The Last Continent

Terry Pratchett published The Last Continent in 1998, and it is the twenty-second Discworld novel. Its subject, in the broadest sense, is Australia, and it parodies the country's popular culture along with the usual conventions of time travel, including the grandfather paradox and a Ray Bradbury story about hunters travelling into the past.

The story opens a few weeks on from Interesting Times, with Rincewind having been transported to the continent called XXXX. There he falls in with a magical kangaroo called Scrappy, who explains what the place expects of him, and the novel follows the two of them across a landscape full of things that will be familiar to anyone who has seen a certain kind of Australian film.

Among the targets are Crocodile Dundee and the Mad Max films, the beer XXXX, Vegemite, thongs and cork hats, the bushranger Ned Kelly, the Henley-on-Todd Regatta and songs from Waltzing Matilda to Down Under. The wizards of Unseen University, meanwhile, are trying to work out what has become of him, which for Pratchett's purposes is an excuse to send them somewhere even less suitable.