One man by the name of Reid, who opened a Sydney shoe-shop in 1935, claimed that his father, Clive, was the first man to bring thongs into Australia. They were known at the time as Japanese Bath Slippers. Indeed the records show that by the late 1970s an informal group known as the Australian Thong-Clapping Association gathered every month at a pub in Pyrmont. I feel it has some rhetorical affinity with market fundamentalism and an increase in power blackouts. There are, of course, more than one kind of Thongline.
Different clans follow different totemic routes through life.
Sydney is an important node in this rhizomatic geography, being the point at which a new directional emerges. Here the Thonglines usually refer to the mysterious white markings left on the upper part of the buttocks when the bikini-brief is removed. In a seasonal ritual praising the heliotropic gods, these particular Thonglines signify the importance of being initiated into the solar cult of the tanned. Perhaps even more so. My sister has a powerful psychological aversion to thongs which manifests itself through violent shudders and a nomadic nausea which begins in her eye-lashes before dropping like an express elevator into her toes.