Tasmania – Land of Odd

 

It’s surprising the odd things Tasmania produces... things like Lambie, Milne, Wee Willy Wilkie, everything Green, a lot of things that are sexually confused and everything that’s Left of centre. 

This spooky little land of fairies, mushrooms and special frogs seems addicted to stopping stuff. It even got rid of all their Aborigines because they were rumoured to be lighting fires and eating goannas.

The last Tasmanian Aborigine, Tudawali, was found stuffing the remains of the only goanna left down his gob, and now they’re both extinct. 

It seems everything in the Land of Odd is either endangered, like the Tasmanian Blobfish (pictured) or its heritage-listed or it's extinct!

They found something else to stop recently... the biggest Salmon producing joint on the island called Tassal. You see, the environmentalists and ABC journos have accused Tassal of having too many fish in the ocean and they want it stopped. 

Last I heard was that some trawler intended taking too many fish out of the ocean and they wanted that stopped too. 

Tassal uses the ocean to grow salmon to table size in huge nets and they’re doing pretty well at it... too well apparently. 

They are making an absolute motza from flogging these fish but apparently they have been discovered killing these poor little buggers the wrong way and smoking them. And that’s just not on!

Smoking anything down there, except marijuana, is frowned upon.

But there is nothing that comes out of Tasmania that could possibly surprise me, that was until I noticed a little Arabic motif on my packet of Tassal smoked salmon that said, “halal certified”. 

“WTF?”, I thought, as I raced to my little book of what Muslims mustn’t eat. And there is was: Buried among pork products and sexually abused goats was, “fish without scales!”, I knew it was there somewhere.

Now I’ve hooked a few of salmon in my time and I’ve never seen one with scales, in fact they’ve all got skin like a well-oiled Kardashian bum and it’s as smooth as duck XXXX. So how the hell did a salmon ever get on to a Muslim menu?

Very odd! I was intrigued and I kept having to remind myself that this was Tasmania. So I sent a list of questions to Tassal, pleading for an explanation.

“Dear Tassal,

1 Is it true you have employed a group of halal licensed Muslims from the mainland who are each given a tube of Superglue and a box of fish scales?

2 Is it true that when fish scales are in short supply it’s “halal okay” to use toenail clippings?

3 Is there another group of halal licensed fishmongers further up the production line who then de-scale the salmon?

4 When killing these poor little buggers are they facing Mecca via Asia or via the South Pole?”

I’ll let you know when I get a reply.

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