While looking into Australia-related matters today, since it’s Australia Day, I looked up Tuross Head. It’s a small village on the coast of New South Wales.

I already knew that, since just after Christmas 1991, I spent a few days nearby, guests of the hospitable Clark family, one of whom I knew in Japan. I spent a good while one day wandering around the fine coastline at Tuross, rocky shores enlivened by distinctly unfamiliar flora, though that doesn’t really show in my snapshots.

More recently, as in today, Wiki informed me that one Eva Mylott (1875-1920) was born in Tuross Head. She was a popular opera singer from Australia, and also so happens to be Mel Gibson’s paternal grandmother, though she was never to know him, since she died when her own children were very young.

That’s her, in a photo from the collection of the State Library of New South Wales.

Then I started reading about her son, Mel’s father, Hutton Gibson (1918-2020). While he didn’t have the platform of celebrity, the elder Gibson had quite a career as a crackpot, back when that meant pamphlets and physical-medium videos or appearing on local radio or talking to people in person about your ideas. Just as the Internet has become a vast conduit of more or less factual information, so too vast eddies of crackpot nonsense now flow through it; but that’s a rant for another time.

Crackpot dad, eh Mel? There’s a Japanese proverb for this situation: kaeru no ko wa kaeru (蛙の子は蛙). Literally, a tadpole is a frog. The less poetic English — though it has some resonance, both as sound and emotionally as meaning — would be, like father, like son.