Bruno is staring at a telephone bill when the word arrives. His son Tobias has accepted a six-hour collect call from Springfield, and the price is impossible to miss: “Nine hundred dollaridoos?” The joke lasts only a moment in The Simpsons, but twenty years later it had Australians signing a real petition about their real money.[2]
In 2015, Australian Simpsons fan Thomas Probst petitioned to rename the Australian dollar the “dollarydoo,” arguing that a real-life Simpsons reference would boost demand for the currency. The campaign gathered 69,574 signatures.[3]
On February 19, 1995, Fox aired “Bart vs. Australia,” the sixteenth episode of the sixth season of The Simpsons.[1] Bart’s prank begins with a bathroom-sink question about which way water drains in Australia, then grows into an international incident serious enough to send the Simpson family overseas so Bart can apologize.[1] Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein wrote the episode, Wes Archer directed it, and Phil Hartman appeared as the diplomat Evan Conover.[1]
The Australia in the episode is deliberately ridiculous. The story folds in references to Mad Max 2, Crocodile Dundee, the Azaria Chamberlain case, and the 1994 caning of Michael Fay.[1] Quartz later called Bruno’s “Nine hundred dollarydoos” outburst one of the worst Australian accents ever put on television.[4] The line still stuck. Wiktionary traces “dollarydoo” to a blend of “dollar” and “didgeridoo,” noting that the original Simpsons coinage was “dollaridoos.”[2]
How the Joke Reached Change.org
In 2015, Thomas Probst turned the fake currency name into a proposal. His Change.org petition, quoted by Quartz, opened with falling commodity prices and a struggling Australian economy.[4] He argued that changing the name of the Australian currency to “dollarydoos” would give the country the kind of pop-cultural hook people might want to hold in their wallets.[4]
“This will make millions of people around the world want to get their hands on some Australian currency due to the real-life Simpsons reference,” Probst wrote, according to Quartz, “driving up the value of the Australian currency.”[4] Cracked later described the same pitch, including Probst’s claim that leaders with “any common sense” should introduce legislation to make the change as soon as possible.[3]
The joke had help from the exchange rate. Quartz reported that the Australian dollar had fallen 25 percent against the US dollar since mid-2014 and was sitting around 70 US cents, far below its US$1.11 peak in 2011.[4] In that setting, “dollarydoo” worked as both a prank and a small satire of economic helplessness: if ordinary people could not move markets, they could at least rename the thing moving down.
The petition spread fast. Quartz reported more than 50,000 signatures in five days.[4] The final figure attached to the campaign was 69,574 signatures, a result too small to alter monetary policy and large enough to prove that thousands of people understood the same absurd reference.[3]
The Word Kept Circulating
The name did not reach Australia’s banknotes. No official currency was redesigned, and the Australian dollar remained the Australian dollar. The word, though, kept wandering through casual Australian English. Wiktionary lists “dollarydoo” as an informal term for the Australian dollar and records later uses in entertainment writing, music coverage, and the children’s show Bluey.[2]
That is the quieter afterlife of the petition. A cartoon father saw a phone bill, yelled a nonsense price, and gave people a joke sturdy enough to carry into newspapers, petitions, and everyday slang. The Australian dollar stayed put, but “dollarydoo” kept jingling in the pocket.
