´óÏó´«Ã½

You will have to forgive me for my infrequent blogging, but parenthood looms and I confess to a journalistic form of "baby brain".

Though I resisted the temptation to opt for the Beer and Bub pre-natal course, where you can prepare for fatherhood in a pub with a soothing libation, our classes had a distinctly Australian flavour nonetheless.

Our tutor was a delightful Melbournian who called us "possums" and "darls" throughout, and whose 40 minute simulation of the final stages of labour will live long in the memory both as an object lesson in birthing, and a journey into some of the lesser-known reaches of the Australian vernacular.

From start to finish, this has very much been an Anglo-Australian project, and now that it is about to reach its fruition the blog will take some paternity leave.

If you will allow me to lapse briefly into the third person, Nick Bryant's Australia will be back shortly, after my wife and I have welcomed into the world our newborn Anglo-Australian...

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

Three iconic Australian females have dominated the news this week: the legendary opera singer Dame Joan Sutherland, Azaria Chamberlain - the ten-week old baby whose disappearance from a campsite in the shadow of Uluru in August, 1980 has preyed on the national consciousness for three decades, and whose death now looks like it will become the subject of a fourth coronial inquest - and Sister Mary MacKillop, who will be canonised at the Vatican on Sunday, and become Australia's first ever saint.

I have written a longer story about Mary MacKillop , but the question raised in the first paragraph is worth opening up for comment.

"Feisty, anti-authoritarian, a lover of the bush, a friend of Aborigines and a champion of a "fair go" for the needy. Were Australians to come up with the qualities they most wanted in their first saint, many would find themselves describing Sister Mary MacKillop."

You could add to that the fact that she was born in Melbourne, died in Sydney, and worked for so much of her life in South Australia, which gives her even more national appeal. Then there is the fact that, like such a large proportion of the Australian population then and now, she was the daughter of immigrants. Her parents came from Scotland.

In her temperament, character traits and upbringing, Mary MacKillop is so quintessentially Australian. As : "Mary MacKillop is the vernacular saint for a people who deify the battler, are democratic, tilt against authority and are yet traditional."

The Vatican has credited Mary MacKillop, who is believed by many Catholics to have miraculous healing powers, with two miracles. This has prompted at least one prominent atheist to pointedly ask why she has used her gifts so sparingly. Elsewhere, however, Mary MacKillop has been getting a near universally good press. Even outside of Australia's five million-strong Catholic community, she commands enormous respect and affection.

What I have found most interesting in the run-up to her canonisation is to see both the defenders of the Roman Catholic Church and its fiercest critics try to appropriate her memory. Mary MacKillop was briefly excommunicated from the church in part because of her role in uncovering a priest accused of child sex abuse, a part of her story that has been seized upon by the main Australian victims group, Broken Rites. They want Mary MacKillop to be viewed as the patron saint of child sex abuse victims around the world.

In her death and canonization, Mary MacKillop has become a curiously malleable figure: a longtime symbol of hope for the infirmed, a newfound symbol of justice for the abused and a more universal symbol of the kind of values which so many Australians have long cherished and continue to hold dear.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

Whenever this country was accused of cultural lowliness in the performing arts in the late-1950s and 1960s, Australians always had available an instant, two-word response: Joan Sutherland or, ever better, ("The Stunning One"). The great Pavarotti, who toured Australia with her in 1965, described her as "the voice of the century." Many think there was no female singer who made a greater contribution to opera in the second half of the twentieth century. Some would in their praise.

Rarely, if ever, will you hear her described as an "Australian Diva," largely because this country does not do divas. It recoils against that kind of self-centredness and self-aggrandisement, and the phrase itself sounds firmly oxymoronic. Indeed, part of her great popular appeal was that she was the anti-diva: a down-to-earth Sydneysider who sang like an angel on stage and spoke Aussie fluent 'strine off it. She fitted what Donald Horne, the author of The Lucky Country, described as "the cult of the informal". She had also worked hard to become an overnight sensation.

Until reading this morning's obituaries, I had not realised that one of Joan Sutherland's great gifts to opera was to open up parts of the repertoire that had been beyond the range of most sopranos. "Because of her extraordinarily agile voice and crystal-clear high notes," writes the arts critic Richard Morrison in The Times, "she was able to champion many of the great bel canto roles that had fallen out of fashion." She was also an especially brave singer, because her speciality was to tackle operatic roles with such a high degree of difficulty.

