Town Worms Its Way to Success

Korumburra, a town in Australia’s southeast state of Victoria, as recently as 1977 was on its last legs. The local coal mine had gone bust, a butter plant had shut down and young people were finding jobs in Melbourne, 75 miles away. Then someone had the idea of promoting the town’s most unique feature, megascolines australia , the great Gippsland gurgling earthworm. A hermaphrodite with 16 hearts, it is 12-feet long and makes sucking and gurgling sounds like a bathtub draining water when it burrows. Tourists began flocking to Korumburra, population 2,800. “The worm saved the town,” said Mark Holmes, who owns the property where most of the worms are found. “The worms helped people have an identity. I don’t know if they’re proud of what they’ve got, but we’ve got something unique.” The town now holds an annual worm festival each March and celebrates the worm with parades, carnivals and, yes, an earthworm queen. Fluffy toy worms are for sale in shops and pink worm cutouts adorn windows. But now the earthworm may be on its last legs. Intensive farming in the area has whittled down its small habitat, which once was an enormous rain forest with 300-foot trees. Last week, Federal Environment Minister Graham Richardson announced an $11,000 save-the-worm grant.

--The citizens of Bridgeton, N.J., turned out in special commemorative T-shirts in the blue and gold of Sweden to greet King Carl XVI and Queen Silvia as they arrived by helicopter to dedicate a museum chronicling the region’s Swedish heritage. The royal couple was in the fifth day of a 17-day tour of the United States to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the colonization of New Sweden, in what is now Delaware, southern New Jersey and the Philadelphia area. Speaking in accented but fluent English, the monarch called the museum a “lasting tribute to Swedish history and culture.” The couple then visited Trenton and Princeton University, where the king was to meet privately with the university’s Nobel laureates. Their schedule called for a black-tie dinner at Drumthwacket, the official residence of Gov. Thomas H. Kean.

--British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has book problems, too. Political scientists David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh, authors of “The British General Election of 1987,” describe the “Iron Lady” during the campaign as being “tired and irritable, and her nervousness was exacerbated by a persistent toothache.”