Earlier this week, I was asked if knew what a billabong was.
Well, yes. Of course I do. But at the point at which someone asks, you know they’re asking for a reason and thus the answer you feel to be obvious is probably going to turn out wrong.
We are, by the way, ignoring the surfwear brand here.
So what do I know about billabongs? They’re Australian, obviously. They are some form of watering hole. They are a place you might go to drink.
They are, let’s be honest, a place where a jolly swagman might sit down and wait for various things to happen. (What is a swagman, anyway? That is a separate question. Banjo Patterson has a lot to answer for. And Waltzing Matilda isn’t even one of his better poems.)
As a friend of mine put it when I sprung the “what is a billabong?” question on him: like an oasis, but Australian.
I tentatively gave this as my answer. And it’s not wrong, as such. But much more specifically: billabong is the Australian name for an oxbow lake.
Oxbow lakes are, famously, one of those things everyone remembers from school geography lessons.
Can I remember what the term means? Yup.
Can I draw a diagram of the process of formation of an oxbow lake, thirty years later? Yup.
Have I ever seen one? No *.
Has this knowledge ever been in the least useful in later life? No **.
Now, admittedly the Australian climate apparently means that oxbow lakes are a rather more seasonal affair than they are in my native Britain. Even so: these two incredibly disparate concepts - oxbow lakes and billabongs - turn out just to be different local words for the same thing.
I am quite unreasonably surprised by this.
* Actually, I am informed that many years ago on a holiday in New Zealand, I did see an oxbow lake. It was only identifiable as such to someone who assiduously read every last bit of text in a guidebook (guilty), and was not - from ground level - observably an oxbow.
** Has anything I learned in geography been useful in later life? I definitely recall learning the capital cities of African and South American countries, which would come in handy for pub quizzes if only I’d learned them properly rather than cramming one night for a test the following day.