Paul Hogan has reportedly called Pauline Hanson a ‘pelican’. Please explain? | Australian politics
With one swift rhetorical blow, Crocodile Dundee has neutralized Pauline Hanson’s latest attack on multiculturalism.
But his choice of weapon left some scratching their heads.
Australian politics has spent a week recovering from the impact of the right-wing One Nation leader’s attempt to explain the controversial concept of “Australian monoculture”, which he first introduced in his National Press Club speech this month.
In his Senate speech on Wednesday, the One Nation leader said: “Bring back Paul Hogan and Norman Gunston. “These are the basic features of the Australian monoculture and there is nothing even remotely exclusionary about them.”
In response, Crocodile Dundee star Hogan said: Tracked by Australian Financial Review We came across a bird metaphor when we went to Venice Beach in California.
“It’s a pelican, yeah,” he reportedly said (adding that Hanson “looks a lot like the stupid idiot over here”).
What? Pelican? Is this… an insult?
Hogan’s role in Australian vernacular is controversial. The 86-year-old national treasure has yet to fully recover from the impact of urging Americans to “take another shot.” prawn On Barbie”.
But it is a deep well of Australian slang and appreciated by academics. Making “G’day” stand out internationally.
Fair dinkum. So, going back to “pelican”, what exactly does it mean? Hogan has some form ahead of time. In 1986’s Crocodile Dundee, its title character tells a New York motorist: “Get on the right side of the road, you pelican!”
Another Australian actor, Russell Crowe, is He reportedly tweeted After the Rabbitohs’ 2014 NRL grand final win, one of the club’s sponsors was revealed to be a “pelican” when he was on the mound supporting rival team Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs. The manager said he was misunderstood and Crowe deleted the tweet.
Its use as an insult dates back much further. King Lear III. In Act scene 4, the eponymous character says of the greedy, power-hungry Goneril and Regan, “‘she was born of this flesh/They were pelican daughters.’ New Oxford Shakespeare says about this sentence: “It is alleged that young pelicans feed on the blood of their mothers.”
Was Hogan reaching for Shakespeare to criticize Hanson’s ruthless political ambition? Apparently…unlikely.
Australians are no strangers to using native wildlife, especially birds, as insults: see also galah, thousand chickens, drongo.
There is no specific entry for “pelican” in the Australian National Dictionary, but the consensus on the internet is that it means a fool or clown, based on the perception that the bird is slow-moving and has a clumsy physiognomy.
Of course, this is quite unfair to an animal. BirdLife Australia calls “Extremely mobile,” working cooperatively in groups “to direct fish into a dense mass,” and “able to fly to heights of up to 3,000 meters,” these are all positive qualities for a potential prime.
Indeed, the bird has risen steadily in Guardian Austalia’s Bird of the Year polls, thanks in part to public awareness campaigns by reporter Matilda Boseley.
Insult or not, this all adds fuel to Hanson’s controversial publicity machine. But Hogan didn’t mean it as a compliment, AFR reported.
“He’s obviously living in the past,” he said of Hanson. “How [Australia] Will we become a monoculture? As far as we know, we are all immigrants except Aborigines. [in Australia] “For 60,000 years.”
He added: “I want to die in Australia, in a multicultural Australia!”
So much for monoculture? This isn’t a knife, Pauline. This a knife.
