“Australians are descended from a boatload of English convicts, right? So two hundred years in isolation at the bottom of the planet is plenty of time for the language to evolve into some sort of double-speak prison slang.”

“Hey, any idea why Australians speak something that sounds deceptively like English but isn’t? I mean, I’m trying to figure out why I can’t seem to converse with another human being who speaks the same language as I do.”

“When she reaches down to touch his shoulder—a gesture only a few species and a million or so years removed from lifting a leg and marking him as her territory with a stream of urine—enough bracelets and bangles to lay track across the Australian Outback slide down her arm and come to a jangling stop at her wrist.”

“Okay, so English settlers brought rabbits with them to Australia to breed for food and stuff, right? But they escaped and basically started destroying the country, eating the vegetation, that kind of thing. So by the early 1900s, the government was trying to figure out a way to get rid of all the rabbits. Want to hear what their genius plan was? The rabbit-proof fence. Worked out great for the rabbits. Once they learned how to play badminton and got the hang of tennis on grass, they couldn’t remember how they ever lived without it. Supposedly there was something like six hundred million rabbits by 1950. But you’re missing the point. The point is that even though it was pretty obvious from the beginning it wasn’t working, they kept right on building it—two thousand miles of it.”

“Oh, I have plenty of problems with Rabbit, it’s just that my comfort level with his name is standing in line behind about a hundred more important things.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but Australians have a LOT of bitches on their cashola.”

“How was I supposed to know ‘lucked out’ means ‘I got screwed over’ in Australian?”