Where "Dry as a Dead Dingo's Donger" Comes From
This is a deliberately over-the-top escalation of the plain dry as a bone — Australian slang has a habit of taking an ordinary comparison and stacking on increasingly absurd or crude imagery purely for comic effect, and this is one of the more colourful examples still in everyday use ("donger" is old slang for the male member, and a dead dingo's would, definitionally, be about as dry as it gets).
The Australian National Dictionary dates the phrase to the 1970s and credits it to comedian Barry Humphries (creator of Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson), though it most likely existed in some form before that. It's used two ways: literally, for parched weather or land, and — just as often — for a very dry sense of humour, or for a drought so bad the joke needs the driest possible image.
Source:
"This wine is dry as a dead dingo's donger."
How Aussies Actually Use It
Reserved for genuinely extreme dryness — a drought-cracked paddock, a bone-dry red, or a throat that badly needs a beer. It's blokey, irreverent language, more at home in the pub than in polite company.
Because of the crude imagery, it's usually said among mates for a laugh rather than in formal or mixed-company settings.
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