Cunt of the Week (27th April 2013) by Will Richards

Will Richards: massive potential for cuntishness

Will Richards: massive potential for cuntishness

My first idea for cunt of the week was myself, Will Richards. I truly am a cunt. I cancel gigs at the last minute, I neglect my wife, I’m greedy and dishonest, I ignore friends until I need something from them. I let people down, I’m slothful, bad with money… I’m a horrible person.

Yet I decided against making myself cunt of the week, mainly because it would essentially be 1,000 words of self-pity and self-indulgence and whilst that would be a good way of demonstrating what a cunt I am, you would probably have stopped reading by now.

Goodwin: a good egg.

Goodwin: a good egg.

Which made it surprisingly difficult to find an appropriately cuntish cunt of the week (incidentally, my spell checker just changed that to “…an appropriately cuntish Cynthia of the week” for some reason – I don’t know anybody called Cynthia). Perhaps because I’m such a cunt myself, I find that the world is largely populated by kind, tolerant, helpful people. Even bankers, politicians and tabloid journalists are largely just products of their environment, trying to do difficult jobs under great pressure from a demanding public. Furthermore, these are not people of whom I have any personal experience and by slagging them off I’d just be regurgitating hearsay and popular opinion. How do I know that Fred Goodwin is actually a cunt, for example ? (My spellchecker changed “cunt” to “count ” in that last sentence and I know he’s not one of those; the cunt’s not even a knight anymore.) I don’t. I’ve never met him.

But then I thought of a group of people who, as I know from first hand experience, really are cunts. A-grade, gold standard, prime cut, dyed-in-the-wool, card carrying cunts. Cunts who are seldom identified as cunts. And this group of cunts includes me! Who are they?  Fucking Australians! Pure cunts, the lot of them.

Australians: a very staid, almost austere people.

Australians: a very staid, almost austere people.

“But Australians are friendly and cheerful and welcoming”, you’re probably saying. Perhaps. Sometimes. But really, is over the top friendliness such a good thing? Do you REALLY want to spend your rail journeys and trips to the shop discussing the personal life of an excessively cheerful, nasal stranger called Shane who won’t shut the fuck up and let you get on with your shopping or read your book or listen to your music? Who ever thinks, “Thank God. I was sitting here enjoying a cup of tea and a sandwich, reading Private Eye and listening to Bach, and something was missing in my life. I now realise it was knowing all about the time Shane went surfing in Bangladesh and got drunk. Lucky me.” Does anybody ever think that?

“But Will, that doesn’t make Australians cunts,” you may still be saying. Perhaps not. Being a cunt requires an element of malice. So even their inherent vulgarity and terrible, terrible television (check out “Hey Hey It’s Saturday” or “The Footy Show” on YouTube sometime) may not make Australians cunts.

So let’s move on to the genocide.

“Genocide? Not by those nice Ramsay Street dwelling simpletons from Down Under, surely???”

The moral of the story: don't fall asleep drunk in the company of a friend who has Tippex.

The moral of the story: don’t fall asleep drunk in the company of a friend who has Tippex.

Yep. Proper, 100% successful, total-annihilation-of-a-race genocide. When was the last time you met a Tasmanian Aborigine? There was an island full of them 200 years ago. A distinct race of humans, quite separate from mainland aborigines, with a unique language and culture, but not any more. They were shot, poisoned, driven off cliffs, starved, infected with smallpox… wiped out. It’s true that mixed-race descendants of settlers and Tasmanian Aborigines exist today – rape tends to be a common accompaniment to genocide, let’s face it – but never in recent times has genocide been so successfully carried out. Australia, so proud of winning ANYTHING, certainly beats Hitler, Pol Pot, the Rwandan Hutus and Stalin in the genocide stakes.

Not the we didn’t try with the mainland Aborigines. We certainly mistreated them. We took their children, denied them citizenship and indeed considered them to be a separate species well into the 1960s. A high proportion of Aboriginals today still live in sub-third-world conditions (in one of the world’s most affluent nations) and suffer from massive social problems, including chronic drug and alcohol addiction. But somehow we didn’t kill them off completely. Not like we did in Tasmania.

Incidentally, Tasmania is also the Australian state in which homosexuality was illegal until 1997, and it was only decriminalised then because its government was forced to do so by the United Nations Human Rights Committee. Yes , it was illegal to be gay in parts of Australia until less than 20 years ago.

It's Curtins for you, pal. (forgive me, but I had no choice but to take a stroll down Pun Avenue there)

It’s Curtins for you, pal. (forgive me, but I had no choice but to take a stroll down Pun Avenue there)

But then Australia – open, friendly, welcoming Australia – doesn’t have an altogether unblemished record of tolerance, as any recent immigrant or refugee will know. Actually, they probably won’t know all that much about Australia as they will have been transported straight to a concentration camp… sorry, DETENTION CENTRE, located in some of the hotter, less hospitable and isolated parts of this hot, inhospitable and isolated country. Either that or they will have been shipped straight off to a Pacific island somewhere, to go mad and commit suicide. No matter what horrors they fled, they are not likely to have been welcomed with open arms by Australia. This nation, made up almost entirely of immigrants and descendants of immigrants and refugees is now brutally protective about letting any freeloading illegals in.

