Did you see the story about Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate who is facing disciplinary action after he jokingly called a fellow councillor a ranga?
It started when he gave a speech to the media in which he said there was no problem with welcoming this new councillor because, as he put it, ‘you lose one ranga, you gain another’. Both the new councillor and his predecessor are red-haired, and Mayor Tom is mates with both.
An anonymous complaint was made to the office of a Queensland body called The Independent Assessor, which deemed ‘ranga’ to be an insult and saying the mayor was guilty of misconduct.
Joe Wilkinson, the new councillor, said he was never contacted by the Independent Assessor, was not offended by the Mayor’s words and what’s more that he is ‘a proud ranga’.
I mean really!
Tom Tate says he’s going to stare down the Assessor and his anonymous accuser and keep calling his mate and fellow councillor a ranga. He said he had no idea it was an offensive term.
Is it though? The Assessor found that the word ‘ranga’ comes from ‘orang-utan’, an animal which has bright orange-red fur. I looked up the word origins and it seems it started as Aussie schoolyard slang and does indeed come from the animal comparison.
I suppose you could call this rude, in the same way that calling someone a drongo (another animal comparison) is rude, but surely to be guilty of causing offence you have to have actually offended somebody.

You could argue that ranga is not strictly an insult, that it depends on context. It’s a notable feature of Aussie slang that a word which is ostensibly an insult becomes a term of endearment when applied to someone the speaker likes. It’s a privilege of friendship to say to your mate ‘How are you, you old bastard?’ Or ‘you old ratbag’. At least in Aussie bloke culture.
While – ahem – researching this story I came across the case of Patrick Hackett. As a student at the St Lucia campus of the University of Queensland he became a legend for his mop of thick, flaming red hair. (See pic above.)

A Facebook page set up in the name of The Glorious Ranga Mullet attracted thousands of likes. He became an overnight sensation at the age of 19.
His life changed in a positive way. He says when he walked into a bar people would say ‘You’re the guy with the mullet, come over here, we’ll buy you a drink’.Fellow students wanted selfies with him. But although on Facebook he was the Glorious Ranga Mullet, around campus he was better known as The Crimson Lion, which you have to admit is a pretty cool nickname to have. And he liked it.
So much better than ‘carrot top’ or ‘bloodnut’ or ‘copperhead’, which were around when I was young. Not that I ever used them; the nuns discouraged such appearance-based nicknames and rightly so.
At the age of 22 Patrick had his glorious mullet cut off for leukaemia fundraiser The World’s Greatest Shave, raising $8000 and further intensifying his fame and popularity. After uni he went to work at a college in north Brisbane where one of the senior teachers who hadn’t had HIS hair cut for about twenty years, was inspired to have HIS waist-length ponytail cut off for the same fundraiser. See pic below of the two of them.
Patrick is now 29 and the glorious ranga mullet is no more. As you can see, he’s toned it down a bit, but he’s still a ranga.

Or perhaps I should say ‘ginger’, since I’m not a mate of Patrick’s and don’t have the privilege of using a rude nickname. ‘Ginger’ is what redheads are commonly called in the UK. It seems inoffensive and perhaps for that reason is spreading here too.
I wonder if it will replace the older Aussie term Blue or Bluey, which dates back to the early 1900s. Remember Bluey and Curley? This popular comic strip started just after World War 2 and featured the adventures of two larrikin Aussie soldiers. Such was their popularity that they lasted till 1975, by which time they had eventually returned to civvy street. Bluey was so-called because of his ginger hair and Curley because his mop of curls. Which seems wrong because according to the unofficial rules of Aussie nickname formation he should be bald!
Stop press! In breaking news, I’ve heard that back on the Gold Coast, the complaint against Mayor Tate is going to be sent back to Council where it’s likely to get short shrift, but best of all, local government authorities are no longer going to accept anonymous complaints. Hooray for common sense.

This article was first published in the New Norfolk News and Derwent Valley Gazette on 23/8/24.