About

Upside-Down Australia refers to a common online trope in which Australia and the situations taking place in the continent are represented by an image being flipped upside-down, typically within memes. This is due to the fact that Australia is the largest meme-producing country in the Southern Hemisphere, and with much of the Western meme community concentrated in Europe and North America, they jokingly perceive themselves as right-side-up in comparison to their Australian counterparts. This cliche also shares similarities to the belief that toilets in Australia flush in reverse.

Origin

The designation of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres has led to upside-down jokes between inhabitants of opposite hemispheres for decades. Backward Australia jokes have been around for even longer, with the common belief that Australian toilets flush backward (with water moving clockwise instead of counterclockwise as they do in Western countries). This is due to the Coriolis effect, a scientific phenomenon where a force such as a cyclone or large tornado reverses in direction to that which would be observed in the Northern Hemisphere. The incorrect conclusion that this affects Australian toilets was publicly debunked as early as 2007 by Scientific American.^[2] Nevertheless, it remains a long-standing running joke that served as a precursor to upside-down Australia memes.

It took until roughly 2011 for memes to appear online centered around the latter topic. The earliest known upside-down Australia meme was anonymously uploaded to 9GAG on March 11, 2011, where it received 21 upvotes in 10 years (seen below).^[1]

Spread

As the upside-down Australia trope began to grow in popularity, people both in and outside of Australia began to make memes and videos about it. On February 7th, 2019, YouTuber^[3] Fairbairn Films uploaded a video (seen below) discussing this cliche in memes, called "A Day in the Life of an Australian," receiving over 5,800,000 views and 15,700 comments in two years.

The subreddits /r/memes and /r/dankmemes frequently feature posts about Australia being upside down and have been doing so since the early 2010s. For example, Redditor u/opum123 posted this meme (seen below) to /r/memes^[4] in 2020, receiving 29,900 upvotes and 94 comments in seven months.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References