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It's always most difficult to talk about your home, but I'll take up the challenge and try and describe my birthplace, Australia, to you.

Australia May 2001

Nickjenkins
2003-11-20 15:37:40

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probably cause a class scandle that would hit the newspapers.

Australian's don't like "tall poppys" - people that think they're better than the rest (Alan Bond was a tall poppy - see what happened to him!).

That doesn't mean we don't like high-achievers. Paradoxically our champion sportsmen and women and the top business leaders all become cult heroes, but only when they display their ordinary roots. If they rise to positions of power and "lord it" over the rest of us, they are cut down quicker than a lone roo in front of a roadtrain.

Rule number one for Oz - treat everyone like your equal because they almost certainly will be treating you that way (the nice flip side is that they don't treat you like 'another damn tourist'). This does not apply to shop assistants in the Queen Victoria Building in Sydney.

The other thing to note about the vast spaces in Oz is that they are beautiful. Standing on a hill in the middle of the Nullarbor watching the sun come up over the Great Australian Bight and turn the sky into a cloud-studded crimson backdrop was one of the defining moments of my life.

But Australia is not all open space and empty bush. Australia is not all bush any more than Britain is rolling green hills or America sprawling gold-brown prairies. Australia has forests, rain-forests, mountains, gorges, rivers and some stunning cities. It has the Swan river in Perth, Sydney harbour, Tasmania's Cradle Mountain, the Barrier Reef, Kakadu and Snowy mountains.

But of course, that isn't what I think of as 'real' Australia. You can get mountains and forests other places and, I hate to admit it, but other places do it better than Oz. Real Australia is that vast stretch of baking, horizontal scrub that starts at about Dubbo and finishes somewhere around Kalgoorlie. The landscape is wide ...