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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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as was expected. Some of the things One Nation members have said over the years have been flippant, bigoted or downright ridiculous. Suggestions from One Nation have included providing low cost loans to farmers by "printing more money", stopping all forms of immigration and withdrawing from the United Nations and eliminating foreign aid. Most of the backing for One Nation seems to come from disenfranchised rural communities. The silver lining on this odious cloud is that it seems to have galvanised majority opinion against One Nation and a number of important groups such as the major political parties, the church and social organisation have explicitly stated their support for Australian multi-culturalism.

And multi-culturalism is one of the best features of Australia. Living in Sydney I had a favourite rota of restaurants that I would visit, starting with Thai progressing through Szechuan to Spanish to French to Greek to Vietnamese. Oft quoted statistics about Australia include the fact that Melbourne has the largest Greek population in the world outside of Athens and that Perth has more Chinese restaurants per head than any other city in the world. Whether or not either of these was ever or is still true I don't know but it's a nice thought to have.

One of the more eclectic features of Australian culture include the way we wrestle with multiculturalism and how hard it is to define authoritative Australian culture.

In terms of geographical organisation there is a lot of confusion in the rest of the world as to just how Australia is made up and where all the cities lie. Everyone has heard of Sydney and a few have heard of Melbourne but it usually doesn't go much beyond that. In order to dispel some of the misconceptions I'll do a quick (and wholly inadequate) run through of each city and state or territory of which there are eight.

Sydney, New South Wales ...