"So, you're telling me that you keep the shit food and shit weather, and we get the Great Barrier Reef and lobsters the size of canoes?... I'm Jack the Ripper, where's the boat?"
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Explanation: Aussieland got its start as a British colony.
... a penal colony, to be precise.
I guess a one-way ticket to the Danger Continent is cheaper than prison.
Well the UK used to send its convicts to a different colony, so they had to find somewhere new once treason had broken out.
I’ve never validated if this is true or not, but apparently the first police officers in Melbourne were selected from the best behaved prisoners.
We call fries fries, we just don't call chips fries. It's useful to have a distinction between thin-cut and thick-cut potato rectangles.
Likewise, we call cookies cookies but we're don't call biscuits cookies. (And we don't call American biscuits anything, they're a total mystery to us.)
Now do jail/gaol.
Sure. We call jail jail.
Both the US and the UK have at times used "gaol" in our histories, but it's super archaic in both places. You might be thinking of one of the other 57 countries for which English is an official language?
(You're probably thinking of Australia, but they also generally only use "gaol" in a historic context, even though it's retained in some place names with that spelling.)
But...its the tube?

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