Transcript of AE 1066 - Debunking 10 Australian Myths | Reaction

Alrighty guys, here we are again, another reaction video for you today. I am looking at the video top 10 common myths about Australia debunked, debunked and this is from Planet 1UP channel. Okay, so go check them out. Anyway, let's get into it.

Hey, everyone, I am Nate and welcome back to Planet 1UP. In today's video, we are going to be having a look at the top 10 myths about Australia, in at number 10 is that Australians ride to school on Kangaroos.

I heard this all the time growing up. I don't think, though I ever met anyone who actually asked this question of me, I don't think. Even Americans, you know, where the stereotype is that the American kid comes to Australia on an exchange and is shocked to find out that Australian kids do not ride kangaroos and they definitely don't ride them to school.

I don't know how this thing began back in the day, but it's definitely a myth that Australians love to sort of joke about with thinking that Americans believe this myth. But yeah, to be fair, I've never actually met anyone who's asked me, do you guys' ride kangaroos? What about wombats?

It would be pretty rude to actually ride a kangaroo. In fact, you'd have to be hopping mad to believe that this myth is actually true. Perhaps it is the abundance of kangaroos in Australia that lead to this widespread myth. Kangaroos are so widespread in Australia that they actually outnumber humans in population.

In 2017 data showed that Australia's kangaroo population was close to hitting 50 million.

Yeah, so we got loads of kangaroos in Australia, that part's not a myth. It kind of fluctuates, though goes up and down. I think numbers kind of depend on whether it is a drought or there's lots of water. The reason we have so many kangaroos is because a lot of the land has been cleared for us to grow crops, to have sheep, cows, everything like that on the land, and the roos eat exactly what the sheep and the cows eat, grass, right.

So, we have tons of them. You would never be able to ride a kangaroo. I think maybe a small child. I mean, if you got like a saddle and you could somehow put it on an adult red kangaroo, you might be able to put a child of like 10 kilograms on the back of that kangaroo.

But, you know, a kangaroo probably weighs about as much as a large dog, think about the average human sitting on top of a Labrador. It's not going to end well. Right. So, yeah. Poor Skippy is going to get squashed.

In at number 9 is that Sydney is the capital of Australia.

Yeah, this I have had people ask me before. I'm not sure if they were Americans. I'm not sure if they were from other parts of the world. But I've definitely heard this go around before where it's kind of a flippant comment that someone will make about Australia. Not in a negative way, necessarily. They'll just be like, oh yeah, I know, I've heard about the capital city, Sydney.

Sydney. Man, you threw Melbourne in there, and that really is messing me up, but I'm going to go Sydney. Sydney, Okay. Sydney. Sydney.

And you'll be like, God damn it, the Capitals Melbourne. I'm kidding, the Capitals Canberra, the capital city is Canberra. Sydney is the largest city in Australia, though to be fair, at least for now, Melbourne is coming for you Sydney, Melbourne is coming. We're going to overtake you in probably another 10 or 20 years. Anyway, yeah. Sydney's not the capital.

Many non-Australians make the mistake of thinking that Sydney is Australia's capital city and forgetting the small, tucked away town, trying to be a city of Canberra. And to be fair, Australian's kind of forget about Canberra, too...

That's fair enough. Canberra's got a tiny population, I think it's, you know, what, 300,000 people. So, compared to the other major cities, it is absolutely minuscule. Yeah, and there's not much reason to go there, right, unless you're a politician or you're going to one of the universities, it's kind of out of the way.

It's, you know, almost halfway between Sydney and Melbourne, a little closer to Sydney. It's not on the coast. Not much to do there. There's no snow there. Yeah, Canberra, lived there once. It was pretty nice. Lots of kangaroos, didn't ride any.

With its most memorable feature being one giant roundabout and being conveniently located in the middle of nowhere, it's easy to forget that this is the city that hosts Parliament House. Bursting a thriving population of 390,000...

Got it right!

...About 1.64% of Australia's population. Canberra is like the ugly love child of Sydney and Melbourne that everyone wants to forget, both to non-Australians and Australians alike. In at number 8 is that all Australians descended from convicts.

