigration and the tendency of students to form cliques based on nationality/ethnicity meant she had trouble making friends. Her streaming was also impacted by Australia's terrible internet.
- Takanashi Kiara is Austrian but had a long Running Gag where she claimed to be Australian, with an accompanying wink to emphasize the joke, which came about after fans asked about her accent and streaming schedule. She dropped this after a real-life friend of hers took it at face value and believed that she was actually Australian.
- Hololive's Spear Counterpart group, holostars, got an Aussie in their ranks with Axel Syrios from their first English-speaking generation, holoTEMPUS. Fans sussed out that he was an Australian when he recommended eating oysters with vegemite,note and when he debuted his thick Australian accent pretty much gave it away.
- RWBY: Menagerie is a continent that is controlled by Faunus. Located in the south-east of Remnant, two-thirds of its landmass is a harsh desert made uninhabitable by how dangerous the native wildlife is. As a refuge for any Faunus in the world to retreat to if life elsewhere becomes too harsh, the single settlement region is cramped and overcrowded. While Humans gave it to the Faunus as a peace-offering over the Faunus fight for equality, it's strongly implied that they did so only as a means to try to get rid of the Faunus in a more indirect way. Menagerie ends up being both a place where Faunus can be themselves without judgment, it is also a symbol of just how unequal the relationship between Humans and Faunus remains, with many Faunus either being extremely tired of the whole ordeal and simply wanting to be left alone, while more radicalized elements like the White Fang working towards more ruthless intentions.
Webcomics
- According to Irregular Webcomic!, Australian wildlife is exactly this dangerous. Or this.
- During the Order of the Dragon arc in Fans!, Keith Feddyg took Australia when the Order caused worldwide chaos and rioting by literally destroying the concept of writing. As he observed, "You know how feral most of that continent is? The exotic killer wildlife will have destroyed human civilization by dinnertime. All I have to do is go back, find the leader of the survivors and melt his bowie knife." This gave him time to stab another Order member in the back and seek revenge against Ally.
- A Funny Background Event here in A Girl and Her Fed:
SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Almost everything in Australia is made of poison, and if you find something that is not poisonous, watch out for the claws and the teeth.
- Bloody Urban (which is set in an AU version of Sydney) features a strip which depicts the Australian open as being played entirely by crocodiles. The Alt Text for the page reads 'This is nothing. You should see our football.'
- In Scandinavia and the World Australia is a tanned blond thanks to going surfing often, and is prone to wrestle with wildlife. His Distaff Counterpart Sister Australia is a bit more subdued, and is considered an expy of Mary, Crown Princess of Denmark (who is an Australian native).
- In Penny Arcade, Upon hearing that Australia doesn't have a version of Halloween, Tycho decides to take an Artifact of Doom down there to spread some chaos, thinking that they just don't have enough to be scared of. He's proven quite wrong by the Wolfman.
Tycho: Feast, my servants. Feast now, and grow... what. What do you want? Why are you back? You should be feasting!
Wolfman: Larry got bit by a spider? Yeah? And then he melted. So I need you to stuff. My ass. Back into the portal. I just bit a guy, and he thanked me.
Tycho: Did you tell him about the Lycanthropy? The Moon Curse?!
Wolfman: I gave him the pamphlet! Motherfucker laughed. I gotta tell you. That's a new one for me.
Web Original
- If one admits to being Australian on /tg/, the first question asked is almost inevitably something along the lines of "How do you find the time to play DnD with all the poisonous snakes?" The answer, of course, is that it's a good idea to have a hobby when unable to leave the house due to the town being knee-deep in funnelweb spiders.
- r/straya is the resident subreddit for humorous and often self-effacing looks at Australian life.
- This man achieved minor viral fame in the late 2010s for his enthusiastic endorsement of Victoria Bitter.
If yer a fukken fair dinkum fukken full-grown Aussie, this is what you'd have fuh breakfast, ya fukken dog cunts! A fukken VB — LONGNECK — at twenty-to-eight in the fukken mornin'! Git that up ya!
- There are multiple characters in the Whateley Universe are Australian, Including Razorback, a large raptor-like mutant. Also, There are stories of events that occur in Australia such as the takedown of a rogue mutant in Darwin, as well as allusions to as-of-Yet unwritten events that occur to some of the Australian students during a home visit.
