Australia/New Zealand OT: Strange Stories of Antipodean Lands

[mfunnell]

Breaking loose from another thread where (apparently ) widely-circulated myth-conceptions were discussed, I thought I'd break out a separate thread rather than hijack the original.

(There's enough BS circulated about Oz and NZ that maybe this will end up discussing other misconceptions as well. For example, Australia hardly ever has tickets available for the Vienna Boys Choir.)

The report stated how crime has increased since the Australian government put a ban on guns.

This story is one I've heard and corrected before. Its essentially untrue. The best place to start with this is the invaluable snopes.com, where David and Barbara continue the good work from the a.f.u days when usenet mattered -

http://www.snopes.com/crime/statistics/ausguns.asp

On a related topic:

It's true that the man who inspired the Crocodile Dundee movies, Rod Ansell, was killed in a shootout with police in August 1999.

They weren't after him because they wanted to take away his guns; in fact they weren't after him at all, but were searching for a gunman who had fired shots at a house, injuring two people. Whether or not Ansell was the man in question is not known, but Ansell shot and killed a policeman at a roadblock, which is when the shootout started.

[taken from: http://www.toxiccustard.com/australia/tvfilm.html

Further details from a current-affairs TV show on the matter can be found at:

http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/s55944.htm

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That's it for now - with maybe more to follow: who knows?

...Mike