Well, again, who believes this? I mean, you know, Australia has an indigenous population for (beep) sake, you know. They've been here for 60,000 years; everyone knows that they've been here for ages. They're not descended from convicts. And guess what? The majority of people who live in Australia today who aren't indigenous aren't descended from convicts.

I'm not descended from convicts, and I am, you know, of Scottish English Heritage. I know I'm kind of disappointed. But that's not the case, which wasn't always the case. People used to try and hide the fact that they were descended from convicts, it was a source of shame.

Shame. Shame.

But yeah, there are- There's probably a large percentage of the Anglo-Saxon Caucasian population who are descended from convicts, but I think- I just did the census yesterday, actually. And I think from reading some of the articles, whilst this was coming out, 30% of Australians were born overseas. So, yes, the majority of Australians are not descended from convicts.

While it is true that Britain condemned more than 160,000 convicts to Australia between 1788 and 1868, it is unreasonable to think that most of Australia's population today would be descendants of these convicts. In fact, today Australia is an incredibly multicultural country with an especially large European and Asian population. In 2018, 29% of Australia's population was born overs-

Shooting these stats out before this guy even says it. Another interesting thing to mention here is that, yeah, we had I think it was about 168,000 convicts come to Australia whilst that period from, whatever it was, 1788 until, I think the mid to late 1800s of bringing convicts over was taking place.

We had way more people coming over as migrants who weren't convicts. So, the population in Australia was a hell of a lot bigger than 168,000 even 150 years ago.

A higher proportion than any other nation on Earth. Australia's population also includes over 100 religions and 300 ethnic groups. Furthermore, every single country from around the world was represented in Australia's population in 2018.

That's pretty crazy. So, we have citizens in Australia that originally come from every single other country on Earth. That's pretty epic.

In at number 7 is that everyone lives in the Australian outback. It's dead, it's arid. No one can live there.

This is something that I've been asked by people, you know, it is again, sorry to (beep) on Americans a little bit too much at the moment.

But this is the kind of thing if you went to Australia, they have seen so many movies like Crocodile Dundee and the film Australia with, I think it's Nicole Kidman and Wolverine. But they think that the average Australian's Outback has a view of that, right, or at least they think. A lot of people, a lot of people from overseas believe that.

You would probably have to drive for over a day from where I currently live to get to anywhere that looks like this. Okay, so yeah, the majority of Australia's population lives along a thin line around the coast, generally speaking. In fact, I think it's like 95% of Australia's population lives within an hour of the beach. So, yeah, there are definitely very few people with that view in their backyard.

This myth about Australia's population was...

Though, goddamn, wouldn't you want that view in your backyard? I mean, imagine waking up every morning and having that right there.

Ours is serenity.

It's probably perpetuated by the Crocodile Dundee films, leading to this wild idea that most Aussies live in the outback. The myth would lead you to believe that fighting the scorching heat of the desert, as well as crocodiles every other day is a normal day in the life of the average Australian. In reality, over 70% of Australia's population live in major cities.

That's over two thirds of the population, not to mention that about 20% of Australia's population lives in the city of Sydney alone. In fact, most Australians have probably never, ever seen a crocodile in real life. Sorry to say it, but this myth is a load of croc.

In at number 6 is, I don't need to explain it, "Shrimp on the Barbie". The popular Australian myth became widespread after the 1984 tourism campaign featuring Paul Hogan. The ad closes with the iconic line delivered by Hogan, "I'll slip an extra shrimp on the Barbie for you".

They did this because Americans call that a "shrimp", and obviously if you're doing a tourism ad for Australia, your target audience is- It's not going to be Australians, right. So, yeah, they used "shrimp" instead of what they should have used "prawn, prawn". So, if you go somewhere and ask if you can buy some shrimps, most people are probably going to say, they're prawns, mate. They're prawns. They're big, they're prawns, not little shrimps.

