farmdoc's blog post number 648

Mole Creek’s in the Meander Valley municipality [1]. A couple of years ago, the elected geniuses in the Meander Valley Council and/or their masters the Council bureaucrats, decided it’d be grand if each town and village in the municipality had its own slogan. I can’t even comprehend why they decided that. But decide it they did. And, what’s more, they also decided what the slogans would be. Didn’t ask the ratepayers/residents, did they? Why would they? They know best. All hail them. And bugger us. Anyway it came to pass that, as the photograph tells shows, Mole Creek was anointed with the slogan ‘Magic Above and Below’. I hate it. My dictionary defines magic as ‘an illusory feat; considered supernatural by naive observers’. Neither the Mole Creek village and surrounds (above ground) nor the Mole Creek caves (below ground) is illusory. Or supernatural. Both are beautiful, to be sure. Exceedingly so. But not illusorily and not supernaturally. Maybe the slogan’s okay for boneheads who don’t bother to think what it means. I can’t second-guess them. Apropos of all this, I love this tongue-in-cheek look at town slogans by Catherine Deveny in yesterday’s Age [2]. As I wrote on 4 December 2008, she’s one of my favourite journalists [3]. And nothing’s changed since then. At least there’s one person in the world – apart from me – that thinks town slogans are stupid. I’m so relieved.