As we celebrate her singular talent, some readers will no doubt think it inappropriate to mention the time she courted controversy at a luncheon in 1994 held by the Australians for Constitutional Monarchy. She bemoaned not having a British passport any more and resented having to go to the post office to get a new one where she was "interviewed by a Chinese or an Indian". "I find it ludicrous," she noted.

But I refer to it now because it helps explain why one of Australia's great cultural assets was not always wholeheartedly embraced by Australia's cultural elites. Back in the Seventies, Patrick White, Australia's only Nobel laureate for literature, had already written her off. Over dinner in 1977, Dame Joan told White that she had never read any of his novels, and was a fan of The Thorn Birds. Afterwards, he called her "a wound-up Ocker Olympia"- too low-brow for his tastes, and too staunch a monarchist.

Needless to say, the very qualities that White sneered at were the same attributes that, in combination with her voice, gave her such broad appeal. For others, she was funny, self-deprecatory, easy-going and instantly likeable. Again, the Australian anti-diva.

I have always thought it a great shame that Joan Sutherland did not get to sing at the opening concert of the Sydney Opera House - although she did perform in its inaugural season, and her portrait now takes pride of place in its foyer. However, a far more fitting memorial comes in vinyl, or its modern-day, digitised equivalent. It means that while La Stupenda may have passed away, she need never leave the stage.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

The Australian dollar soared to near parity with the US greenback this week, providing yet more proof, as if any more were needed, of the comparative strength of the Australian economy, the much envied "wonder from down under".

Overnight on Thursday, the dollar reached 99.18, its highest level since 1983, when the currency was first floated. "From Pacific Peso to Parity" - the headline writers are waiting with their fingers on the ENTER key.

Rarely has Australia packed more of an economic punch, which makes it all the more ironic that the new Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, should imply this week that, on the diplomatic front at least, she now intends to land much softer blows.

After visiting Australian diggers in Afghanistan and talking up Australia's World Cup bid with the Fifa chief Sepp Blatter in Zurich, she made her international debut in Brussels at the Asia-Europe meeting.

However, it was not much of a coming out. Instead, she gave the strong impression of wanting to be back home.

In an interview with ABC television, "by satellite" no less as the presenter Kerry O'Brien pointed out, Julia Gillard had this to say of her first trip abroad as PM:

"Kerry, I'm just going to be really upfront about this: foreign policy is not my passion. It's not what I've spent my life doing. You know, I came into politics predominantly to make a difference to opportunity questions, particularly make a difference in education.

"So, yes, if I had a choice I'd probably more be in a school watching kids learn to read in Australia than here in Brussels at international meetings."

It says a lot about the leaden parochialism of Australian politics right now that this statement is being talked of in some circles as something of a political masterstroke. It gives her a kind of undiplomatic immunity, I suppose you could call it, for never can she be accused, as Kevin "747" Rudd so often was, of being more interested in Beijing and Washington than Broken Hill and Wollongong.

The trip to Brussels also came with a photo-opportunity, presumably aimed at Middle Australia, and a classic example of her Bungalow Politics that we have spoken of before.

Samantha Maiden of The Australian takes up the story. "In a masterful bogan touch, the travelling media were invited yesterday to photograph her visiting a Brussels hot chip van to sample the local delicacy - fries and mayonnaise."

Arguably, one of Kevin Rudd's great achievements was to institutionalise Australia's increased diplomatic heft, not least by helping to elevate the role of the G20. Both John Howard and Kevin Rudd also nurtured close ties with the US presidents of the day. Clearly, Julia Gillard will be more of a stay-at-home prime minister.

Tony Abbott, who was in Britain last week for the Conservative Party conference, has also said that Australian prime ministers who spend too much time abroad have a "ticket on themselves".

Last weekend, he even turned down a trip to Afghanistan to meet the diggers, explaining, bizarrely, that it would give him "jet lag" when he arrived in Britain. This from the Iron Man Triathlete.

