ABOVE: Watch my poo roll. Photo by Nico Smit on Unsplash
Don’t you love that perfect, smooth surface when you un-lid a brand-new jar of Vegemite? But then what happens? People get stuck in, and pretty soon it looks like the trenches of the Somme, only polluted with gobs of butter, marmalade and, what the hell? Pizza sauce!
That’s what can happen when we start making comparisons, especially with ourselves.
Oscar Wilde maintained that comparisons are odious, but compared to me he is nothing but a deceased Irish wit and playwright, and a successful one at that. I think that makes my point pretty well, certainly better than any points Wildey is making nowadays.
Comparisons can be demeaning. Now I don’t mind a spot of demeaning but it usually only takes place in my imagination, unless I’m 110% certain the demeanee isn’t going to whup me with a fence paling or give me a pizzling through the courts.
It’s a swings and roundabouts thing. I mean, you might not stack up too well against Mahatma Gandhi, the woman who invented spray-on skin, or that overbaked minx who put you in the shade at the open mic night by absolutely nailing ‘You Are the Wind Between My Cheeks’ or whatever. But compared to, say, Vladimir Putin, just about anybody can hold their head high.
Anyway, as a rule, I prefer to avoid comparisons, especially between Australia and other countries. You can end up with ego on your face pretty quick smart.
Take Brazil. They’re way bigger than us. Their rivers shame ours. OK, our spiders are more badass, but they’ve got a whole shirtload of critters that can rip us to shreds or swallow us whole. They are more betterer at clearing rainforests, and for mad presidents it’s hard to go past Bolsonaro, unless you’re heading for Trump.
They win for overcrowded beaches, speaking Portuguese and for Big Jesuses, but they’re so far under the Vatican heel of contra-contraception that they’re overpopulated to buggery.
Their cattle are always getting foot and mouth disease, so our cattle rule.
They’ve got the samba; we’ve got the emu dance. We’ve got the didge; they’ve got the berimbau. We’ve got the deadly Irukandji jellyfish; they’ve got deadly poison-tipped blowgun dart things.
But wait. We’ve got the wombat. What have they got? The capybara. OK, forget those other comparisons. Call them a draw. Let it all come down to this: Wombat Vs Capybara. Yeah!
The wombat is a stocky, ballsy and industrious marsupial. The capybara is an overgrown, repugnant Brazilian rat or guinea pig at best.
The wombat excavates its marvelous burrow in the great Aussie bush. Apparently, the Gulf of Carpentaria was dug by a giant wombat called Pipeline Perce. The capybara just mooches around in a swamp.
The wombat eats shoots, roots and leaves. The capybara gnaws on swamp stuff.
Wombats smell of eucalyptus and freedom. Capybaras reek of swamp.
The wombat snuffles quietly and has an armour-plated arse, which it uses to defend itself in the burrow. The capybara runs away squealing.
Being stocky and low-slung, wombats can operate in hilly country. The capybara’s centre of gravity is way too high. It could only totter about and probably fall over, roll down a hillside and injure a baby or toddler.
Wombat poop is square. Yep, square, so it doesn’t roll down a hill and land on you. Capybara poop is all runny and gross, plus it lands in the water and enrages the anacondas, and you don’t want that.
And finally, the wombat features in the world’s greatest poem, The Man from Snowy River:
‘The wild hop scrub grew thickly, and the hidden ground was full of wombat holes, and any slip was death’. And the capybara? Pfft. Are you kidding? Banjo couldn’t give a continental fig for any samba swamp rat.
Can you imagine it? ‘But his mucky swampland capybara he could barely raise a trot, he was mud from hip to shoulder from the swamp’… Zzzz, snore, boring! That’s it. All over. Australia wins.
Yep, comparisons are odious, unless you’re backing a clear winner like the Aussie wombat.
A lesson to us all.
Bullgoose
and then