In one swift rhetorical blow, Crocodile Dundee has disarmed Pauline Hanson’s latest attack on multiculturalism.

But his weapon of choice has left some scratching their heads.

Australian politics has spent a week recovering from the rightwing One Nation leader’s attempt to explain her controversial concept of “Australian monoculture”, first introduced at this month’s National Press Club address.

On Wednesday, in a Senate speech, the One Nation leader said: “Bring back Paul Hogan and Norman Gunston. These are the essential features of Australian monoculture, and there’s nothing remotely exclusionary about them.”

In response, Crocodile Dundee star Hogan, tracked down by the Australian Financial Review to Venice Beach, California, reached for a bird metaphor.

“She’s a pelican, yeah,” he reportedly said (adding that Hanson “sounds very much like this stupid boofhead over here, Trump”).

A what? A pelican? Is that … an insult?

Hogan’s role in the Australian vernacular is contested. The 86-year-old national treasure is yet to fully recover from urging Americans to “throw another shrimp on the barbie”.

But he’s a deep well of Australian slang, and is credited by academics for giving “G’day” international prominence.

Fair dinkum. So going back to “pelican”, what does he mean exactly? Well, Hogan has prior form. In 1986’s Crocodile Dundee itself, his titular character tells a New York driver: “Get on the right side of the road, ya pelican!”

Another Australian actor, Russell Crowe, reportedly tweeted after the Rabbitohs’ 2014 NRL grand final win that one of the club’s sponsors was a “pelican” after he was overhead to back the opposing team, the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs. The executive said he had been misconstrued, and Crowe deleted the tweet.

Its usage as an insult goes back much further. In Act III scene 4 of King Lear, the eponymous character says of the grasping, power-hungry Goneril and Regan “‘twas this flesh begot/Those pelican daughters”. The New Oxford Shakespeare says of this line: “young pelicans supposedly fed on their mother’s blood”.

Was Hogan reaching to Shakespeare to criticise Hanson’s ruthless political ambition? It seems … unlikely.

Australians are no strangers to using native wildlife, and particularly birds, as insults: see also galah, bin chicken, drongo.

A specific entry for “pelican” is absent from the Australian National Dictionary, but the consensus online is that it means a fool or a clown, based on perceptions of the bird as slow-moving, with an ungainly physiognomy.

Of course, this is all quite unfair to an animal that BirdLife Australia calls “highly mobile”, that works cooperatively in groups “to drive fish into a concentrated mass”, and can “soar to heights of up to 3,000m” – all positive qualities for a potential prime minister.

Indeed, the bird has steadily risen in the polls in Guardian Austalia’s Bird of the Year, partly thanks to the public awareness campaigns of reporter Matilda Boseley.

Insult or not, of course, it’s all grist to the mill for Hanson’s controversy-publicity machine. But, according to the AFR’s reporting, Hogan did not mean it as a compliment.

“She’s living in the past, obviously,” he also said of Hanson. “How can [Australia] be a monoculture? We’re all migrants, except the Aboriginals, who as far as we know have been [in Australia] for 60,000 years.”

He added: “I want to die in Australia – in a multicultural Australia!”

So much for the monoculture? That’s not a knife, Pauline. That’s a knife.