The dollar may be close to parity. But on the international stage, the new Australian prime minister and the leader of the opposition appear to have brought about their own devaluation.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

The Australian dollar soared to near parity with the US greenback this week, providing yet more proof, as if any more were needed, of the comparative strength of the Australian economy, the much-envied "wonder from down under."

Overnight on Thursday the dollar reached 99.18 cents, its highest level since 1983, when the currency was first floated.

"From Pacific Peso to Parity." The headline writers are waiting with their fingers on the ENTER key.

Rarely has Australia packed more of an economic punch, which makes it all the more ironic that new Prime Minister Julia Gillard should imply this week that, on the diplomatic front at least, she now intends to land much softer blows.

After visiting Australian diggers in Afghanistan and talking up Australia's World Cup bid with the Fifa chief Sepp Blatter in Zurich, she made her international debut in Brussels at the Asia-Europe meeting.

However, it was not much of a coming-out. Instead, she gave the strong impression of wanting to be back home.

In an interview with ABC television, "by satellite" no less as presenter Kerry O'Brien pointed out, Julia Gillard had this to say of her first trip abroad as PM:

"Kerry, I'm just going to be really upfront about this: foreign policy is not my passion. It's not what I've spent my life doing. You know, I came into politics predominantly to make a difference to opportunity questions, particularly make a difference in education.

"So, yes, if I had a choice I'd probably more be in a school watching kids learn to read in Australia than here in Brussels at international meetings."

It says a lot about the leaden parochialism of Australian politics right now that this statement is being talked of in some circles as something of a political masterstroke.

It gives her a kind of undiplomatic immunity, I suppose you could call it, for never can she be accused, as Kevin '747' Rudd so often was, of being more interested in Beijing and Washington than Broken Hill and Wollongong.

The trip to Brussels also came with a photo-opportunity, presumably aimed at Middle Australia, and a classic example of her Bungalow Politics that we have spoken of before. Samantha Maiden of The Australian . "In a masterful bogan touch, the traveling media were invited yesterday to photograph her visiting a Brussels hot chip van to sample the local delicacy - fries and mayonnaise."

Arguably, one of Kevin Rudd's great achievements was to institutionalise Australia's increased diplomatic heft, not least by helping to elevate the role of the G20. Both John Howard and Kevin Rudd also nurtured close ties with the US presidents of the day. Clearly, Julia Gillard will be more of a stay-at-home prime minister.

Opposition leader Tony Abbott, who was in Britain last week for the Conservative party conference, has also said that Australian prime ministers who spend too much time abroad have a "ticket on themselves."

Last weekend he even turned down a trip to Afghanistan to meet the diggers, explaining, bizarrely, that it would give him "jet lag" when he arrived in Britain. This from the Iron Man Triathlete.

The dollar may be close to parity. But on the international stage, the new Australian prime minister and the leader of the opposition appear to have brought about their own devaluation.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

The disturbing footage from a Perth detention facility of an Aboriginal man being blasted by a taser gun repeatedly and agonisingly has drawn near universal condemnation. The man had refused to submit to a strip search and was hit 13 times by a 50,000-volt shock, eight times on camera and five times off it.

"Do you want to go again?" yelled one of the nine officers from the who surrounded the man. "Wanna go again?"

As the taser is fired over and over, the video shows the man writhing on the floor, his body contorted in pain.

Filmed two years ago, the footage was released as part of a report into the use of taser guns by the Western Australia Police. It found that there was a growing tendency to use them in place of other methods of negotiation and physical restraint, even though they were introduced originally to provide officers with an alternative to hand guns in more extreme confrontations.

Whereas batons and capsicum spray might have been used in the past on difficult and violent offenders, now the preference is for taser stun guns. In the three years that they have been issued to beat police officers in Australia, they have apparently become the weapon of choice.

The release of the report coincided with the death of a man in his twenties in Sydney who was zapped by a taser gun after allegedly brandishing two knives at the police. The police say he was breaking into a house, and argue that the use of the taser may have prevented the deaths of two officers. The incident has become part of a much wider debate about the increased reliance on tasers.

"Police are far too trigger happy," says Terry O'Gorman, the president of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties. "The evidence shows that tasers can kill. We support the use of tasers in a life-or-death situation or a violent situation where there is no alternative, but they're being used willy-nilly."

But the defends their use. It notes that in New South Wales assaults against the police dropped by 24% after tasers were deployed.