- The story of Outcast Corner's Christmas trip to Darwin has finally come out. No one would blame them if they decide not to repeat the trip.
- Less is Morgue has two Australian characters. One is Shaz who is pretty normal, for the standards of the series at least, and the other is Jarrod Mcknight, a mullet-sporting, knife-weilding electrician who is uncomfortably aggressive and spouts catchphrases such as "Bloody ripper" and "I'm not here to fuck spiders."
- Cracked has made a Running Gag of equating Australia with Death World. So has this wiki.
- Ben Powell, Brendan Wallace, and Jason Harris from Survival of the Fittest. They're all Aussie, though only Ben is played straight. You'd have to read the profiles of the latter two to find out they were actually Australian.
- In
onemost of his video reviews, Yahtzee takes time to complain about how much later games are released in Australia than the US. One of these reviews showed an outline of Australia, with labels in four places. One in the southwest of the map said "ME" and the other three scattered throughout said "SHEEP".- He doesn't think much of the "Everything Trying to Kill You" part, though. In his words, "Whatever Cracked might tell you, you do not get savaged by Shelob the moment you step off a plane in this country."
- Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Jeice is from "Space Australia". More specifically, Space Brisbane. Go Space Broncos!
Krillin: WE GET IT! YOU'RE FROM SPACE AUSTRALIA!
- Piecing Together the Ashes: Reconstructing the Old World Order: Australia, now known as Oz, went through a period of warlordism and climate disasters following the Deluge, but emerged as a unified constitutional monarchy that is now spreading influence through the South Pacific.
Web Videos
- Dr Glaucomflecken: Upon learning that the Ophthalmologist gets to visit Australia instead of attending the hospital management-mandated wellness retreat (a.k.a. waste of time), the other medical specialists get back at him by telling him about the (partly exaggerated) dangers of Australian wildlife.
Western Animation
- American Dragon: Jake Long featured Fred Nerk, the first Australian Dragon, as minor antagonist during "Dragon Summit". His dragon form's design was based on Sea Dragons, which are native to the waters of Australia, and he was described by the creators as "an affable bloke; plays rugby; likes to travel; not especially concerned about dragoning ('The bloody place pretty much takes care of itself')."
- In the Animaniacs (2020) episode "Bun Control", when the Warner Bros. backlot is overtaken by "buns" (bunnies posing as a thinly-veiled allegory for guns), Wacko gets the idea to call Australia, since they "know how to solve the issue of bun violence". Australia promptly sends a paratrooper unit of dingoes, who speak in stereotypical phrases like "G'day", "How you goin'", and "Cheers, mate", to initiate a "bun buyback" program.
- The DuckTales (1987) episode "Back Out in the Outback". Features miniature UFO's, opals. a sheep station, and a variety of marsupials.
- An episode of Gargoyles where they visited Australia and the country was portrayed this way. Also Dingo's character in general. If you can get past the ludicrously over-the-top faux Australian accent long enough to pay attention to his words and behaviour, that is.
- The Simpsons: "Bart vs. Australia" manages to make several goofs — such as a didgeridoo made out of bamboo, being played by a woman — as well as purposefully subverted stereotypes, such as a postage stamp proudly claiming, "30 Years of Electricity!" Surprisingly, many Aussies are quite fond of that episode.
- You know Dwarves... wonderful senses of humor.
Aussie MP: Hey! Mr. Prime Minister! ANDY!!!!
PM: (lounging on an inner-tube, naked, drinking a can of Fosters) Oi, mates, what's the good word? - Another favourite bit goes like this:
Croc Dundee Parody: You call that a knife?
[pulls out spoon]
Croc Dundee Parody: This is a knife.
Bart: [confused] That's not a knife, that's a spoon.
Croc Dundee Parody: Alright, alright you win. I see you've played knifey-spoony before. - And of course:
Marge: I'll just have a coffee.
Pub owner: Beer it is.
Marge: No, coffee.
Pub owner: Beer.
Marge: Coff-ee.
Pub owner: Bee-eer.
Marge: C-O...
Pub owner: B-E... - Another:
Australian teen: (Holding a frog) They's looks like kangaroos, but they's reptiles they's is!
Marge: Oh, we have those in America, we call them "bullfrogs".
Australian teen: That's a funny name! I'd 'ave called 'em chazwozzas! - And of course the scene where Homer and Bart try to jump into the pouches of a pair of kangaroos.
