Why everyone wants to be Australian

If you live long enough, you get to see the world turn — or turn upside down. After a lifetime spent watching and living through the abrasive, competitive relationship between Australia and Britain, I can vouch for that.

Growing up in the southern state of Tasmania in the 1950s, I measured the expanses of water on the map and wondered why we had been dumped at this forlorn global extremity. Plotting my escape, I played Monopoly — enabling me to buy and sell Piccadilly.

But when I finally reached Oxford — thanks to one of the scholarships invented by Cecil Rhodes to give boys from the imperial backblocks an instruction in life and manners — a fellow-student reminded me of my deprived, peripheral condition.

”Bloody colonials, over here telling us about our literature,” he said with a snort.

I came, after all, from a country that had served, during its early days as a penal colony, as Britain’s privy. Its culture was supposedly non-existent, its nature grotesque and miscegenated.

In 1819 the first poem written in the colony, by a jumped-up jurist called Barron Field, derided the kangaroo and the platypus, and rhymed Australia with failure. A century later Norman Douglas, objecting to the incursion of eucalyptus around the Mediterranean, defamed our native trees accusing them of ”precocious senility and vice”, castigating their foliage for a ”perverse, anti-human” denial of shade.

Australia was an underworld, a demonised dystopia.

At last we benighted castaways have our revenge. Australia has become an object of abject longing for miserable Britons. The 2000 Sydney Olympics made the country’s new status official. The opening ceremony was a supernatural pageant, a creation myth enacted before our eyes.

Now every year the global telecast of festivities on New Year’s Eve begins as fireworks erupt from the span of the Sydney Harbour Bridge: the world annually renews itself in Australia, which basks in a light as fresh as that of Eden.

From this distance Australia seems a parade-ground of nubile flesh: the exotic and the erotic are natural synonyms. I remember rejoicing a few years ago when one of the spotty Manchester lads in the television series Queer as Folk managed to pick up a hunky bloke from Sydney. The day after, he bewailed his unworthiness. ‘I can’t be the best shag he’s ever had,’ he whined. ‘I mean, he’s Australian!’

The sensual idyll that is Australia is on display, not only in the form of Kylie Minogue’s bottom, but also in the soap opera Neighbours, where characters spend their unclouded days commuting between the pub, the coffee shop and the backyard swimming pool. Good humour is compulsory, the dialogue matey banter. The only work required is a few outdoor chores — watering and mowing of lawns generally — before the residents are free to flirt, sunbathe and redecorate their spacious bungalows.

No wonder tour buses bring hordes of foreign visitors to its innocuous Melbourne cul-de-sac where the soap is set. Ramsay Street is a picture of innocence in comparison with dank, skulking Coronation Street or the war zone of Albert Square.

True, Australia remains a sanitary disposal area for unwanted celebrities, with Ant and Dec currently supervising a sadistic regime in the rainforest. But despite the snakes, the leeches, and Janet Street-Porter, the British public spends its time fantasising about an Australian holiday or the chance to emigrate there.

It reminds me of a story about a doughty Australian housewife who won the lottery in the 1950s and was asked whether she intended to visit Britain, which in those days was still deferentially referred to as ”home”.

”Oh no, I wouldn’t go there,” she replied. ”That’s where the convicts came from.”

Australia — affluent, stylish, sunnily hedonistic – is no longer prepared to accommodate those shiftless creatures it calls ”Pommie bludgers”.

The contradictions can be cruel. Last winter, I noticed an advertisement on a London bus shelter. Foster’s lager was encouraging local observance of Australia Day (celebrated down under with beach barbecues on 26 January).

On the poster, sniffling Britons in woolly caps gripped lager cans in hands that would have been better warmed by mugs of steaming Bovril. ”Party Like It’s Summer,” the slogan urged.

I suspect the promotion failed: some ironies are too hurtful, even for hard-bitten Londoners in whose supermarkets Australia brazenly markets its allure. Does anyone remember the Jacob’s Creek advertisement that featured a weary, snotty British voice sighing, ”Just what we need — more Australians”. Then a crate of Australian Merlot slides into view, silencing all objections. Our wine is welcome, even if we’re not.

Consumerism caters to emotional cravings as much as to physical needs, so the Australian products on sale here are elixirs.

I assuage my own homesickness by buying a brand of shampoo with a mob of kangaroos bounding round a logo with a pseudo-scientific justification: a wildflower known as kangaroo paw is blended, or so they say, with the sulfates and sodium chloride. The small print supplies contact addresses in Ireland and the Netherlands, where kangaroos are not often sighted, and adds the warning: ”Aussie is a trademark”.

I worry that an offshore corporation might have copyrighted my native land. But I scrub such concerns out of my head with my tea-tree conditioner.

And after that, having dressed myself in clothes from Country Road — shirts as rust-red as the Nullarbor Plain or as grey-green as a gum tree, sweaters shorn from merinos — I spread some Vegemite on my toast and am ready to confront the damp London gloom outside my front door.

Countries today are branded goods to be merchandised around the world. New Zealand has relaunched itself as Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and the national airline’s Boeing 747s are painted with warlocks.

Australia has decided to ally itself with another cinematic fiction, and goes by the nickname of Oz. The yellow brick road leads to Sydney, and the dazzling ceramic shells of the Opera House.

Hugh Jackman spent this year on Broadway in a musical about Peter Allen, a spangled dervish who married Liza Minnelli while conducting an affair with her mother’s husband. The show was called The Boy from Oz and made Australia look like a lurid tropical resort over-run by disco dancers.

L. Frank Baum, who wrote the Wizard of Oz stories, idly named his imaginary realm after a glance at the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet — labelled 0-Z. Like that drawer, Australia remains a convenient vacancy in which remote admirers can file away their daydreams.

The country’s omnipresence has been advanced by a series of actors like Jackman, specialists in self-invention. They no longer deal in crass stereotypes, such as Paul Hogan as Crocodile Dundee or Steve Irwin (an actual croc hunter, who had the doubtful distinction of being one of the Australians George Bush asked to meet last year).

What these new performers exemplify is Australia’s obliging adaptability.

Jackman’s Allen — bisexual, bicoastal, bicontinental — will transform himself into whatever you desire, or whatever can be sold. Russell Crowe can be a gladiator or a Princeton mathematician. Cate Blanchett is equally convincing as a Tudor monarch or a frontier wife. Nicole Kidman assumes the identities and physiques of a harlot, a vampire, a robot, or an egg-headed White House aide with a special knowledge of nuclear smuggling.

Perhaps this illustrates what it means to be a boy or girl from Oz, in a borderless world where national identity is as obsolete as the nation state.

Australia has, after two centuries of rejection, won the role of the wish-fulfilment fantasy. That popularity won’t last forever but, on an over-run planet, it’s hard to see where next the moribund northern hemisphere will be able to find clear blue skies, clean water, open space and smiling faces.

A map of the world, as Oscar Wilde wisely remarked, needs to leave room for utopia. The fifth continent — the first to be created and last to be discovered — may be as close to paradise as we will get.