...Onto your shrimp, because I'm about to grill you on the inaccuracies of this myth. The most glaring issue with this ad campaign and one that Aussies would cringe over for years to come whenever the phrase was uttered by someone outside of Australia, is the fact that Aussies don't even use the word "shrimp".

In Australia they're called prawns. If I had a dollar for every time an Australian actually used the word "shrimp", I'd have no money at all.

In at number 5 is that it's always summer here. For summer reason there is a myth that it's always summer in Australia.

This one I've never heard before. I think they probably expect the weather to be incredibly mild and probably to the hotter, humidor end of it. But I think that's just the- You get to see so much from Queensland and from the tropical areas around Australia all the time that you think is just phenomenal.

But yeah, there are definitely some gloomier places in the south, east- The south parts of the country. Tasmania does not look like that all year round.

Reach scorching temperatures in the summer across the country, the highest ever recorded being 50.7 Degrees Celsius, or 123.3 degrees Fahrenheit. Certain parts of the country also face pretty extreme cold temperatures during the winter. Melbourne, in the southern part of Australia, averages a daily high of only 14 degrees Celsius during winter, which is about the same as a November day in London.

Not to mention, there are parts of Australia that are blanketed in snow throughout the winter months. Australia actually features a wide variety of climates, from deserts and grasslands to snowy mountains to tropical rainforests.

That is true, and I think the snow in Australia, if you want to go and visit it, is probably the most expensive place in the world to go skiing or snowboarding or, you know, whatever it is because there is so little of it and so many people want to go there. But it's just not good. It's not good, it's not good quality.

This is all due to the country's large geographical size, which leads us into our next myth. In at number 4 is that people believe Australia to be a small country.

That's another one that's a little bit weird. I don't think I've ever had anyone say to me, you know, Australia's tiny. And I guess it depends, is he talking about population or is he talking about geography? Because I think the average person knows the size of Australia is massive, right. Well, relatively speaking, I think it's probably a little smaller than, what is it, Russia, the US and Brazil, but it is a large, large continent.

However, the population is only 25 million or so, which is relatively small compared to countries like Russia, the US and Brazil.

Leading on from the last myth, there's also a myth that Australia is a small country, which is pretty small minded if you think about it. Because Australia is an island...

This guy's puns are just killing me. They're just killing me.

...Country with no land borders, it's hard to picture just how big the country actually is. Covering almost eight million square kilometres, Australia is actually the sixth largest country on Earth after Russia, Canada, China, the USA and Brazil. In fact, if you place a scale picture of Australia over the USA, the difference in size doesn't look much at all. Oh, and Australia is the world's large-

To be fair, the US also has Alaska.

...Island, too. In at number three is that toilets flush backwards...

This is perpetuated by The Simpsons. The Simpsons, so the idea here being that in the northern hemisphere, I think the toilets flush a certain direction if that's clockwise and then in the southern hemisphere because of, I guess, the Coriolis effect where- Someone's going to have to explain this better than me.

But I do know what is true about the spinning thing is that cyclones spin a different direction in the southern hemisphere than they do in the northern hemisphere because of the Coriolis effect. In fact, let me check that so I don't sound like an idiot if I post this and I am wrong.

Tropical cyclones rotate clockwise in the southern hemisphere, let's have a look in the northern. Counter-clockwise. Boom! And is it the Coriolis effect? The Coriolis effect describes the pattern of deflection taken by objects not firmly connected to the ground as they travel long distances around the Earth.

...The Simpsons taught us anything about Australia, it's that we call money dollaridoos and that toilets flush backwards. Thanks to the popular episode of the show, Bart verse Australia, many people think that toilets flush-

I've never had a toilet where the water does that, to be honest. Usually, it just goes down the toilet. It doesn't spin one way or the other, and I'm sure it would be much more related to the jet of water and how it's angled down the bowl than it is the Coriolis effect.

...Clockwise in Australia, as opposed to anticlockwise in the northern hemisphere. While there is...

I think he's got these around the wrong way. I think that looks like it's spinning this way, doesn't it?

...Some science behind the origin of the myth being its link to the Coriolis effect. The myth is...

