Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaleditions.com/i/131975
Illustration: www.jim-ro gers.co. uk insider Naming rights (and wrongs) Well, cut me off at the legs and call me Shorty. I'm on a flight to Burnie, Tasmania, and who is in the next row but the most poised man in Australian dairying, Mr Patten Bridge. Patten has one of the most geographically perfect names I've ever encountered. He only needs to move to Patton Bridge (a rural hamlet about five miles from the town of Kendal in Cumbria, England) and he'd be the most tautological person in the English-speaking world. But instead he is heading to the new Tasmanian Dairy Products factory at Smithton. The last time we met, it was at the Murray Goulburn dairy factory at Tangambalanga. Patten obviously has a thing for challenging placenames. He was one-time chair of the folk festival at Yackandandah. And so he has to get to work on Smithton. That town sounds far too drab and is sorely in need of a snappy slogan. It needs something to boost the stature of the place and coax money out of passing pockets. For example, a suggested slogan for Yackandandah is 'Having a gander in Yackandandah.' On balance, this has to be better than 'Having a goose in Yackandandah.' As a slogan, however, it's possibly less memorable than Brisbane's 'What are you up for?' On the OMG Index this is just narrowly pipped by Mooroopna, which proudly calls itself 'Fruit Salad City'. Our American cousins have far more fun with their slogans. Signs on the city limits have no limits for these jokesters. Hooker in Oklahoma assures visitors 'It's a location, not a vocation,' while infamous Roswell, New Mexico, claims 'The aliens aren't the only reason to visit.' There's a hint of bleating about San Andreas in California ('It's not our fault') and a note of desperation to the Nevada town of Winnemucca ('City of Paved Streets' … and hopefully sewers and reticulated water supplies). Some wag got the upper hand in Bushnell in South Dakota ('It's not the end of the earth, but you can see it from here') while the good folk of Gas in Kansas made the best of what they had ('Don't pass Gas, stop and enjoy it'). In days when it was surrounded by chemical works there was 'Pasadena, where the grass is greener and the air is too.' My favourite, however, is the Oklahoma township of Beaver: Cow Chip Capital.* *Don't laugh, it could have been a lot worse… Journalist, novelist and public speaker Sue Webster is part of the third generation of a dairying family and director of a company that specialises in agricultural and financial writing. 95