It’s long been joked that Tasmanians have two heads.

The stereotype has been fuelled by exaggerated claims of incest on the island. A far more likely explanation is goitre.

In case you don’t know, a goitre is a swelling at the front of the neck caused by an enlarged thyroid gland. One of the causes of a goitre is a deficiency in iodine, which is essential to the proper functioning of your thyroid gland.

Tasmania’s topsoil has been devoid of iodine since the ice age, which means low-iodine food was grown and consumed in Tasmania for centuries. This led to goitre affecting the local European population in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Doctors could surgically remove the swellings, but this often left a scar on the neck – which kept the ‘second head’ joke alive.

One notable Tasmanian who developed goitre and had it removed was Enid Lyons, the first woman to be elected to federal parliament. (She was also the wife of the twenty-sixth premier of Tasmania, Joseph Lyons, who went on to serve as Australia’s tenth prime minister.)

Enid had her goitre removed just before being elected in 1949, the same year the Tasmanian government began administering daily iodine pills to schoolchildren, which unfortunately resulted in numerous cases of thyrotoxicosis.

One of the Tasmanian professionals who worked with people suffering from thyroid conditions was Paul Richards, a now-retired professor of nuclear medicine.

“Some [people’s] goitres were very, very large, and so the joke went around that it was protruding like a second head,” he told the ABC in 2019.

“It was just taken for granted that you had goitre.”

Iodine deficiency and related health issues have mostly disappeared thanks to public health measures, such as a legislated requirement that packaged bread contain iodised salt.

Two Pillows, Two Heads?

Something else has fuelled the two-head joke over the years: the claim that Tasmanian soldiers fighting in World War One asked for two pillows for their beds instead of just one.

While there is no solid evidence to support this, emeritus professor of history Stefan Petrow believes “it’s not impossible.”

“Tasmanians were mixing more directly with [mainlanders] during the course of the war, so it’s certainly possible,” he said in 2019.

Callum J. Jones studied English, History, and Journalism at the University of Tasmania. He has written fiction and non-fiction for Tasmanian Times since 2018. He can be traced by the smell of fresh coffee.

Follow him on Twitter (@Callum_Jones_10) and Facebook (@callum.j.jones.creative).