Nicole Cadet Fantasy Art

Can I just say, it really annoys me when US reporters make incorrect reports on Australian colloquialisms/ songs/ words/ jobs/ whatever or completely misunderstand an Australian ideal. Research in this day and age is as easy as www.google.com and takes all of 5 minutes. I find it insulting for someone writing in the public arena to grossly misrepresent famous icons of another country. If you are going to post an article about an Australian (in this case it was Heath Ledger), at least have the decency to research what you are writing about:

For example (they edited the story after two obvious Aussies posted comments about incorrect references to "Waltzing Matilda", an Australian folk song by Banjo Patterson)

• A swagman was a temporary worker that drifted from job to job (taking everything he owned in a swag - basically a blanket/ canvas bedroll that was wrapped around their possessions and tied to their back). They did any job they could - shearing, menial labour, farm work. They were not shepherds!
• In the folk song 'Waltzing Matilda', Matilda refers to the swag - the swagman's only companion, likened to a woman because it kept him warm at night. There's other various theories about the term which I'm not going to go into.
  
• Completely unrelated, Matilda was also the name of the 1982 commonwealth games mascot - a giant Kangaroo
• The swagman drowned in a billabong, not a lake (well not in the way you normally think)! A billabong is generally a stagnant pond that's  often the result of a change in the natural flow of a watercourse, or the drying up of creeks. They are called oxbow lakes in other countries, but they aren't a lake in the generally accepted form of the word.
  
• The swagman in the poem committed suicide to avoid going to jail. He was an anti-authoritarian, who stole a sheep for food. My feeling is that this kind of ideal fits well with the convict heritage of our country as many of the people who came here, were transported from Britain for similar crimes (some convicts deserved life imprisonment, but many were victims of poverty).

*No doubt other authors from other nationalities have done similar disservices to national icons, and I probably have generalised a bit, however it just seems to me that more often than not, it's the US media that tend to have the gross cultural inaccuracies.