David Hunt > Quotes

“Captain James Kirk was named after Captain James Cook and the USS Enterprise was named after the HMS Endeavour. Star Trek’s catchphrase “to boldly go where no man has gone before” was inspired by Cook’s journal entry “ambition leads me … farther than any other man has been before me”. Enterprise and Endeavour, the first and last space shuttles, were named after the ships of Kirk and Cook. There are bound to be other links between Captain Cook, Star Trek and the US Space Program and some Australian university will no doubt award a grant to explore this issue of undisputed national significance.”
― David Hunt, Girt

“The first colonial teenagers rejected their parents’ values, as teenagers have done ever since Cain and Abel decided to get away from all that hippy nature stuff. They were sober, industrious and, if truth be told, not much fun. They laboured uncomplainingly in the sun, exercised in the fresh air, swam in the sea and were, on average, six inches taller than the malnourished British stock from which they had sprung. Within a single generation, the Artful Dodger had transformed into Chesty Bond.”
― David Hunt, Girt

“The First Fleet was one of the world’s first examples of a Public–Private Partnership, a business model designed to allow government to avoid responsibility, the private sector to maximise profits, and the consumer to wake up in a dark alley with no trousers and a feeling that he really should have said no to that last drink.”
― David Hunt, Girt

“Australia was the place to be. Unless you were black. Or a woman. Or gay. Or suspected of being Irish. Or even worse, all of the above.”
― David Hunt, Girt

“While the British were completely off the mark in naming the Seven Years’ War and the Hundred Years’ War, the Germans are a pedantically efficient people. When they committed to the Thirty Years’ War, you could rest assured that the war would run for precisely thirty years.”
― David Hunt, True Girt

“Australia owes its existence to tea, tax evasion, criminals and cannabis. With these four sturdy pillars as its foundation, what could possibly go wrong?”
― David Hunt, Girt

“The name Sydney derives from Saint Denis of Paris, the patron saint of headaches and hang-overs. Denis was also known as Dionysius, a name inherited from the Greek god of wine, drunkenness and wild orgies. Alcoholic excess is built into the very name of Sydney.”
― David Hunt, Girt

“Britain sent in its gunboats, told the Chinese they had to keep smoking its gear, insisted on free access and European settlement rights in five Chinese ports and demanded Hong Kong as compensation for the inconvenience of being forced to invade. 22”
― David Hunt, True Girt

“In 1801, the visiting French naturalist, François Péron, noted that “after residing a year or two at Port Jackson, most of the English prostitutes became remarkably fruitful”. Rather than attributing this to changes in climate and diet, he believed the fertility of the “disgusting prostitutes” was linked to “the sudden revolution in their moral conduct”, paradoxically arguing that a reduction in sexual activity resulted in more babies, as “an excess of sexual intercourse destroys the sensibility of the female organs”.”
― David Hunt, Girt

“The English took their anti-Catholicism seriously. Catholics kept sneaking back onto the throne, so they passed laws that the monarch could not “professe the Popish religion” or “marry a Papist”. In Ireland, Catholics were barred from holding public office and fined for not attending Anglican services. Irish Catholics could not own firearms or horses worth more than £5 and were forbidden from taking custody of orphans, to protect vulnerable youth from the taint of Papism. When a Protestant landowner died, his land passed to his eldest son: when a Catholic died, the Popery Act required his land to be split among his sons, breaking up the great Catholic estates. The law also required that Catholic churches be made from wood, so that they could be burned down more easily when the local Catholics misbehaved.”
― David Hunt, Girt

“Their ambition to remake New South Wales in their own image was fuelled by a powerful elixir, a draught that men would kill and die for, a base liquid that they would transmute into gold. Its name was …”
― David Hunt, Girt

“The terms “to go commando” or “to go regimental”, meaning to dress without underpants, derive from the official (un)dress code of Scottish military regiments. During the First World War, Scots officers on the Western Front would check that their troops were not wearing underwear under their kilts, aided by a mirror attached to the end of a golf club.”
― David Hunt, Girt

“and scientifically certified Japanese school lunch boxes.26”
― David Hunt, True Girt

“When God was handing out venom, He started with Australia and then got bored. There”
― David Hunt, True Girt

“Grose was lazy and corpulent, with stunned-fish eyes and a prodigious double chin that suggested somewhere in heaven a cherub was desperately searching for its missing buttocks.”
― David Hunt, Girt

“Bligh attempted to characterise the coup against him as revenge for his efforts to curb the spirit trade, while Johnston and the other rebels maintained it was because he was an insufferable twat. In 1855, William Howitt, a rabid teetotaller who blamed all of the evils of the world on alcohol, drank Bligh’s rum-spiked Kool-Aid and renamed the Great Rebellion of 1808 the Rum Rebellion. The name stuck.”
― David Hunt, Girt

