History Literature / TheLastContinent

** Of course, it gets worse (resulting in perhaps the only time when a wizard goes into a serious HeroicBSOD).

Back in Ankh-Morpork, the wizards, looking for the {{Egregious}} Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography to help them navigate to Xxxx, discover that he's missing and his office conceals a portal to a nice sunny island. They, and housekeeper Mrs Whitlow, all end up trapped there.

* AustralianWildlife: Disturbingly accurate in that [[EverythingTryingToKillYou Everything Really Does Try To Kill You]] down under. Yes, this includes the spiders, the snakes, the kangaroos, the koalas ''and'' the earth itself. Also, a surprisingly accurate analogy of the Melbourne underworld (... and no, sadly enough, this is ''not'' a joke).

'''Senior Wrangler:''' Of course not.\\

* WhatHappenedToTheMouse: When the people Rincewind befriended on his journey all come back to see him off at the end, Mad is noticeably absent. The reason is never explained.

** And as usual, there's an iteration of CMOT Dibbler here too, selling meat pie floaters.

* BattleBoomerang: The XXXX Creator's boomerang is described as one that does not return to whoever threw it, generally because it's lodged in the ribcage of whatever he threw it at.
** TruthInTelevision: Hunting boomerangs are designed to be thrown accurately at an animal, not to return to the thrower.
* BiggerOnTheInside: The Bugarup University tower is about twenty feet high from the outside, and about twenty feet high when you're climbing it. When you look out from the top, however, you're half a mile above ground.
** And, yet, it seems to be every bit as hard to climb up to the top as it looks like it should have once you're there.

* CanisLatinicus: ''Nullae Sheilae Sanginae" and "Nullus Anxietas", the BU mottoes.
** For those whose Latin is a bit rusty, those translate to "No Bloody [[Series/MontyPythonsFlyingCircus Sheilas]]" and "[[UsefulNotes/AustralianSlang No Worries]]" respectively.

* EverythingTryingToKillYou: Non-deadly creatures of Xxxx are... um... some of the sheep.
** This applies to non-people as well. XXXX has only a few venomous snakes... because [[WorryingForTheWrongReason most of them have been eaten by the spiders.]]

* GoodOldWays: Ponder's inner monologue claims the faculty have a collective MadLibsCatchPhrase: "You don't get proper fill-in-nouns these days--remember old "nickname" ancient-wizard-who-died-fifty-years-ago-who-Ponder-wouldn't-possibly-be-able-to-remember? Now ''there'' was a wizard who knew his fill-in-nouns."
** He starts [[HypocriticalHumour quoting it himself]] when the randomised magic field of Xxxx's creation temporarily causes him to rapidly age up to the other wizards' age.

* LandDownunder: [[BlatantLies Although the author claims it is not]].
** It isn't from the LiteralMinded point of view: on the Disc there is no "under" (at least, not for walking-about-on-the-ground-type species). It is more the landoverRimward.

* OOCIsSeriousBusiness: The word "monkey" is the Librarian's BerserkButton. When the Senior Wrangler accidentally says it near him and he does nothing, the wizards become convinced that the Librarian's not long for this world.

* ShoutOut: Rincewind encounters [[Film/MadMax a mad dwarf in a heavily armed and armored cart]] and [[Film/TheAdventuresOfPriscillaQueenOfTheDesert a trio of travelling transvestites]], inspires a folk song similar to "Waltzing Matilda"[[note]]Once a moderately jolly wizard camped by a dried-up waterhole under the shade of a tree he was completely unable to identify. And he swore as he hacked and hacked at a can of beer, saying, "What kind of idiots put beer in tins?"[[/note]], and invents a dessert called "Peach Nellie" in honor of an opera singer (much like Peach Melba in the real world).

** The drunken Rincewind drawing a picture of the Faculty: "[[RolfHarris Can you tell what it is yet?]]"
*** He also apparently drunkenly sings "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport" while at the bar in Didjabringabeeralong.

** Don't forget Rincewind's chase after the mob of wild horses, astride a nondescript mount named Snowy. "The Man from Snowy River" should be playing in your head about now.

** A playful jab is made at Creator/MichaelMoorcock and his Eternal Champion. [[AC: Death]] muses that Rincewind is the opposite, 'the Eternal Coward... with a thousand retreating backs.'

* TooManyCooksSpoilTheSoup: How the wizards end up creating the Platypus. They were trying to draw a duck. (This is a reference to an old saying that a platypus is like a duck designed by a committee.)
** The Creator (who was sitting right there) is highly confused by this. However, he allows it, apparently because it amuses him.
*** The Creator never notices that the image the UU Wizards drew came alive like his did, as he was busy drawing the UU Wizards into the rock. He also didn't notice that one of them had taken [[spoiler:the bullroarer]].

* WhamLine: Parodied. The narration says Ponder's "There's only one of everything" ''should'' be one of these, with the others having horrified looks and saying things like "By George, he's right!" but... well, these are wizards, and their response is to argue about it.

