You should check out this show called Neighbours, because there’s this one guy Toadie whose character the last 17 years has progressed from waiter at the Coffee Shop to bartender, then he was a DJ for a little bit and moved on to working at a hotel and is somehow now a lawyer – most of the while sporting a mullet as ferocious as a cornered street rat. He’s a bit chubby (but at least he’s trying) and now wears an absolutely immoral goatee but despite that, he’s more believable as a soldier than your American actors are believable as Australians.
Between Tarantino’s awful accent in Django Unchained and the two Aussies in Pacific Rim, I reckon there’s some shifty guy making millions off Hollywood as the generic Australian voice coach. If he’s constantly inviting you over to ‘put shrimp on a barbie’, claiming that he needs new assistants because he’s ‘gurt by a bunch of morons’, and talking about ‘mateship’, then he’s definitely a phony, because none of us know what the fuck any of those things mean.
And what are the names of these ‘Aussies’ in Pacific Rim? Chuck Hansen and his father Hercules Hansen. Chuck and Hercules. Of course. Can’t get any more Australian than Chuck and Hercules. In Australia, in ranking the popular names for children, it goes Davo, Johno, Natho, Robbo, Bricko, VBo, Frankston, closely followed by Chuck and Hercules. I bet there are more fucking Guillermos in Australia than all the Chucks and Hercules combined. The world joins together to build colossal robots controlled by human brains? I can suspend my disbelief. A South African/Cockney/Swedish-immigrant-to-Scotland hybrid accent? I’m sorry, but Harry Kewell sounds more Australian than that. This is a long rant, but it’s not hard to fix. Either don’t make your characters Australian, or dip into the wealth of Australian acting talent we have.