“27 It was up to the white man to give these things to the Aborigines, along with the other trappings of Western civilisation like beads and mirrors, trousers and the treatments for smallpox and syphilis. It was even up to the white man to give the Aborigines smallpox and syphilis.”
― David Hunt, Girt

“The French were disgusted by the increasingly popular English custom of installing toilets in residential dwellings, which, flush notwithstanding, they regarded as unhygienic. The French derisively referred to an indoor toilet as “un lieu à l’anglaise” or “an English place”, which is a possible origin of the term “loo”.”
― David Hunt, Girt

“Australian farmers whinge in cycles. When they’re not moaning about insufficient drought assistance, they’re demanding subsidised scuba gear for their cattle. This is because Australia doesn’t have regular seasons like other continents. Instead it has El Niño and La Niña, which are Spanish for shitty weather.”
― David Hunt, Girt

“Some scientists now attribute these personality changes to a dietary deficiency caused by intestinal worms. Others say he was just in a shitty mood.”
― David Hunt, Girt

“And while the world's other great powers saw Australia's unparalleled girtedness as an excellent reason to steer clear of the joint, Britain saw it as a virtue, for it needed a place to stash all its pickpockets, sheep thieves and Irishmen. Britain fervently hoped that the tyranny of distance and the despotism of lots of water would prevent its undesirables from walking back to London.”
― David Hunt, Girt

“put a Bushells in the microwave”
― David Hunt, Girt

“a strange brown paste that could transform a simple piece of toast into a simple piece of toast covered in a strange brown paste. A people who called themselves Australians”
― David Hunt, Girt

“British sailors liked a drink. And then they liked another one. The Admiralty knew what to do with a drunken sailor, but was struggling to work out what to do with 60,000 of them. In 1740, it responded by diluting the daily rum ration with water, a mysterious liquid that the sailors viewed with great suspicion. The resulting mixture was known as grog.

...

New South Wales was run by sailors, so the colony’s love affair with rum was inevitable. The colonists loved rum so much that they used the term to describe all liquor. Australians nurse an etymological hangover from the colony’s rum-obsessed early days, with “grog” still used as a generic Australian term for any alcoholic drink.”
― David Hunt, Girt

“The thriftiness of Scots is well recognised in the commercial world. McFrugal is Scotland’s most popular online hardware chain, while Scotch tape received its name after a client of the 3M company criticised the lack of adhesive in the middle of the tape and told a salesman to take the product back to his “Scotch bosses”. 3M embraced the Scotch name because economising was regarded as a virtue during the Great Depression era in which the tape was invented.”
― David Hunt, Girt

“Darwin moved on from islands and tortoises in 1871, with the publication of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. In this work, Darwin stated his long-held belief that man and ape shared a common ancestor, which pissed off the churches and honest Godfearing folk He also argued that the male desire to excel was driven by female choosiness in selecting a mate (sexual selection) and that men choosing bigger and better weapons and tools over the years had caused them to "become superior to woman", which, unsurprisingly, pissed off a lot of women. Darwin also challenged the dominant view of the time that the human races were separate species, which pissed off the Confederate Americans, who argued that it was their inalienable right to own black folk who picked cotton for free.”
― David Hunt, True Girt

“Island life, with all of its quirks and anachronisms, also fascinated Alfred Russel Wallace. Wallace developed a theory of evolution based on natural selection before Darwin published his, but the fact that he was not an independently wealthy gentleman who owned a country house with a swan-encrusted ornamental lake and hedge maze meant Darwin got all the glory. Wallace’s Island Life considered how isolation could preserve animals such as Mauritius’s dodo and New Zealand’s moa, but left them totally unprepared for contact with dogs, pigs and hungry sailors and/ or Māori, which rapidly population-bottlenecked them into extinction.”
― David Hunt, True Girt

“Australia, as its most viciously eloquent prime minister, Paul Keating, once pointed out, “is the arse end of the world”. So what inspired Great Britain to select distant Botany Bay as the outhouse of its empire? Let’s start with tea.”
― David Hunt, Girt

“The irritating thing about pedants is that they are almost always right.”
― David Hunt, Girt

“The male convicts came from a variety of professions, while most of the females were domestic servants or “singlewomen of no trade”. Terrified that they would be regarded as seamstresses, these women would sometimes invent occupations to convince magistrates of their virtue. One, when asked what work she did, enigmatically replied, “I serve with asparagus.”
― David Hunt, Girt