Page 7 - IAV Digital Magazine #453

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
A Penis Drawing That Can Be Seen From Space Has Popped Up in Australia
The internet has been giggling over the latest satellite map dis- covery, and we can't blame them. A giant penis drawing has appeared on a dry lake bed in Victoria, Australia.
Details on its provenance are scant, but those who think the dick-and-balls shape is the work of crafty photo- shopping can easily check out the real deal on Google Maps, where it's cur- rently tagged as 'Aussie Weiner'.
According to
the Geelong Advertiser, locals have known about the penis for months, and at some point it was tagged on the map as Betoota Lake, purloining the name from
an Australian ghost town and satirical newspa- per.
Weirdly enough, this isn't even the only penis on the
Australian land- scape that's visi- ble from space. Nor the most impressive.
In 1998, a heli- copter pilot spot- ted an enormous figure etched onto a desert plateau in South Australia. Thought to depict a naked Indigenous man holding a throw- ing stick or woomera,
the Marree
Man was named after a nearby town.
These kinds of aerially-visible drawings are called geoglyphs, and the Marree Man is actually one of the largest geoglyphs in the world - he is 4.2 kilometres (2.6 miles) tall, and the outline meas- ures a staggering 28 kilometres (17 miles).
And yes, the etching into the red sand comes complete with pubic hair and male genitals.
Australia boasts
the oldest contin- uous human set- tlement on Earth, but this particular figure actually seems to have modern origins, although to this day nobody has stepped forward to claim the mys- terious artwork.
This week, on the 20th anniversary of Marree Man's discovery, Australian entre- preneur Dick Smith even offered a mone- tary reward for info about the creator of the
glyph, which sadly has started to fade in recent years.
Arid lands like the dry Australian interior are great locations for geo- glyphs, since weather impact can keep dam- age to a mini- mum. Some of the most mysteri- ous ones are the giant structures found in the grasslands of Kazakhstan, thought to be at least 8,000 years old.
Huge artworks have also been found in the Amazonian for- est, but the most famous geo- glyphs in the world are arguably the Nazca lines in Peru - a vast col- lection of mas- sive shapes dat- ing back to around 500 BCE.
The Nazca shapes, which mostly depict var- ious animals, are so numerous and intricate, earlier this year researchers announced they'd discovered over 50 drawings that had previously gone unnoticed.
We don't think there was a giant penis amongst them, though. But whichever prankster is responsible for the recent dick geoglyph can rest assured they are continuing a val- ued tradition - as demonstrated by the Cerne Abbas Giant figure from England:
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine