Some vital points were raised by participants in the recent blog discussion about food instigated by SueBrown and left unanswered, because she flummoxed me and I had to concede that I did not have the information readily to hand. In addition I was falsely accused by Sarah Lynn Morgan of hastening the demise of the Homing Leek. I will demonstrate below that this is a monstrous calumny. I have now rectified the deficiencies in my information by researching from eminent sources such as;

The Macquarie Encyclopaedia
The Oodnadatta Herald Tribune
The Cooberpedy Underground News
The Darwin Chronicles
et.al

The first references to leeks and haggis (the plural of haggis is haggis) in Australian source material records that they were introduced by Captain Cook, who was a gastronome of note as well as an explorer. With the contemporary ignorance of ecological considerations he released colonies of both species along the East coast of Australia where they out-competed the local marsupial equivalents and soon reached plague proportions just as did rabbits in the next century.

SueBrown was quite correct in speculating that their movements around hillsides would be anti-clockwise. This was predicated by the reversal of the coriolis force to the South of the equator. The evolutionary answer to this was that both species had to adapt to moving backwards because of their different leg lengths. This led early observers into error because they assumed that the leading portion of the creatures was the head, so that the sobriquet applied to the Australian variety of haggis,"hairy-nosed haggis" is totally anatomically incorrect.

The leeks adapted in a different way. Because they came from a country where it rains 367 days of the year the Australian climate initially decimated the leek, but they soon fought back. Instead of congregating on hillsides they opted to live around billabongs where the longer leg could always be immersed in water (although they still had to travel backwards to circumnavigate these waterholes) and they thrived in these conditions, developing into a sub-species known as the "Leek Eeboot". These are now harvested by dangling a bucket of water in front of them, which entices them to meekly follow the bearer home. They are definitely not on the endangered species list and fill the equivalent ecological niche to the Homing Leek.

Interbreeding with indigenous creatures has produced such oddities as the Oomagooli bird,which is legless and gives a plaintive cry of "oomagoolies" whenever it alights on dry land. They have become the main staple of the Farkawi tribe,who are legendary for their geographical incompetence, and whose war-cry is "We're the Farkawi"