Cunts.

Not that Australians are unaware of racism. Ask the next Aussie backpacker you meet what he thinks about South Africans. The answer will be something along the lines of, “They’re ALL racist. I don’t know what it is, but every single South African you ever meet is, without exception, a racist bastard. They all make fucking generalisations about other races and cultures and they have such fucking annoying voices too!”

In our defence, we do have the largest Greek population outside of Greece. Or to put it another way: the largest source of funds for Golden Dawn.

Kyle Sandilands: even Bill O'Reilly thinks he's a cunt.

Kyle Sandilands: even Bill O’Reilly thinks he’s a cunt.

Australia is a nation who have produced a strain of talk-radio hosts even more virulent than conservative USA. Have you heard of Kyle Sandilands? Google him. Read about the time he hooked a 14 year old girl up to a lie detector live on air and quizzed her about her sex life, resulting in her admiring to having been raped when she was 12. Read about his on-air bullying of a refugee from Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Read about his threats to hunt down a female journalist who had criticised a book he had written.

He remains a popular radio and TV ‘personality’ and a judge of Australia’s X Factor. And there are plenty more like him. Actually, Australian talk-radio hosts could be the subject of their very own cunt of the week.

Then there’s Australia’s treatment of its extraordinary and unique wilderness, flora and wildlife, some of which survives. We’ve certainly done our best to fuck it up, with nuclear tests, coal mines, iron mines, bauxite mines, uranium mines… big pits of Chinese money and fuck whatever lived on top of it.

'Sheepish? It's the bladdy sheep shit I'm warried about.'

‘Sheepish? It’s the bladdy sheep shit I’m warried about.’

As for the bits we haven’t dug up and sold to the highest bidder, we’ve grazed cattle and sheep all over fragile fauna and released foxes and cats and carp and cane toads, against which Australia’s native wildlife doesn’t stand a chance.

In many parts if Australia, admitting to taking climate change seriously is slightly less acceptable than admitting to fucking goats.

Are there good things about Australia? Of course. Some of the wine is nice, even if the beer is largely horrible. The food is very good. Melbourne has many lovely public parks and an excellent tram network. The coffee is superb. Some of the people are alright, in small doses. Dame Joan Sutherland was one of the 20th century’s finest coloratura sopranos. Many of my own friends and family are very pleasant people. So I guess Australia and its population is not always totally 100% cunt. Just as drinking a gallon of sulphuric acid is not always totally 100% fatal.

But collectively, may I humbly present the Commonwealth if Australia, its population and the author of this essay as your cunt of the week.

Knock Australia all you want, but don't bash the Bishop.

Knock Australia all you want, but don’t bash the Bishop.

And  you know the worst thing? You’ll just continue to love us. You British will continue to watch our soap operas and talk about emigrating down under every time it rains. You’ll continue to ask us, with genuine surprise, what we’re doing over here when we could be enjoying the sunshine back home. (Incidentally, have you ever actually tried to live and work in temperatures that don’t fall below 35 for weeks on end ??? Give me the wettest, bleakest British weather any day.) You’ll continue to spare even the scummiest Aussies any real racism or prejudice, no matter how unpleasant you are to hard-working Poles and third generation descendants of Pakistani immigrants. Nothing I’ve written here will sway you from your belief that Australia is a wonderful paradise. A belief shared by most Australians.

So we may be cunts, but as long as you keep encouraging us, you’ve only got yourselves to blame.

willrTHIS WEEK’S GUEST WRITER Will Richards is a part time comedian, born and brought up in the town of Melbourne, Australia. Will has lived in the UK since 2001 and after this essay has been published is likely to be staying here for the foreseeable future.

When performing on stage , Will adopts an English accent.

It’s a little known fact about Will, but he’s the curator of the world’s first – and only – Pantomime Horse Museum. His proudest exhibit is the earliest panto horse, which was just a regular horse with its head, legs and arse chopped off. People would simply climb inside the carcass and animate it from within. Will keeps the specimen in a walk-in refrigerator, and spends every morning dousing it with vinegar. This is why Will often smells like piss and meat.

When The Krankies die, Will hopes to have them sealed inside a panto horse costume and embalmed. Nothing to do with his museum: he’s just a sick bastard. He also has an extensive collection of dead flies, which he keeps selotaped to his bedroom wall.

Harold Bishop and Helen Daniels from Neighbours are rumoured to be Will’s parents. You think that’s unusual? You don’t know the half of it. Nobody’s saying that the actors who portrayed those characters are his parents: they mean the actual characters are his parents. Australians drink too much.

FOLLOW WILL ON TWITTER: @justinbeiber ONLY JESTING. DO NOT follow that wee cunt.

REALLY FOLLOW WILL: @jollyfunky AND ALSO CHECK OUT @TweedyDuffer