I reckon Port Arthur is a solid contender with its low population of 251 (known for being the site of a mass shooting that led to significant changes in Australian gun laws). It is fading in name recognition as time goes on though, after all that was approaching 30 years ago and lots of people have been born since then.

My top pick however would be Bega with its population of 5013 and the name recognition the cheese factory has brought. It’s hard to go past a name that’s printed on cheese (and assorted other products now) in the vast majority of supermarkets across Australia, and they even export overseas to get a bit of international cachet.

Fair enough, it does have associations there. Pretty sure I’d toss y’all in the same basket though if I heard anyone trying to make it a thing…

Why bother with importing y’all when we already have yous (or youse depending on how you want to spell it)? Or you could just treat ‘you guys’ as gender neutral, it effectively is these days with how people use it.

Looks like I could buy one for $55k (AU) - would be kind of fun to have actually and cheaper than a lot of new 4wds. Pity some wowsers had issues with it running around with a machine gun, I feel like that’d reduce traffic problems…

I’m sure I’ve read worse but one that stands out as making me question the time I put into reading it is Out of the Dark by David Weber. I go into it expecting a military sci fi, and for the vast majority of the book that’s what you get - aliens invade Earth and plucky humans resist etc etc. The aliens however have more reserves and air superiority so are slowly winning as the end of the book approaches, at which point you expect the main characters to pull a rabbit out of the hat and do something different. Except that’s not what happens.

I was definitely not satisfied with this ending, even if there was some foreshadowing earlier in the book that made sense after knowing this was a possibility in this universe.

Far from the only one, I think there’s plenty which could plausibly be a duck. It’s just that most people seem to be going for one of these ducks:

Or one of these ducks:

instead of one of these ducks:

Reading the news while having breakfast, though it’s now on my laptop instead of the newspapers I started this habit with.

The ACT does get a bit cold in winter, but I feel like it’s closer to England than Finland (if England was drier and actually got hot in summer anyway). We are after all talking minimums of -5 or -6 for the coldest days in winter and snow normally only settling on the tops of the nearby mountain range (and temporarily at that).

I’ve found a plunger useful for a sink occasionally, a bit of back and forth plunging can loosen up a hairball or break a layer of fat/soap scum. On the other hand I’ve never needed to use a plunger on a toilet - I don’t know how much of this is exaggeration on the internet but Australian toilets don’t seem to have anywhere near the amount of issues the American designs do.

It’d be interesting to see how much this changes if you were to restrict the training dataset to books written in the last twenty years, I suspect the model would be a lot less negative. Older books tend to include stuff which does not fit with modern ideals and it’d be a real struggle to avoid this if such texts are used for training.

For example I was recently reading a couple of the sequels to The Thirty-Nine Steps (written during WW1) and they include multiple instances that really date them to an earlier era with the main character casually throwing out jarringly racist stuff about black South Africans, Germans, the Irish, and basically anyone else who wasn’t properly English. Train an AI on that and you’re introducing the chance for problematic output - and chances are most LLMs have been trained on this series since they’re now public domain and easily available.

Nutbush City Limits might have a chance then, we’ll see whether Australian public schools are still teaching the dance in a couple of hundred years…

I never had a problem with walking around cows as a kid and I did it pretty often. Visitors would get spooked occasionally because cows love to follow you and see what you’re up to, but I never got chased or anything. That was beef cattle country though so these cows were mainly cows (female) and steers (castrated males). I’ve heard that some bulls could be territorial however so your mileage may vary if one is around - the couple I’ve walked around were fine but your chances of issues are higher with them.