Crooked Mick

Crooked Mick is a larger-than-life character from Australian Oral Tradition, emerging during the era of the swagmen. A sort of aussie Paul Bunyan, he is almost ubiqitious with the equally fantastic Speewah; there are Speewah tales without Crooked Mick, but there are no Crooked Mick tales not set in the Speewah.

Crooked Mick, like his American Wild West counterparts, is a giant of a man and skilled in many trades. Hard-working, hard-playing, Made of Iron and with an appetite to match his size, Crooked Mick is regarded as the quintessential bushman. Nothing was beyond his capabilities; he could lift huge weights, shear massive amounts of sheep in no time flat, cook pies so light that a gust of wind would carry them, kick crocodiles to the moon, move mountains, and generally do anything that everyone else could do, but 100 times better than anyone else could do.

The reason behind the "Crooked" in his name, while always a physical feature, varied from story to story. Some described him as having one eye higher than the other. Some said it was because his nose was all twisted due to having been bitten by a crocodile that tried to yank it off and then gave up. Others proclaimed it was because his habit of wolfing down two whole sheep for every meal and tearing their skins off with his teeth left his teeth twisted and gnarled. Most commonly, it's because he walks crooked; sometimes it's just a limp from being ringbarked when he was a teenager, more often it's because one hot day he stuck one leg into a trough to cool it off and then took it out to place the other one in, but it buckled under his weight when he tried to stand on it alone, leaving him with a bent leg for the rest of his life.

Unlike many of the Wild West legends he resembled, Crooked Mick was said to have died, but again the stories vary. A fairly common story has the teller describe how they heard several others give their explanations for Crooked Mick's death (like a duststorm causing him to throttle himself with his own giant beard), only to then hear the real truth -- like how Crooked Mick became The Man in the Moon when he built his own pogo stick and bounced all the way from earth to the moon.

Tropes exemplified by the Crooked Mick stories:

 * Only Known by Their Nickname
 * Shrouded in Myth: There exist many conflicting versions of why Crooked Mick was "crooked", or how he died.
 * Tall Tale: Crooked Mick's reason for being.