My wife and I were enjoying breakfast (me, poached eggs; her, a bizarre, mexican-themed omelette which smelled preposterously good) in our courtyard. Knowing my penchant for quizzes, she offered to read me the one she'd come across whilst leafing through the Sunday Times. Had I known it was a quiz that focused solely on Western Australia - after all, it is the Foundation Day long weekend - I'd probably have declined. (For no real reason other than churlishness.) And if I had, I'd have failed to stumble across something rather interesting.
The quiz moved through the standard fare of Governors and Premiers, the odd ship-wreck, a few token women and absolutely no indigenous mentions at all. (It was the Sunday Times, after all.) All this rather dry history soon gave way to the bulk of the quiz; sport. Whilst I'm sure there will be some written complaints from the Cable estate (nary a mention of the good - as opposed to the once-red-and-white-now-red-and-blue "big bad" variety of Barries), it was a good selection. The one about locally born Brownlow winners had me racking my brains. (There are six, by the way.)
And there were a few animal questions, for the kids, just to round things out. A question about WA's floral emblem. Fine. A question about our faunal emblem. Fine. A question about our bird emblem. Also faunal, so a bit of a double-up, but fine. A question about our fossil emblem. Pardon?
Yep, we have a fossil emblem. I wondered, when had this happened? Did Aboriginal Australians have a faunal emblem that has subsequently long ceased to be? Or did we decide at some point that we needed an emblem of an ex-beast in order to give our state crest a few extra teeth? I was intrigued to say the least.
And it got me thinking about who gets to come up with this stuff. I mean, if fossils get a guernsey, why can't emblem-selection be a little more lateral? I'd like to nominate the bunyip as our mythical emblem. Heck, why does an emblem need to be something that pertains to life in some way? I reckon granite would make a pretty fine rock emblem, the dumper a redoubtable choice for wave emblem, the hammock a natural choice for furniture emblem, and, of course, the iconic (and largely undrinkable) Emu Export as our lager emblem.
It's a simple enough lateral proposal; if it exists of a type, it needs an emblem henceforth. Modesty prevents me from nominating this humble site as our blog emblem, but feel free to sing its praises of your own volition. I'm mentally designing our creast already.
And if you were wondering, our fossil emblem is the gogo fish. Which I guess should be re-named the gonegone fish. But there you go. I'm going to find a picture, and get me a t-shirt made. After all, you've got to support these things, don't you?
Yep, you sure do.
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