- One moment that isn't especially well-liked is when Bart cuts off Bruno's phone call with, "I think I hear a dingo eating your baby," a rather tasteless reference to the tragic story of the death of Azaria Chamberlain, though Bruno's reaction could imply it was meant to be a case of Dude, Not Funny! in-universe.
- In the episode "Lost Verizon" Bart prank calls a Tin-shack bar, on the edge of Sydney Harbour.
- You know Dwarves... wonderful senses of humor.
- Parodied on Clone High, when Gandhi runs into Daniel Feldspar, the "stereotypical Australian dragon", who Gandhi manages to distract by claiming that he's never tried vegemite.
- Although the Australian Story Arc of Exosquad starts pretty inconspicuously in Canberra (not Sydney!), it soon progresses into the desert-aborigines-Ayers Rock routine. Australia is also just the right place to introduce vicious half-beast/half-Neosapien Neo Warriors whose sole purpose is to search and destroy humans. They fit right in!
- Taz-Mania, a show starring Looney Tunes' Tasmanian Devil, is supposedly set in the island of Tasmania, but is actually a Flanderized version of the Outback, and bears as much resemblance to the real Tasmania as Taz does to the real Tasmanian devil (that is, none at all). Apart from the Unstoppable Rage and Extreme Omnivore tendencies. Weirdly Taz-Mania got right the fact that Port Arthur in Tasmania has a lead mine. No idea if this was Shown Their Work or Accidentally-Correct Writing.
- When the X-Men appeared on Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends and again in Pryde of the X-Men (the pilot for the first attempt to make an X-Men animated series, which wasn't picked up) usually Canadian X-Man Wolverine sported an Australian accent. Presumably because the producers couldn't imagine the toughest mutant in the world coming from anywhere else. (Decades later, it would turn out they were right — but at least Hugh Jackman was polite enough to fake it.)
- For some reason, Jetfire in Transformers: Cybertron has an Australian accent.
- In the G.I. Joe universe, Cobra operative Major Bludd is from Sydney, and once served with the Australian SAS. On the Joe team, the survival expert Outback is depicted in the UK comics iteration as an Australian. The rather uncouth Dreadnoks were also from Australia, due to Larry Hama having issues with Australian soldiers while he served in the Vietnam War.
- The Smurfs (1981) Season 9 episode "G'Day Smoogle" takes place in Australia, where the Smurfs find a race of Smoogles.
- Total Drama's fifth season features an Australian character, Jasmine, who displays a stereotypical "crocodile hunter" behavior. In a rare use for the stereotype, it's a female character.
- Peppa Pig's "Australian Holiday" 4-parter plays with this in a slightly more accurate way and the location slowly becoming more obvious.
- In the first part (The Outback), Peppa and Kyle's family are seen flying in Kyle's family plane. You can clearly see Uluru in the background before seeing them go to their cabin.
- The second part (Surfing) features Miss Rabbit (a skilled worker in their hometown) showing up at the surf shop near a beach, and features them learning how to surf. Surfing is popular in Australia, despite boat racing and wakesurfing having a bit of a following there.
- The third part is about them exploring the Great Barrier Reef in a homemade submarine. From here it's too obvious that they have located a house near the Townsville-Cairns border.
- The fourth and last part (Boomerang) is about learning how a throw a boomerang, despite not being used regularly by most modern Australian people.
- Thomas & Friends: "Kangaroo Christmas" shows that there are a huge amount of kangaroos in Australia, only because they are native.
- The Flamin' Thongs is about an Australian family which embodies almost every negative ocker stereotype.
- Danger Mouse:
- "The Odd Ball Runaround" takes place mainly in Australia. "Waltzing Matilda" can be heard in the background.
- In "The Great Bone Idol," Greenback hires Count Duckula to find the idol. When Duckula asks what's in it for him, Greenback offers him Australia.
Duckula: Australia? Bondi Beach...Woolloomooloo...kangaroo stew...yes, done!- Then later after he acquires the idol and leaves DM and Penfold to contend with panicking elephants:
The idol is mine! I've rent his plans asunder! Now off to claim my prize as emperor of Down Under! - Koala Man is an adult animated series set in Australia, with an Australian cast, a superhero based on an Australian animal, and kangaroos.
