Naaman Zhou 

When 2017 got ridiculous, Australia’s best memes came to the rescue

Politics and national affairs were at times so absurd it was enough to induce despair. But online a thousand blossoms bloomed
  
  

2017 Australian memes
The shooting stars of the Australian meme internet of 2017. Composite: The Guardian

When Benjamin Hammond Haggerty, better known as Macklemore, booked his ticket to Australia to perform at the NRL grand final in October, he could not have known what he was in for.

The Seattle rapper – largely forgotten since his 2012 hit Thrift Shop – found himself at the centre of a national debate about the value of free speech, in which he was attacked by Tony Abbott and defended by the former PM’s daughter Frances over the politics of his song Same Love.

Such was the state of Australia in 2017, as national politics and culture reached new heights of absurdity. But a bizarre year for news makes for a good year for memes. Here are some of the best.

Prime Minister Trumble

Malcolm Turnbull suffered online embarrassment after his first phone call with Donald Trump ended when the president hung up on him in anger.

While Australians were still processing the insult, the White House’s then-press secretary, Sean Spicer, called him “Trumble” and the meme – of Turnbull getting haplessly owned on the world stage – was born.

House is always haunt

In May Fairfax Media staff across the nation went on strike. A dramatic week-long action, sparked by 125 job cuts, saw staff walk off in the crucial week of the federal budget.

As reporters, editors and subeditors called for solidarity, the columnist Elizabeth Farrelly instead filed an opinion piece about moving house.

It was an odd article that at one point compared selling a terrace to a slave auction. But more importantly, with management scrambling to put together a paper with no subeditors, it went up with a hilariously weird typo.

The internet instantly seized upon it.

When Andrew Bolt fell victim to a similar lack of editorial oversight, it was simply too good for this world.

Barnaby Joyce is a Kiwi

A great many politicians lost their jobs this year to section 44 and the dual citizenship crisis. But nobody got roasted for it more than Barnaby Joyce, the red-faced, carp-hating leader of the Nationals, who was revealed to be a New Zealander by descent.

Someone nominated him for New Zealander of the year, and Amber Heard, whose dogs Joyce infamously threatened to kill in 2015, returned serve with aplomb.

Cracking open a cold one with the boys

“Cracking open a cold one with the boys” became an online refrain globally around the end of May.

Though many Australians would consider it uniquely theirs, the phrase – and the caricature of masculinity it was poking fun at – struck a chord around the world, and was applied to increasingly ludicrous situations.

Its provenance is debated but its popularity in 2017 can be clearly attributed to a number of Australian Facebook pages. As BuzzFeed reported, the influential page Cracking open a cold one with the boys is based on Townsville.

A thousand blossoms bloom

God bless the reporter who asked the Queensland MP Bob Katter what he thought of the same-sex marriage survey.

No bones about it, the eccentric Katter is hardly a good ally to the LGBTI community and is well-known for his retrograde views, but this November an astonishing interview transfixed the nation.

If you haven’t seen it, watch below. Otherwise nothing will make sense.

Katter’s tonal shift mid-answer was incredible; his phrasing throughout – especially “let there be a thousand blossoms bloom” – was beautiful and bizarre. As the ABC’s Tiger Webb put it: “It’s Juilliard. It’s Branagh. It’s Inside the Actor’s Studio.”

And it inspired many memes.

The ABC even fact-checked it, finding “no evidence to support the claim that crocodiles were killing people every three months in Queensland” – but missed a trick.

Shooting stars

You may have come across shooting stars, a meme that became globally popular early this year, without realising it was Australian.

It shows a person in the process of falling or jumping, edited into a series of often surreal backgrounds, and set to the 2008 minor dancefloor hit Shooting Stars by the Sydney electronic duo Bag Raiders.

It became so popular it even featured in Katy Perry’s highly internet-literate video for her single Swish Swish. “It’s all just totally weird and very of this time,” a Bag Raiders band member, Chris Stacey, told Pedestrian of his meme notoriety in February.

Did I meme? @bunsen_berner16

A post shared by Clay Hollie (@clay.hollie) on

The Horses

Mirroring the Shannon Noll revival of late 2015, this year’s nostalgic Australiana obsession was Daryl Braithwaite’s classic The Horses.

The birds

Some memes, although not Australian in origin, found themselves communicating uniquely Australian things.

Inhaling Seagull – an image series of ... an inhaling seagull – was a perfect fit, combining our love of birds with our love of belting out songs.

Guardian Australia’s own bird of the year poll became a big social media event, and this effort from Michelle Law paired it with a perfect Australian twist on the “Nothing but respect for my president meme” – originally developed to poke fun at an overzealous fan of Donald Trump.

 

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