The country where everything's a steal

Tourists have long been snatching pieces of Uluru - but many later return them after complaining of bad luck. Photo / Supplied

When it comes to bizarre thefts, Australians are an enterprising mob. After all, it's a country where the testicles on statues of bulls have to be padlocked to stop them being swiped.

The city council of Rockhampton, Queensland, secures the testicles of bull statues to stop pranking students stealing them.

At least Rockhampton police have irrefutable evidence of the stolen property - after all, how many sculptured bull's balls can there be?

Cucumbers - they're a different matter.

South Australian police are investigating the theft of A$10,000 ($12,400) worth of cucumbers in the past three months. Thieves have struck market gardens a dozen times, leaving police an unusual challenge.

"The issue with the cucumber is, how do you and I tell who owns a different cucumber?" SA Police Chief Inspector Kym Zander said.

The cucumber heists are as baffling as the theft of the entire produce from an olive grove in New South Wales in May last year. Thieves stripped 398 olive trees in Lovedale, in the Hunter Valley.

Then there is Brisbane man Chad Daniel Haylock, jailed this week for eight months for crimes including the theft of 360 eggs and 5kg of freshly ground coffee from a south Brisbane hotel.

While a motive for stealing food is plausible, other robberies defy reason.

Such as the 2004 theft of horse tails from a farrier's paddock in Toowoomba, Queensland. The tails were cut off six pet horses while their owner, Bob Hayes, was in a Brisbane hospital with heart problems.

"It's a rotten, lousy thing to do," Hayes said, adding he believed the stolen items could be destined for a market few would know exists: the fake tail market, where they could collectively fetch more then A$2000.

Then there's the crocodile stolen from Rockhampton Zoo, numerous snakes reported stolen from wildlife parks, parking meters plundered and polka-dot garden gnomes gone.

Those robberies almost seem run of the mill compared to the theft of a purple, pink and yellow 40kg statue of a four-armed man clutching vanilla slices in Ouyen, northwest Victoria, in 2004.

The town's mascot was missing for months before being found abandoned in a ditch.

But pranks were ruled out in Cairns when a man twice broke into an adult shop in the north Queensland city.

He stole blow-up sex dolls and, as the Cairns Post put it, "had sex with blow-up dolls before abandoning the vinyl vixens in a nearby lane".

The perverted purloiner joins a list of sex-related thieves which includes a deviant baggage courier with a fetish for women's hair.

The courier collected the pubic and head hair from brushes and underwear in baggage, put it in plastic slips and recorded the owner's personal details in an exercise book.

- AAP