Adventures in Correspondentland (39 page)

If nothing else, Irwin's death demonstrated that Australia was far more complicated than international news organisations, such as the BBC, liked to think. We preferred hearing about an assumed Australia, recalling the usual stereotypes, rather than anything more confounding or unfamiliar. No doubt, this is one of the reasons why big international news organisations have neglected the ‘land down under', a phrase dripping with inconsequentiality. Generally, they have viewed it as a faraway backwater, where many of its stories, as F. Scott Fitzgerald might have put it, ‘fell just short of being news'.

Long ago, Australia lost the legendary CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite – just as President Johnson lost him over Vietnam – who wryly observed that the country harboured too many reporters and not enough news. Australia's sheer irrelevance also provided the starting point for another American, Bill Bryson, whose book
Down Under
is probably the most widely read portrait of
modern Australia. Before setting off for Sydney, Bryson sauntered the short distance to his local library and conducted a fruitless search of
The New York Times
index for 1997. Australia merited just 20 mentions, whereas Albania got 150. If anything, that year yielded an exceptionally rich harvest of Antipodean yarns. Over the following 12 months, just six stories were considered ripe for publication. Ending his adventures and travelogue, Bryson left readers with a departing thought, as melodramatic as it was melancholic: ‘Life would go on in Australia,' he opined, ‘and I would hear almost nothing of it.'

My hunch was that all this neglect was born of a false sense of understanding: the misplaced notion that because assumed Australia was so easily comprehensible there was no real need for any further enquiry. It was almost as if we allowed Australia's tourism advertisements to do our journalism for us. Every few years or so, another would pop up to reassure us that everything we supposed was true. The blokes still drank beer. The women were still blonde, bikini-clad and beautiful. The barbie was still aflame, like some Antipodean chariot of fire.

In my more evangelical moments, this was something I was determined to change, both out of national interest and self-interest. No longer should the tyranny of distance mean that Australia, and its resident correspondent, would suffer the felony of neglect. Any talk of ‘relevance deficiency syndrome' would be confined to the past. And although coming to Australia still had the feel of a lifestyle sabbatical, part of my search for a balanced life, there was still enough of the egomaniacal foreign correspondent in me not to want to disappear entirely from public view.

So when I arrived in Australia, I planned to start with the internal contradictions and then work from there, in the hope of
persuading London that this truly was a continent that defied neat encapsulation. Ahead of my BBC interview for the Sydney post, I even drew up a list of anomalies, which effectively became my pitch. How did the ‘no worries, mate' nation come to enter the new century with the third-highest suicide rate among the world's rich club of nations and see the consumption of anti-depressants triple over the past decade? How was it that such a supposedly laid-back country had some of the longest working hours in the Western world? Why the sanctification of the bush and the outback in what was one of the most urbanised countries in the world? Why was the country regarded as so fiercely nationalistic when its competing states appeared surprisingly antagonistic? Why such a boozy reputation when its ranking had slipped in the world drinking league to a lowly 20th? Though the championing of the underdog and the trumpeting of the ‘fair go' suggested that a spirit of egalitarianism still prevailed, why had those nostrums not always been extended to its original occupants or most recent arrivals, especially those conveyed by boat? Why did this fun-and larrikin-loving land have such a zealous and overbearing bureaucracy, a question of especial pertinence to Paul Hogan, its most celebrated comedian, who at that stage was being targeted by the tax authorities? Call that a stereotype? Even the word ‘mate' had a dual meaning and could be deployed to indicate both genial camaraderie and snarling menace. My hunch was that we had got Australia wrong.

In coming to Sydney, I realised I had retreated from the frontline of news but found myself disorientated nonetheless by the speed at which I was flung centrifugally to its outermost margins. It
was a case of Kabul one minute and Kylie the next. Literally. The Princess of Pop had recently announced that after a successful convalescence from breast-cancer treatment her global comeback tour would commence in Sydney. Naturally, London went ballistic.

Looking to infuse the story with greater depth and meaning, I was keen to report that Kylie had emerged from her brush with mortality a much more substantial figure, that the experience of going through a treatment she likened to being hit by a nuclear bomb had made her an advocate as well as a battler, a fully realised woman rather than the chirpy tomboy we had grown up with on
Neighbours
. What I was proposing, I suppose, was an Antipodean Angelina, a storyline that would work for both of us.

But the evidence supporting my thesis seemed a little weak. Take Kylie's first public appearance in her comeback week at a mansion overlooking Sydney Harbour, where the media assembled to watch her spruik her new celebrity-branded fragrance, Couture. Consider the book she penned during her convalescence,
The Showgirl Princess
, a story she herself described as a true fairy tale, full of glitter, glamour and dreams. Finally, there was her long-awaited entry at the Sydney Entertainment Centre, through a trapdoor in the stage, enshrouded in a cloud of dry ice and enclosed in a stunning pink costume designed by John Galliano. In the age of the sermonising rock star, a beaming Kylie made do with the briefest of salutations: ‘Good evening, Sydney! How are you feeling tonight?'

That same week, Israel had bombarded Gaza, Nancy Pelosi was about to become America's first-ever female house speaker, Aung San Suu Kyi had been allowed to leave her house for the first time in six months, Russia announced that the way was now clear for its entry into the World Trade Organisation, and the head
of MI5 had warned that hundreds of young British Muslims had been radicalised to the point of jihad.

