The Big Shoe

My Granny Campbell used to say that big feet were to be celebrated as they "... gave you a good firm grip of Scotland!"

But I was recently amazed to see this massive boot at a shoe shop in the centre of Melbourne!

In light of this, it is not so hard to see why the Ausies have such a strong physical reputation in sport. Perhaps Ausies really are an immense race of physical super-men and women.

Or perhaps it is exactly this kind of miss-interpretation that explains how ancient writers developed such fantastical ethnographic observations of extremely distant and untraveled lands:

23 "Megasthenes records that on Mount Nulus [India] there are men with their feet reversed and with eight toes on each foot. On many mountains there are men with dogs' heads who are covered in wild beast's skins; they bark instead of speaking and live by hunting and fowling, for which they use their nails. Ctesias writes ... of a tribe of men called the Monocoli who have only one leg and hop with amazing speed. These people are also called the umbrella footed, because when the weather is hot they lie on their backs stretched out on the ground and protect themselves by the shade of their feet. The Monocoli are not far from the cave dwellers, and further to the east of these are some people without necks and with eyes in their shoulders.

[Pliny The Elder, Natural History, Book XXIII]

In light of this, the big shoe might not be so weird after all.