Flavours available include
Gourmet Red
Gourmet Green Apple
Gourmet Watermelon and
Gourmet Black.
In all my life I have never heard of Willy Wallaby or these kinds of Licorice. However, it is most important to keep an open mind at all times, and in the spirit of scientific enquiry and adventure I set out to investigate. To my surprise I discovered that similar but not identical licorice was readily available:
Tropical Mango Soft Licorice,
Strawberry Soft Licorice,
Raspberry Soft Licorice,
Choc coated strawberry licorice, and
Red Licorice.
The familiar black licorice is still available in many forms as are licorice allsorts.
UPDATE 12 November 2007
Great interest has been shown in this important topic. At personal inconvenience and expense, I have extended my research to the home of Wallaby products: The United States.
Here I have not only found but also eaten Wallaby Australian Style Organic Yogurt -
This delicious yogurt is made in California. If a blind tasting were held, even the most dedicated connoisseur would be unable to distinguish it from an Australian low fat strawberry.
Is it too late to save the Wallaby brand for the nation? The Howard government has acted on orangutans: let's have some action on our own beloved wallaby.
As the year comes to a close, I learn that some entymologists have debated the spelling of "Licorice" in this article. I can only note that Dr. Johnson favoured the robust English spelling: although he was clearly aware of continental variants adopted by others.
Indeed. While I am yet to try it, Darrell Lea has been producing mango and strawberry flavoured liquorice for some years, apparently. I saw a little thing about Darrell in the paper on Sunday. Not that I read the Sunday papers. Anyway, it could be worth looking into. They sell this stuff at a lot of pharmacies, for some reason. One of the few chemist-approved sweets, it would appear. Maybe in virtue of its laxative effect? Liquorice tea is also very nice, and good for low blood pressure. Or was it high blood pressure? For goodness' sake, just don't confuse the two, whatever you do! Seek independent medical advice before deciding on a course of action that involves self-medicating with liquorice tea. Or any liquorice product, for that matter. Perhaps the medical use explains the different fruit flavours - a la mandarin-flavoured cough medicine. Why always mandarin? One wouldn't have thought it was the most commonly or easily grown, harvested and juiced of the citrus fruits. I imagine its flavour has a chemical structure that's very easy to synthesise. At any rate, I was thinking that perhaps the flavoured liquorice, seeing as it's sold in pharmacies, was meant as an "hommage" to flavoured cough medicines? As good a theory as any, to my mind. I made a cake out of tangelos recently. It was really very nice, though a little too brown on top, which was a problem only as it was a syrup cake, and this limited the absorption of syrup into the deepest, darkest, driest heart of the thing. It was still reasonably moist, though. Which brings me seamlessly to an important digression: what is the comparative of 'moist'? Surely 'moister'? My mother thinks that word does not exist. But this from a woman who pronounces 'gouge' as 'goozh', so hardly an expert in these matters. By the way, if you were upset by all the talk of artificial flavourings, you may be interested to know that the All Natural Lolly Co. or whatever they call themselves recently put out a rather good soft eating liquorice. Recommended. And I recently discovered, on a less happy note, much to my chagrin, that Allen's - or was it Pascal? Perhaps it was Pascal. They clearly have no concern for good taste - I don't suppose you've seen those ads on telly with the singing mother? - have placed on the market fruit allsorts - that is to say, 'liquorice' 'allsorts' with absolutely no liquorice content whatsoever. This asssumedly to appeal to all the liquorice-haters out there who are easily beguiled by the stripes and colours. Disgusting. Hopefully they will soon be eliminated by market forces as the public sees them for the fraud that they are. Oh, and as for the Wallaby liquorice, I've never heard of it either, but it does remind me of the 'Australian Ice-Cream' that they have in Belgium (and presumably elsewhere in Europe), which is made, a friend tells me, as they say in their promotional materials, according to the time-honoured, traditional, hand-made techniques of the Australian Aborigines, a people much studied by anthropologists and agricultural historians for their extensive and intricate pre-contact dairy industry. Fascinating. They also have, on the Continent, a brand of potato chips called 'Jumpys', which are barbecue flavoured and shaped like little kangaroos, actually three-dimensional and very cute. Perhaps the Wallaby liquorice is wallaby-shaped? In the event that you decide to take your liquorice investigations further, should you happen to track down a brand of allsorts that have more than just tasteless congealed coloured sugar between the liquorice layers, could you please make this highly topical information known to the world via your webpage? Thank you; you are performing an important public service. Please keep up the good work.
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