* WhoWouldBeStupidEnough: Knowing what wizards are like, Ridcully attaches a note to the prop keeping the portal open: "Do not remove this prop. Not even to see what it does." The good news is it wasn't a ''wizard'' who moved it in the end.

--> '''Dean''': Is there any breakfast?"
--> '''Senior Wrangler''': Stibbons found some soft-boiled eggs.
--> '''Dean''': What a useful young man he is. Where did he find them?
--> '''Senior Wrangler''': On a tree
--> '''Dean''': A soft-boiled-egg tree? You'll be telling me next he found a spoon tree...
--> '''Senior Wrangler''': Of course not.
--> '''Dean''': Good.
--> '''Senior Wrangler''': It's a bush.
--> '''Dean''': A bush that fruits spoons...
--> '''Senior Wrangler''': Young Stibbons said it makes perfect sense, Dean. After all, he said, [[SanitySlippage we'd picked them because they're useful, and then spoons are always getting lost.]] [[GivingUpOnLogic Then he burst into tears.]]

--> '''Scrappy''': [Those hills] were made thirty thousand years ago.
--> '''Rincewind''': Oh come on, they look ''millions'' of years old!
--> '''Scrappy''': Yeah. Thirty thousand years ago, they were made a million years ago.

** This is a reference to the Aboriginal concept of Dreamtime, which works in a similar way.

** The very name of the continent itself refers to a popular brand of beer in Australia.

* [[IndianBurialGround Aboriginal Burial Ground]]: Subverted; Rincewind's guess that the beer factory got cursed this way was mistaken, as the natives didn't want the site and were happy to hand it over.

* BreakTheHaughty[=/=]BreakTheCutie[=/=]BreakTheScientist: Ponder Stibbons' penultimate BreakTheHaughty crossed with BreakTheCutie comes in this book, courtesy of A) being stranded on an island which has some very strange ideas about evolutionary process, and B) being stranded on aforementioned island with [[DrivenToMadness Ridcully and the UU faculty]].

* [[YowiesAndBunyipsAndDropBearsOhMy Drop Bear]]: On Roundworld, a Drop Bear is a malicious koala variant made up by Australians to frighten tourists. On Discworld, a Drop Bear is a malicious koala variant that ''actually exists.'' Although if you tell the locals about it they'll laugh at you, because they know it was made up to frighten tourists.

* MistakenForRacist: Rincewind mistakes ''himself'' for a racist, because he [[ComicallyMissingThePoint erroneously believes the word means someone who is good at running]]. Once he finds out what it actually means, he is surprised but realizes he isn't one after all-- he only categorizes the world into "people who are trying to kill him" and "people who are not."

* WorldHealingWave: The Wet can be seen this way. There's also a bit of an InferredHolocaust though, since it's replacing 30,000 years of water all in one go, and some people- certainly, many sheep- must have been unable to get to high ground.

* RegionalSpeciality: Rincewind is offered a "Meat Pie Floater", a meat pie suspended in thick pea soup with tomato ketchup according to taste (no honestly, [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pie_floater it's real!]] as an Ecksian regional delicacy. Rincewind ponders that all of the "Regional Delicacies" that he's been offered in his travels seem to be the kind of disgusting and inexplicable dishes that someone would only concoct while drunk which are then foisted upon unsuspecting tourists. It's a regional delicacy because no-one else in the world would be crazy enough to eat it.

* [[YowiesAndBunyipsAndDropBearsOhMy Drop Bear]]: On Roundworld, a Drop Bear is a malicious koala variant made up by Australians to frighten tourists. On Discworld, a Drop Bear is a malicious koala variant that ''actually exists.'' Although if you tell the locals about it they'll laugh at you, because they know it was made up to frighten tourists...

** Subverted in that they actually manage to resist this time. Their Housekeeper, on the other hand...

* LandDownunder: [[BlatantLies Although author claims it is not]].
** Well, if you want to be ''technical'', on the Disc there is no "under". It is more the landoverrimward.

* PerpetualStorm: The continent is surrounded by a perpetual cyclone that not only prevents people from sailing away (new arrivals are mostly shipwrecked people), but also rainfall (the natives get confused and angry when people mention water coming from the sky).

Unfortunately, the events of ''Discworld/InterestingTimes'' have left Rincewind stranded in Xxxx, the [[TitleDrop Last Continent]], and he's still there, somehow surviving on the burning desert. This is because, as a {{Trickster}} posing as a kangaroo named Scrappy tells him, he's been kept for a ''purpose'': he has to bring rain back to the arid continent. Rincewind [[RefusedTheCall immediately runs away]], of course, but these quests have a way of [[TheCallKnowsWhereYouLive sneaking up on you regardless]].

Back in Ankh-Morpork, the wizards, looking for the Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography to help them navigate to Xxxx, discover that he's missing and his office conceals a portal to a nice sunny island. They, and housekeeper Mrs Whitlow, all end up trapped there.

** The idea that Xxxx was made ''after'' the rest of the Discworld, by a separate Creator, and differently, is a reference to the fact that when Australia was discovered, some European naturalists found its flora and fauna so alien and bizarre that they joked that it had been a separate Creation to the rest of the world.