For a nation as vast, wide, and unwieldy as Australia, it is remarkably homogeneous. A lot of that has to do with the founding of the modern nation state being so late in time; this is in contrast to the many languages of indigenous people groups who were here before the British stole a continent through the cunning use of flags. This also has to do with the modern nation state of Australia being founded in the electric age; with the unifying instruments of mass media (radio and television) both coming within a single lifetime.
Nevertheless, Australia is still a nation which is marked by regionalisms and cultural differences. It has too many unnecessary codes of football, it has railways that change gauge when you cross a state line, and weirdly it has different names and packaging for the same suspicious meat roll. Woolworths (also called Safeway and Roelf Vos in other states) produces a suspicious meat roll which depending on where it is sold, is either called Polony, Fritz, or Devon.
You can check the ingredients and nutrition information on the side of the packaging to confirm that they are in fact identical. Woolworths changes the plastic wrap depending on where it is going to be sold. This is different from pepperoni and salami which are different things which look similar. Polony, Fritz, and Devon, come out of the same sausage machinery and are in fact the same hot dog type thing. In principle this is Schrodinger's meat, for it is impossible to know what is inside (don't ask what how the sausage is made) and it impossible to know what it is going to be called until it receives its wrapping.
I can only assume that the name Fritz is given to this thing in South Australia because of the post-First World War immigration from Germany. The Northern Territory which is in a political disunion with South Australia, is influenced more by the by the neighbour to the south than the neighbour to the east.
South Australia started out as a different colony to the rest of the country because it was the only one which wasn't a convict colony. Fritz as a name for suspicious meat roll appears to be an inter-war name, which is almost certainly the result of Germans coming to Australia during the White Australia Policy; who then made some kind of fleischwurst. The other two names are way harder to track down.
The name Polony is more than likely British via Italian and is a transliteration of Bologna, which also becomes Baloney in the United States. I am assured that Baloney is the same kind of suspicious meat roll and because it is made from suspicious meat and filler, the name Baloney has also passed into metaphor for untruth/nonsense.
Devon on the other hand is a strange strange mystery, for unless suspicious meat roll was coming from that county in the south west of England, then it makes no sense. Devon as a name for suspicious meat roll is so suspicious that even the name is a mystery.
On that last note, the name Devonshire as in Devonshire Tea is a nonsense as the county's name is just Devon. I have no idea why if Cornwall is known for pasties, why Devon gets an incorrect moniker for fancy afternoon tea. Devon and Cornwall are in their own weird battle in the great Scone War, over whether jam goes on the scone first and then cream, or whether cream goes on the scone first and then jam.
Quite clearly a multi billion dollar company like Woolworths isn't going to question why Australia has a tripartite disagreement over what to call suspicious meat hot dog type roll and so rather than fight it, they acquiesce and merely sell the product according to the name in the relevant market. To be fair, Australia is so vast, wide, and unwieldy, that the three tribes of suspicious meat roll leave the same factory and aren't confused. A batch which is bound for the eastern states is marked as Devon, a batch which is bound for the western states is Polony, and the batch for the inbetween states is Fritz.
Given the vast distances between The markets where Polony, Fritz, and Devon, are sold, I bet that the appearance of the wrong one in the wrong place would cause sufficiently large enough ripples of confusion that it would make page 7 of a daily newspaper. The convergence of news media might mean that the same story would be published across different states but it would still need to be subedited to catch the "they call it this but we call it this" aspects of the article. Even then I can still see them getting it wrong.
Of course the question at the heart of there being three different names for the same suspicious meat roll is, is this necessary? On the face of it, no. Woolworths could if they wanted to, enforce their product name upon everyone in the country and that would be the end of it. Should they? Again, no. In fact, if anything the diversity in names of suspicious meat roll should be celebrated. As a nation divided, we could come together in changing the flag.
Or not.
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