The Wizard of Aus

Happy Australia Day everyone. Welcome to Australia, the land of barbecues, funny animals and the country that stadium rock never forgot! Australia Day is a celebration of the landing of the first-fleet in Botany Bay, Sydney on this day 1788. It was a prison colony. It's also sometimes called Invasion Day by some nay-sayers (always saying nay). It's the national public holiday and like all good national holidays is in the middle of the summer. It involves beer, barbies and lamb chops (apparently).

One of the main features of Australia Day is Triple J's (the best radio station I've ever heard) Hottest 100 countdown (Wiki entry with previous years). The voting opens on January 1st and you can vote for any song realised in the year. Notable was a few years ago when U2 reached mid 30's without ever having had a play on Triple J. It's the largest music poll in the world, getting about half a million votes. Triple J begins playing from number 100 at 10 in the morning and just keeps going, for about 8 hours. This is a BIG deal. I for one think Wolfmother will get number 1... possibly System of a Down... possibly Kanye West. I'm not sure which I'm most excited about. I hope it's Kanye so Mike freaks out.

We had barbecued chook (Aussie for chicken) for lunch, have been listening to the hottest 100 and are breaking in nicely to a tray of Carlton Draught. Off to the pub later. Let's hope the fireworks display and the half a million people billed to turn up later is cool. More tomorrow!

This entry was posted on 26 January, 2006 at 07:59. You can skip to the end and leave a response.