Famously known as “that country that was colonized by criminals” and “that country where the people previously known as criminals did really bad things to the indigenous population” – Australia is now trying really hard to reform its bad boy image. 

This country of 23M people and a whole bunch of land has really distinguished itself on modern world stage in four areas: 

1. Having attractive people (go figure that a country seeded with rebels would all turn out to be various shades of James Dean)

2. Being the home of the Hemsworth brothers (current count 3)

3. Having an excellent Olympic Swim Team

4. Slang – the obscure type, where they make up a word and assign it a definition. It’s like Australia was playing a massive international game of Scrabble, ran out of good letters, made stuff up and then got frustrated everytime England said “I do declare, but that is not a word!” – so they decided to make these words official. 

Here are some examples:

• Goon: boxed wine 
• Pluggaz: flip flops
• Dunny: toilet
• Bonza: awesome
• Drongo: idiot
• Seps: Americans (short for “septic tank,” pretty sure this one is somehow racist)

There are of course, other things Aussies are known for: having at attractive accent, putting eggs and beetroot on burgers, and being so far ahead in time zones that they can see the future. 

Most importantly though, it is a country with a complicated past that hasnt yet fully healed, or really, even figured out how to deal with the issues, but over time and with some more effort it will.

And so today, I say a sad goodbye, with the great Australia salute – not a single hand wave, not a double hand wave, but more of a swat (because the Australian Salute involves waving away flies – this joke doesn’t work as well as I had hoped)

So Long, Oz…you’ve been beautiful.