Even before the release of the video footage from Western Australia and the latest taser incident in Sydney, the issue of over-aggressive policing had been in the news after the death of a man who had been sprayed with capsicum spray by police and hit with a baton at St George Leagues Club in Sydney, where fans had been celebrating their victory in Saturday's rugby league grand final.

Not that it has any bearing on what happened at the Leagues Club, I watched the game at Sydney's Olympic Stadium and was taken aback afterwards at the scale of the police operation. Vehicles from the riot squad patrolled the surrounding plaza. Police dog handlers were out in force. As is the norm at sports stadiums in New South Wales, the police wore boiler suits, while even the officer helping to herd people onto the trains was wearing a bullet-proof vest.

But the style of policing seemed out of kilter with the mood of the game, at which fans from the and the had mingled happily in the stands and exchanged congratulations and commiserations afterwards. Fans are not segregated at Australian sporting events, and, curiously, the only times I have reported on crowd trouble at Australian sporting events have been at the - two years running.

Nobody doubts that the police do an extraordinarily tough job in the most trying of circumstances. You only have to be out in one of the major cities late on a Friday or Saturday night to witness the challenge confronting them. But from the increased reliance on tasers to the forceful policing of sports fixtures, do they themselves need to show more restraint?

PS Euroloo, yes I did get soaked.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?

"Must Australians always be matched with some prototype from the wider world, rather than being judged on their own merits?"

So asks Peter Conrad, the Oxford-based Australian academic, in the October issue of The Monthly, an Australian version of The New Yorker, to make precisely the kind of comparison that makes Conrad recoil. He raises the question in his review of a new exhibition of the work of Carol Jerrems, an Australian photographer working in the 1970s who has oft been compared with Diane Arbus, the New York photographer known for her black and white portraits of dwarves, transvestites and circus performers. Nicole Kidman, the Australian Julia Roberts, played her in the 2006 film Fur.

I confess to doing it myself in the post on Australians who do not have much of a global profile but enjoy great recognition at home. Andrew Denton became an Australian Parkinson. Peter Sculthrorpe was an Australian Vaughan Williams or Elgar - although the better international comparison is an Aussie Aaron Copland. Poor old Norman Gunston, meanwhile, was reduced to an Aussie Ali G. Here, the international comparisons were intended, as they usually are in this blog, to help make sense of Australia to non-Australians.

Conrad's grumble is with home-grown Australian cultural commentary that goes in for this kind of international benchmarking, to use an inelegant phrase, because it so often comes with a few spasms of cultural cringe. Often the presumption in any kind of comparison is that the Australian example will be inferior - the habit identified by A.A. Phillips 60 years ago when he noticed that listeners of a programme called Incognito on ABC tended to pick the outsider when asked to adjudicate between the performance of a foreigner and a home-grown musician.

As regular readers know, I tend to argue in favour of Australia's newfound cultural creep rather than lingering feelings of cultural cringe - though they have not been entirely vanquished. But on Conrad's point, I simply do not think it is true anymore that Australians are automatically compared with international prototypes. More so than ever before, I suspect they are being judged on their merits.

The most obvious example is Cate Blanchett. Cate Blanchett is Cate Blanchett. But there are many more. The poet Les Murray is incomparable. I have never heard the playwright David Williamson described, say, as an Aussie David Hare. The same is true of the work of Baz Luhrmann. I don't hear the novelists Christos Tsiolkas or Steve Toltz likened to writers from elsewhere because their voices are so emphatically Australian (although there are echoes of the cultural cringe in the reaction to The Slap making it onto the Booker prize long list and A Fraction of the Whole making it onto last year's short-list). The same is true of the singer Paul Kelly and a host of others.

Elements of the cringe doubtless survive. Here's but one example: the two big recent theatrical hits in Australia were Waiting for Godot starring Sir Ian McKellen and August: Osage County, a quite brilliant play that came here from Chicago via Broadway. But what strikes me about the arts scene here at the moment is its creative confidence.

"Must Australians always be matched with some prototype from the wider world?" I no longer think it is fair to say that they are "always". The international comparisons still come to be drawn. But it's no longer a mandatory process, and often, when it happens, the Aussies come out on top.

With that, I'm off to the rugby league grand final.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?