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Australia's runaway television hit of the winter reached its teary climax on Sunday night, with the final of Masterchef. More than 3.7 million viewers are thought to have tuned in, the largest audience for a non-sports telecast since 2001.

The winner of the cook-off was mother of three Julie Goodwin, who impressed the judges with her home-style cooking and homespun tales. With misty eyes, she spoke of her love of family and food.

An Aussie battler to the core, Julie said she would use her $A100,000 prize money to open a restaurant on the Central Coast of New South Wales, where she would 'serve good food, unpretentious food'.

The loser was Poh Ling Yeow, an artist from Adelaide who had stunned the judges with her modern Malaysian cooking, much of which she had learnt from her mother.

I came to Masterchef late, but was hooked immediately. An unexpected ratings winner, I wonder what explains its success.

Along with the taste good factor, there was certainly a feel good factor - and perhaps audiences have been particularly receptive to that in these feel bad times.

Certainly, the contestants were an inspiring bunch with noble culinary intentions, which sometimes bordered on the evangelical. As Julie Goodwin said in her emotional victory speech: 'When people leave my restaurant I want them to feel loved'.

The judges were unusually nice, as well, and opted for a much more benevolent style of adjudication that the normal reality show knockabout. Rather than reducing contestants to tears, they tried hard to build them up. In fact, the judges seemed to cry almost as much as the cooks.

A few Australian commentators have noted that in the age of Obama - and the age of Oprah - its fashionable to be 'nice'. During the Ozcar scandal last month, Miranda Devine, a conservative columnist with the Sydney Morning Herald, reckoned that Malcolm Turnbull's assault on Kevin Rudd had backfired so spectacularly because he had come across as Mr Nasty. She cited the success Masterchef as part of the trend towards niceness.

Perhaps a better example is the public revulsion at the British chef Gordon Ramsay for his potty-mouthed outburst at the television host, Tracy Grimshaw. That kind of shtick is so pre-global financial crisis. Since last September, people have wanted to be soothed rather than savaged. They do not want the furnace-like temperatures of Ramsay's Hell's Kitchen, but the warmth and sentimentality of the Masterchef set.

Here, it's worth contrasting the success of Channel Ten's Masterchef with the disappointing ratings of Channel Nine's home decoration reality show, HomeMade. Home renovation is for prosperous times. Home cooking is a fact of life of a downturn, as the empty tables in some of the country's most fashionable restaurants attest.

I'd like to think that the success of Masterchef also reaffirms Australia's status as one of the world's great lifestyle superpowers. Surely there are few countries where the food is so good, so varied and so appreciated. When The Bulletin magazine came up with its 100 most influential Australians of all time, it listed the cooking guru, Margaret Fulton, alongside Donald Bradman.

The food here is also so very diverse. Top-notch Greek, Italian, Malaysian, Chinese, Russian, Lebanese, Vietnamese, French, Japanese, Spanish, along with all the fusion spin-offs.

After all, is not food the most glorious expression of Australia's multicultural melting pot?

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