TWCL

Dutch · Posted: Thu Jan 26, 2012 5:18 am Post subject: Australia Day! :)

Happy Australia to everyone, especially any lingering Aussies lurking around the forum!

Time to eat barbecued lamb chops, sink a beer, play cricket on the beach or in the backyard and take a four day weekend because tomorrow is Friday and that means the great Australian notion of 'Taking A Sickie'. Smile

And the best bit... no marching bands ANYWHERE! Very Happy

Cheers.
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Gual-kun · Joined: 23 Jun 2011 Posts: 245

It's Australia day? Well, happy day, then!
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Dutch · Posted: Thu Jan 26, 2012 1:39 pm Post subject:

Well... I wouldn't have posted something like this if it wasn't...
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ttallan · Posted: Thu Jan 26, 2012 1:42 pm Post subject:

Happy Australia Day! I'll be sure to pass that along to any Aussies I meet today. Smile

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n9uxu · Joined: 28 Mar 2008 Posts: 576 Location: Michigan

Happy Day, indeed.

Dave

Gual-kun · Joined: 23 Jun 2011 Posts: 245

Dutch wrote:

Well... I wouldn't have posted something like this if it wasn't...

C'mon. It was just an expression Razz

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Dutch · Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2012 6:34 am Post subject:

No fair enough. Smile

I guess I'm just used to posting this up most years and either having it ignored or someone taking the piss straight away. Smile

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Casual Notice · Posted: Fri Jan 27, 2012 12:48 pm Post subject:

For my fellow ignorant Americans, Australia Day is a celebration of the day that the first "settlers" former residents of England's crowded jails and debtors' prisons landed at the site of what is now Sidney. England had recently lost their former dumping ground for poor people and petty criminals when Georgia was liberated along with the rest of the newly-formed United States.

Unlike Georgia, which was only a debtors' colony, the New South Wales penal colony also included petty criminals (remembering that manslaughter was considered a petty crime if the victim was also poor). The First Fleet, the designation accorded to the prison ships that arrived at the colony in January 1788 included 188 female convicts (mostly prostitutes and women who had "Pleaded the belly").

Oddly, the official Australia Day website glosses over the importance of criminal transportation to Australia's white settlement, acting as if the newly-arrived residents of Botony Bay were just people who woke up one morning and decided to help spread the empire, and not the victims of a rigidly caste society and the soldiers assigned to guard and punish them.
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What I lack in sincerity, I make up for in sarcasm.
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stevenboats · Joined: 27 Jan 2012 Posts: 30

Americans aren't that ignorant, most of us aussies don't know why we celebrate Australia day.

Harrington AW · Joined: 26 Oct 2008 Posts: 843

Happy Australia Day!

Any country that came up with both Aussie-rules football and V8 Supercars should definitely have a day to celebrate it.

-S
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