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Millipedes are a class of arthropods which,
in Australia, include 21 genera of 60 species. They live under rocks or the
bark of trees, and are often brightly coloured to the point of fluorescence. At
rest, they are indistinguishable from a dead variety of their kind, though
under a microscope one will see their little chest rising and falling. At play,
their many – experts have counted as many as seven – legs appear to undulate in
a soothing, sensual, almost hypnotic motion that has driven some men to
madness.
Ask
any Australian schoolchild how many millipedes there are in Australia and he
will undoubtedly tell you a million. Keep him down another year, teacher, for
as any educated person knows, the word milli
is Greek for ‘thousand’. There are, at any given moment, a thousand millipedes
in this country, and as soon as one dies the Queen Millipede (often, in the
popular press, jovially known as ‘Millicent’, though her name is actually quite
different) produces another egg which hatches to a replacement.
The
most common variety of millipede in Australia is the pill-millipede, so called
for its habit of rolling into a ball when faced with a predator or when hoping
to impress. While these do resemble pills, they are quite different from the
common variety of pill found in the modern pharmacist’s store – products such
as Mrs. Beecham’s Cirrhosis of the Liver Pills or Mr. Gloomy’s Gut Salts – in
that, if swallowed, they actually might do you some good.
Millipedes
are often the subject of public discussion and debate, sometimes with tragic
results. Former Governor-General Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson, long known as the
most ribald of Governors-General – particularly at gentlemen’s smoking jacket
nights – often made jokes at the expense of millipedes. Addressing the Young
Fascist Club of Ramsay, Qld. in 1926, he brandished a rolled up copy of a lewd
French magazine to his dazzled audience and compared it to a millipede: ‘long
and cylindrical, with a varying number of horny segments’. Munro-Ferguson was
later summonsed by the King to explain this joke and, unable to convince His
Majesty of the validity of the colloquialism ‘horny’, was beheaded.
See also: Edward, King; Ferguson, Sir
Ronald Munro; Millicent, Queen; Munro, Sir Ronald Ferguson; Ronald, Sir
Munro-Ferguson.
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