On Wednesday, in a Senate speech, the One Nation leader said: \u201cBring back Paul Hogan and Norman Gunston<\/a>. These are the essential features of Australian monoculture, and there\u2019s nothing remotely exclusionary about them.\u201d<\/p>\n In response, Crocodile Dundee star Hogan, tracked down by the Australian Financial Review<\/a> to Venice Beach, California, reached for a bird metaphor.<\/p>\n \u201cShe\u2019s a pelican, yeah,\u201d he reportedly said (adding that Hanson \u201csounds very much like this stupid boofhead over here, Trump\u201d).<\/p>\n A what? A pelican? Is that \u2026 an insult?<\/p>\n Hogan\u2019s role in the Australian vernacular is contested. The 86-year-old national treasure is yet to fully recover from urging Americans to throw \u201ca shrimp<\/a> on the barbie<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n But he\u2019s a deep well of Australian slang, and is credited by academics for giving \u201cG\u2019day\u201d international prominence<\/a>.<\/p>\n Fair dinkum. So going back to \u201cpelican\u201d, what does he mean exactly? Well, Hogan has prior form. In 1986\u2019s Crocodile Dundee itself, his titular character tells a New York driver: \u201cGet on the right side of the road, ya pelican!\u201d<\/p>\n Another Australian actor, Russell Crowe, reportedly tweeted<\/a> after the Rabbitohs\u2019 2014 NRL grand final win that one of the club\u2019s sponsors was a \u201cpelican\u201d after he was overhead to back the opposing team, the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs. The executive said he had been misconstrued, and Crowe deleted the tweet.<\/p>\n Two innocent pelicans, who would very much like to be excluded from this narrative. Photograph: Jenny Evans\/Getty Images<\/p>\n Its usage as an insult goes back much further. In Act III scene 4 of King Lear, the eponymous character says of the grasping, power-hungry Goneril and Regan \u201c\u2018twas this flesh begot\/Those pelican daughters\u201d. The New Oxford Shakespeare says of this line: \u201cyoung pelicans supposedly fed on their mother\u2019s blood\u201d.<\/p>\n Was Hogan reaching to Shakespeare to criticise Hanson\u2019s ruthless political ambition? It seems \u2026 unlikely.<\/p>\n Australians are no strangers to using native wildlife, and particularly birds, as insults: see also galah, bin chicken, drongo.<\/p>\n A specific entry for \u201cpelican\u201d is absent from the Australian National Dictionary, but the consensus online is that it means a fool or a clown, based on perceptions of the bird as slow-moving, with an ungainly physiognomy.<\/p>\n Of course, this is all quite unfair to an animal that BirdLife Australia calls<\/a> \u201chighly mobile\u201d, that works cooperatively in groups \u201cto drive fish into a concentrated mass\u201d, and can \u201csoar to heights of up to 3,000m\u201d \u2013 all positive qualities for a potential prime minister.<\/p>\n Indeed, the bird has steadily risen in the polls in Guardian Austalia\u2019s Bird of the Year, partly thanks to the public awareness campaigns of reporter Matilda Boseley<\/a>.<\/p>\n Insult or not, it\u2019s all grist to the mill for Hanson\u2019s controversy-publicity machine. But, according to the AFR\u2019s reporting, Hogan did not mean it as a compliment.<\/p>\n \u201cShe\u2019s living in the past, obviously,\u201d he also said of Hanson. \u201cHow can [Australia] be a monoculture? We\u2019re all migrants, except the Aboriginals, who as far as we know have been [in Australia] for 60,000 years.\u201d<\/p>\n He added: \u201cI want to die in Australia \u2013 in a multicultural Australia!\u201d<\/p>\n So much for the monoculture? That\u2019s not a knife, Pauline. That\u2019s<\/a> a knife<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In one swift rhetorical blow, Crocodile Dundee has disarmed Pauline Hanson\u2019s latest attack on multiculturalism. But his weapon…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":765402,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-765401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=765401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/765401\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/765402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=765401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=765401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=765401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Bird](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/1782636489_586_1920.jpg\")
Bird of the year 2023: why the pelican deserves to win, according to a pelican \u2013 video<\/p>\n