Naaman Zhou 

What’s the go with the memes? A roundup of Australia’s best in 2018

From Knickers the big cow to a whispered ‘G’day’, we shared some beauties. Privilege!
  
  

A collection of memes from 2018
Do you know your Knickers from your ScoMo cap? Australian memes lit up the internet in 2018. Photograph: Lucas Coch/Dan Peled/Mick Tsika/The Guardian/AAP

A form of madness gripped the country this year. As all about us people lost their heads – over leadership, plastic bags and trips to Hong Kong – Australians on the internet, by and large, kept theirs and made comedic hay.

Usually – it is no shame to admit – Australia relies on the rest of the world for memes, but 2018 was a bumper crop for homegrown content. Fed and watered by political chaos, Australian memes grew strong and flowered. We made some real beauties – here they are.

Knickers the big cow

The list must start with the big boy. The lad who grew too large for the slaughterhouse, Knickers, the humongous unit, became an international celebrity in November, when an expertly framed TV shot shocked the world.

Originally unearthed by the ABC, the massive 1.94-metre-tall Holstein Friesian steer is taller than Arnold Schwarzenegger and only 8.7cm shorter than the world record. Everyone loved him.

The laws of tall-poppy syndrome meant that he then had to weather a storm of slander. A misleading attack article from the Washington Post claimed he was somehow “a lie”, while jealous Canadians dug up their own, far less interesting big cow.

Thankfully, Guardian Australia’s expert analysis confirmed Knickers was indeed a big, beautiful boy.

Mark Latham wore a dirty polo and oversized shorts to the PM’s XI

The meme that explains itself. On the fateful day of 20 January 2016, the former Labor leader wore a dirty polo shirt and oversized shorts to the prime minister’s XI – an annual invitational cricket match in Canberra.

The Twitter user @mesut_ausil saw him, and the image never left his mind. Over the next two years, he unrelenting tweeted the phrase in increasingly inspired ways, frequently wrapping in news, memes and current events.

In July @patr1ceo created a compilation of greatest hits and spread it to a wider audience.

From its origins:

To its development:

Seasons came and went but the message stayed the same:

Eventually, Latham blocked him.

“Well ... well”

The South Australian Liberal senator Lucy Gichuhi became an international meme this year with a 14-second interview.

In it, she responds to a tricky question from a reporter by saying “Well … well,” then laughs before leaving.

The footage came from February, when Gichuhi was asked about the then employment minister, Michaelia Cash, casting aspersions on young women in Bill Shorten’s office.

Gichuhi dodged the question masterfully and a meme was born. Americans picked up the video, mostly without knowing who she was, and applied it to a range of generally awkward scenarios.

Needles in strawberries

In September needles were found in strawberries across the country. The scare spread to other fruits, tonnes of produce were destroyed and Scott Morrison upped the jail term for food contamination to 15 years.

Thankfully, nobody was seriously injured. After a few weeks, Australians began to laugh about the whole thing.

What’s the go with the au pairs?

The question that dominated August had a convoluted back story. In March it was revealed that the home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, had intervened to grant visas to foreign au pairs who were about to be deported by his own department. Apart from that tantalising, bizarre fact, the government refused to release anything else. In August, questions began to mount.

Why was Dutton granting visas to au pairs but not refugees? Who uses au pairs? The intrigue could only be expressed in one all-encompassing question: “What’s the go?”

Initially driven mostly by @matttburke, the meme grew the more the government obfuscated.

Eventually Guardian Australia revealed what the go actually was. There was a second au pair – and a polo player.

But the meme continued, and it now appears in Hansard numerous times.

Scott Morrison’s hats

After landing the top job in August, Australia’s new prime minister embarked on the boldest election campaign since “It’s Time” in 1972: he wore a never-ending series of new caps.

His headwear frequently combined with another meme – his terrible PR videos. There was the bizarre non-sit, the fake phone, and treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s tribute act – somehow even worse.

The memes merged in a video message to Mick Fanning’s mum.

Honourable mention must also go to Morrison’s Fatman Scoop video and the short-lived “who fuckin’ tonight” meme.

Plastic bag ban

At the end of June, Coles and Woolworths stopped giving out free single-use plastic bags across the country. Despite South Australia, the Northern Territory, the Australian Capital Territory and Tasmania already having bans in place, the rest of the country lost its mind.

Angry shoppers stole bags and attacked staff, while the News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt delivered an impassioned defence of the bags in print and on TV.

The collective inability to deal became a fantastic meme.

The absurdity ramped up in August, when Coles backflipped on the ban because customers were having such a hard time adjusting – but then backflipped on that backflip the next day after fierce criticism.

What’s wrong with this photo? NOTHING

In September Four Corners dedicated a full episode to an interview of the former Trump adviser and Breitbart editor Steve Bannon by the senior ABC reporter Sarah Ferguson.

The move split her colleagues at the ABC, with many arguing it normalised Bannon’s dangerous views and gave him a pass on his history of racism and Islamophobia, months after he had lost any role with public influence or importance.

At the same time, the New Yorker festival was facing criticism – it invited Bannon to speak but backtracked after a fierce boycott.

Ferguson defended her decision, posting a chummy photo with Bannon and a series of hashtags referencing the New Yorker controversy (#NewYorkerBoycott) and calling for open-mindedness (#stopsilos).

The brashness of the photo offended some, and for others, spawned a meme. They copied Ferguson’s phrasing and applied it to either a) other far-right figures, b) weird pairings involving two people, or c) generally displeasing images.

I pull you close and whisper ‘G’day mate’

On the second last Monday before Christmas, the Nationals MP and assistant minister Andrew Broad delivered a horrible gift.

Broad resigned his post after New Idea magazine revealed he had inappropriately contacted a woman through a dating site while on an official trip overseas.

One message, revealed in the story, was so bizarre and cringeworthy it became a phenomenon. After asking, “Do you like Aussie accents?,” Broad followed up with, “I pull you close, run my strong hands down your back, softly kiss your neck and whisper ‘Gday mate’.”

It was the perfect template.Any reference from the past 12 months could be pencilled in – a custom-made summary of the year.

The meme that got away – ‘Privilege’

Finally, here one that never took off as it should have. This phenomenon-in-waiting was posted to Twitter by the journalist Rick Morton in November – unfortunately just one day before the emergence of Knickers, who overshadowed it just as he overshadows smaller cattle.

In it, two executives from the Retail Food Group appear before a parliamentary inquiry. Pretty uninteresting. Except that, for some reason, they have been advised by their lawyer that they must say the word “privilege” every time they speak.

The Labor senator Deb O’Neil, incredibly confused, explains to them that they don’t need to. The Nationals senator John Williams adds: “Anything that is said here …you’re covered under parliamentary privilege [already].”

Tony Alford replies: “Privilege! My advice, with respect, is that I should use the term privilege prior to responding to any questions.”

And so they do:

 

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