My mum’s family’s were/are RC and my dads family were a staunchly Methodist family and they often referred to my mums family as “left footers” and now I am going to “look up” where that saying comes from lol

I haven’t heard that one in a long time, but yes. Thanks Old Sparkles for the link to its origin.

Childhood influences ... Two nights ago I was chatting by email with a niece in Australia, explaining that my son was a lifelong anti-war pacifist. I gave as an example, an incident in his early childhood when (aged four or five) he protested his mother's loud and frantic slaughter of a cockroach by the kitchen door. "What have cockroaches ever done to you?" he sobbed.

He passed that philosophy on to his daughters, in their time. When staying with us grandparents, we have always had to trap cockroaches under a glass and slip a sheet of paper underneath, and release them outside. The girls are in their twenties now, but the house rule still holds good.

<<<SNIP>>>

Saw a mouse-sized cockroach in a department store today. Checking out the jewellery bargains. Live and let shop.

The cockroaches always use to come out and help when our Aussie friends use to have a barbecue lol I dreaded when they use to ask us over for their bbq’s. A mouse in the UK news has been caught on camera at night tidying up a garden shed…..I kid you not.

And I just thought of another Australian -o ending. How could I have forgotten "Nasho" for National Service (in the army, for three months in 1959)? A waste of time, as it happened; I never found any practical use for my skill at bayoneting a sack of potatoes. Anybody else old enough here to have done their Nasho?

I heard about the mouse - think it was mentioned in the 'WTF back in the UK' thread in the lounge.

Can't say the cats have brought many mice in recently - I'm gonna guess the snakes dealt with them. We had one in the house recently (snake not mouse) - that has made me a bit cautious at times. Feel sorry for the woman in QLD who had one in the bed

During my time in Australia I did not mind the bugs/flies etc (I religiously used surface spray so never had a problem) but I hated snakes…still have dreams about them, luckily never had any on our properties but did see them out and about urgh….over Christmas we watched the Crocodile Dundee movies showing on tv, we laughed (do not make movies like that anymore) and you certainly hear “Aussie slang” some even I had not heard lol.

My sister, yesterday

On enquiry

My Dad always referred to a snake as a "joey" - short for "Joe Blake". I don't know how common that rhyming slang was in Australia, or if it still is.

Wiki gave this - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Joe_Blake

The quotes attached to the Australian slang use are all recent.

I've most recently heard 'danger noodles' - general snakes, or 'nope ropes' - snakes that can do damage / kill.

I read an interesting book several years ago, “Why You Are Australian.” It was written by a woman for her children, and it was a memoir of her decision to leave the UK and return to Australia to bring her children up in her home country.

Anyway, one part came to mind reading the last few posts. She spoke about British women marvelling at how clean and tidy Aussies were in the kitchen: no leaving food scraps out and dishes soaking overnight in the sink. And she explained the reality of sharing your environment with a lot of very determined little critters, so that cleanliness was second nature unless you were ok with pests sharing your benches and food. And I can vouch for that lol

We had a similar experience visiting family in Florida - being lectured on washing all crockery thoroughly, before putting it in the dishwasher.

Another shrimp for the barbie... Has anybody here done the train trip from Melbourne to Perth, on the "Nullabor Special" or whatever they call it? Linda and I did it in 1971, and the most memorable aspect of it was waking up to the exact same scenery out the window for three mornings in a row! Not boring, and not interesting either: just... a different experience! I've been told that the train across Canada offers the same sort of experience; and the one across Russia probably does as well. I'd like to have done both of those, but never did.

I'm a fan of Graham Hancock and his books, and at the moment am re-reading his "Magicians of the Gods". He speculates that a giant comet smacked the Earth 12,800 years or so ago, and destroyed the pre-Sumerian civilisation that existed then. Further, he suspects that it (the comet) returns regularly about every 12,800 years, or so.

If that is the case, one of those visits might well have been what prompted our ancestral "modern humans" to leave Africa and scatter to the four corners of the Earth, beginning 100,000 or 200,000 years ago. Those "four corners" included Australia, before the oceans rose.

What do you reckon?