I guess unicorns are still roaming in abundance in Scotland.
They must be. The unicorn is after all the Scottish national animal and proudly displayed on the United Kingdom and the Queen’s coat of arms.
Even the Scottish are the first to admit that getting a thistle as a national floral emblem puts them a bit at the bottom of the pecking order when it comes to floral emblems. But thistle it is. They seem to favour emblems with spiky bits and even the humble bagpipe could be seen as a bag with its own spiky bits.
On the other hand, we of the Redlands get to embrace a soft fluffy thing as our logo. Who doesn’t love a koala? We have photographs of ourselves tentatively cuddling them as children at local wildlife sanctuaries. And we look for them in our gum trees. And yes, they may have become scarce in the past 20 years, but we still have the occasional siting.
I am going out on a limb here (verily the limb of a gum tree) when I say that Scotland has only spotted its emblem in its dreams or perhaps after a good few drams of whisky.
But here we are considering dropping our cuddly little mascot in favour of something else that better depicts our city. If we were to ditch the koala logo, what would we have instead? Just what has become prolific here? I know there are a few more geckos running around at my place than there used to be. And the noisy miners are doing their best at clearing out the native birdlife. And we’ve never really got on top of the cane toad problem. Perhaps it’s time for them to step up.
If the logo is to go, perhaps we should also consider the Redland City crest. With its symbolism of horticulture and small crops, we would surely have to query the relevance to an area that is now mainly full of housing. Just where have our small crop farms gone? I should also mention that, lovely as it might be, we also feature the poinciana tree, a South American native tree. Come to think of it, what with cane toads in our suburbs, I’m seeing a South American theme here.
Either way, I’d like to keep the koala. And I understand why the Scots like unicorns too.