While all this was unfolding, the central question facing the BBC's new Australia correspondent was whether the diminutive Kylie would collapse under the weight of her feather tiara. For the news that night, I delivered my obligatory piece to camera with Kylie on stage and fans wearing ‘Look at Moiey, Look at Moiey' T-shirts ranged behind me. But for one of the first times in my television career, I rather hoped that the viewers would avert their gaze – or, even better, venture into the kitchen to boil the kettle. Those who were watching – alas, seven million – saw me tread the dark path of show-business cliché as I reassured the great British public that Kylie had tonight lived out her own fairy tale. With plumed pomp and musical majesty, the Princess of Pop was most definitely back.

Kylie hardly fitted into the new paradigm of Australian reporting that I had arrived determined to usher in. Nor did the only other entry in the news diary when I first landed in Sydney: the start of the Ashes – that ribald orgy of conditioned thinking. True to form, the Gabba – or ‘the Gabbatoir', I should say – was boiling with Anglo–Australian hostility on the first morning of the series, as each set of supporters played out the role assigned to them by history.

Outside the Colosseum-style stadium, to the tune of the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic', a male-voice choir sang ‘We shall beat them at the Gabba'. On a promotional stand next door, Ford motors sought to make further inroads into the Australian market by inviting fans to take part in ‘Tonk a Pom'. Bringing to the game a carnival spirit that I have only since seen rivalled at Sydney's Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, fans streamed into the ground
wearing wide-brimmed sombreros, green and gold singlets, and zinc cream smeared across their faces like warpaint. Many had inflatable kangaroos in their arms, the Southern Cross tattooed on their shoulders and tiny Australian flags transferred onto their faces that twinkled like stardust. Not to be outdone, the travelling English hordes arrived dressed in medieval chain mail, suits of armour and jester's hats. A couple of fans even turned up in drag, impersonating our queen and yours.

‘Good morning, everyone,' said Richie Benaud, lending both his voice and imprimatur to the hype. ‘In my lifetime, I've never known such anticipation for a sporting event.'

Then, England's lanky opening bowler, Steve Harmison, hurtled towards the popping crease, with the cherry-ripe new ball in his hands and the burden of an expectant nation on his shoulders. In a blur, he hurled down his delivery, which was caught at second slip by the England captain, Andrew Flintoff. Had the batsman, Justin Langer, played any part in altering the ball's trajectory, England could not have got off to a happier start. Alas, Harmison was solely responsible. His opening delivery had pitched so wide of the wicket that it had come close to landing in the outback.

Bodyline had been replaced by Shoddyline, according to the Aussie scribes, though it was Martin Johnson, that great sage of Lord's press box, who produced the superlative line of the day. ‘Channel Nine chose the opening day to proudly unveil its new “infra-red hot spot camera” for detecting edges,' he noted, ‘but it is still some way short of developing the technology required for Harmison's first ball, which could only have been tracked by a satellite device from Cape Canaveral.'

In the terraces, as well, an unexpected drama had started
to unfold. Throughout the morning session, and well into the afternoon, the Barmy Army's travelling trumpeter had tried to rally the tourists with regular blasts on his bugle. A classically trained musician, Billy Cooper had taken his annual cricketing sabbatical away from the pit of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden to belt out morale-boosting ditties such as
The Great Escape
theme tune, ‘Rule Britannia' and ‘Jerusalem'.

But it was his rendering of the theme tune from
Neighbours
that landed him in trouble. As the crowd joined together to espouse that perfect blend of good neighbourliness and understanding, a group of stewards and policemen moved in, wrenched the trumpet from his lips and ejected him from the ground. Bereft of Billy the Trumpet, the Barmy Army threatened to boycott the rest of the match, and when its members joined in the singing of ‘You all live in a convict colony' to the tune of ‘Yellow Submarine', it seemed especially redolent with meaning.

The Barmy Army interpreted the silencing of their bugler as a product of the Aussie win-at-all-costs mindset, and claimed to be the victims of some vast conspiracy hatched between Cricket Australia and the police. What they failed to appreciate was that the Australian fans were also trampled by this crushing authoritarianism.

There was a backpack ban, food and drink had to be transferred into airport-style plastic bags, and pizza boxes were forbidden, since they could be used as projectiles. For the same reason, streamers, confetti and ticker tape also appeared on the contraband list. A beachball ban was also in place, and anyone who managed to smuggle an offending inflatable into the ground soon had it punctured if it landed within reach of a boiler-suited police officer or steward.

There was also a strict prohibition on the Mexican wave, with casino-style cameras equipped with super-slow-mo technology trained on every seat to pinpoint the miscreant who first flung his arms skyward.

Streakers tempted to sprint across the oval faced a lifetime ban, and a $5500 fine – $5000 plus GST, presumably. The Queensland Police Service's Elite Public Safety Response Team had even undergone anti-terrorist-training exercises in nearby Ipswich, although the only thing that was blown up, other than beachballs, was an inflatable sex doll that had to be ejected from the Vulcan Street End.

On the eve of the Ashes, the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission even managed to elbow its way in, placing strictures on what fans could actually say. In describing the English team and their supporters, it ruled that the word ‘Pom' was permissible but ran the risk of being racist if used in conjunction with stiffer forms of abuse, such as ‘bastard' or even ‘whingeing'. Hence, the phrase ‘Pommy bastard' was banned, which seemed the colloquial equivalent of removing the red kangaroo from the coat of arms and leaving behind a solitary emu.

Inevitably, this came to be described as political correctness gone mad, but it was actually Australian officialdom that was certifiable. For all the boos and catcalls directed at the police when a drunken boofhead was hauled from his seat, still more unexpected was the meek acquiescence of the Australian fans in the face of this bossy authoritarianism. For me, of course, this was manna from heaven and the Australia I had yearned to cover: the land of punctured stereotypes.