As a place that caught our interest Australia ranked about level with Belarus and Burundi. In the same period, for purposes of comparison, the Times ran 120 articles on Peru, 150 or so on Albania and a similar number on Cambodia, more than 300 on each of the Koreas, and well over 500 on Israel. In that year across the full range of possible interests-politics, sports, travel, the coming Olympics in Sydney, food and wine, the arts, obituaries, and so on-the Times ran 20 articles that were predominantly on or about Australian affairs. I began with the 1997 volume for no other reason than that it was open on the table. Just before I set off on this trip I went to my local library in New Hampshire and looked Australia up in the New York Times Index to see how much it had engaged our attention in recent years. It doesn't have coups, recklessly overfish, arm disagreeable despots, grow coca in provocative quantities, or throw its weight around in a brash and unseemly manner.īut even allowing for all this, our neglect of Australian affairs is curious.
From time to time it sends us useful things-opals, merino wool, Errol Flynn, the boomerang-but nothing we can't actually do without. Its sports are of little interest to us and the last television series it made that we watched with avidity was Skippy. Its population, just over 18 million, is small by world standards-China grows by a larger amount each year-and its place in the world economy is consequently peripheral as an economic entity, it ranks about level with Illinois. Australia is after all mostly empty and a long way away. The fact is, of course, we pay shamefully scant attention to our dear cousins Down Under-not entirely without reason, of course.
This seemed doubly astounding to me-first that Australia could just lose a prime minister (I mean, come on) and second that news of this had never reached me. No trace of the poor man was ever seen again.
On my first visit, some years ago, I passed the time on the long flight reading a history of Australian politics in the twentieth century, wherein I encountered the startling fact that in 1967 the prime minister, Harold Holt, was strolling along a beach in Victoria when he plunged into the surf and vanished. My thinking is that there ought to be one person outside Australia who knows.īut then Australia is such a difficult country to keep track of. I am forever doing this with the Australian prime minister-committing the name to memory, forgetting it (generally more or less instantly), then feeling terribly guilty. Flying into Australia, I realized with a sigh that I had forgotten again who their prime minister is.
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