Man, I'm on fire with all this, I got knowledge bombs galore today.

All right, Morty, don't break an arm jerking yourself off.

...Mostly a load of- Well, you get the picture. The Coriolis effect is where flow patterns are affected by the Earth's rotation, which explains natural phenomena like hurricanes. A toilet flush is way too small to be affected by the Coriolis effect, though, and the direction of the spiral of water is usually a result of simple things like the toilet design, plumbing and the water pressure.

Man, I'm on it. I'm just anticipating everything this guy is going to say.

And at number 2 is drop bears. Dropping in at number two, I'm about to finally let you in on the truth about one of Australia's most elusive and fearsome creatures, the drop bear.

These things are like Santa Claus, so. Except instead of children, its foreigners, right. So, yeah, we make this sort of joke. And I remember, in fact, being out doing some field work and there was an American guy with us. We were telling him, and we convinced him that there were these carnivorous koalas that lived in the trees and would wait for unsuspecting marsupials or other animals to go below the tree.

And they would just drop out of the tree and, you know, just savage this thing like a lion and a wildebeest on the Serengeti plains. And he was terrified for at least a day or two until we broke it to him that we were full of (beep).

They are 100% real. That's it. Don't come to Australia. You'll be killed by a drop bear. Okay, but for real now, drop bears are actually a hoax. The story goes that drop bears are an arboreal, predatory marsupial related to the koala that drops in on its prey, that being people.

The animal is often used in stories to scare tourists. There are some suggested folk remedies that are said to act as a repellent to drop bears. These include having forks in your hair or Vegemite or toothpaste spread behind the ears.

All right, guys. So, what do you reckon number 1 is going to be? Okay. Pause the video, go down into the comments and tell me, what do you think the biggest myth in Australia is going to be? Because I don't know what it is. I think it's probably going to be that Vegemite tastes bad.

Number one. One of the myths that people believe about Australia is that everything is trying to kill you.

I should have known that. I should have known that.

If you're dying to take a vacation to Australia, the thought that the wildlife wants to kill you has probably made you reconsider. Australia has gained a reputation for being home to the world's deadliest animals, and this is partly true due to the residents...

I love how the drop bear is on that image, so all these other animals are actual animals and then it has the drop bear there. You can see him like skydiving. Classic, and the ears are flung up. That's amazing. I need to print that out and put that on my wall.

And this is partly true due to the residence, saltwater crocodile, sharks, spiders, snakes and the blue ringed octopus. It's not hard to see why this claim has been blown out of proportion. In reality, though, it's unlikely that you'll actually cross paths with many of these dangerous animals, let alone be killed by one of them.

You have to go out of your way to find things like venomous snakes or the two human killing spiders in Australia. You're not just going to come across these when you're at your desk, you know, in suburban Australia, studying at home or something.

The same with crocodiles, I mean, in northern parts of Australia, they are a little more all over the place. But again, they take maybe one or two people a year doing something like, you know, going for a swim where they shouldn't go for a swim.

Yeah, I would be much more terrified about dogs, horses, driving at night because deer or cows or kangaroos could hit the front of the car. You know, there are plenty of other things- Heart disease, man.

You know, the average person, if they wanted to put things into proportion, would be terrified to go through the McDonald's or the Macca's drive thru because they are much more likely to die of a heart attack, probably sitting there waiting for their burger, than by getting bitten by a snake. There have been no confirmed spider bite deaths in Australia since 1979 and on average only 1.5 People die from a shark attack each year.

It's 0.5 because the shark keeps the other half. Yeah, I don't know. But that goes to show how few people actually die from shark attacks in Australia.

In fact, you're more likely to be attacked by a shark in the US than you are in Australia. Surprisingly, the most animal related deaths that occur in Australia...

Horses, and you know why? Because people fall off horses.

...From riding horses and other transport animals.

All right, guys, I think that's probably enough. Go check out this guy's channel, Planet 1UP. Let me know in a comment below what are some other myths that you've heard about Australia? And besides that, if you're learning Australian English, go check out this video. See ya.