Rather than embarking on the longest election campaign in history, Ms Gillard said that her intention was to allow businesses and consumers to better plan their year.

But no doubt she will be hoping that her announcement wrong-foots her main opponents: the conservative opposition leader Tony Abbott, and, to a lesser extent, the Labor prime minister she ousted, Kevin Rudd, who still harbours leadership ambitions.

Polls suggest repeatedly that her Labor minority government will be removed from office, even though Mr Abbott has struggled to win the affection of voters. As for a long, drawn-out election battle, Canberra has been in campaign mode pretty much since 2010's inconclusive federal election.

It provides a fitting title for Bill Bryson's best-selling book on Australia, a portrait, sweeping in its broad brush strokes, which focuses on what the author perceived to be this country's sheer irrelevance.

Before making the long journey to Australia, Bryson sauntered the short distance to his local library where he conducted a fruitless search of the New York Times index for 1997. Australia merited just 20 mentions. Albania, by contrast, got 150.

If anything, 1997 turned out to be a glut year. Over the following 12 months just six stories were considered ripe for publication. Ending his travelogue, Bryson left readers with a departing thought that was as melodramatic as it was melancholic: "Life would go on in Australia," he opined, "and I would hear almost nothing of it."

Published on the eve of the Sydney Olympics, Bryson's conclusion sounded implausible then, and seems absolutely ludicrous now.

No longer can it be said that Australia suffers in any way from a national form of relevance deprivation syndrome. Quite the opposite. Few peaceful nations with a population of 22 million or under receive such close attention. As the economic locus of the world shifts from the Atlantic to the Indian and Pacific oceans, that trend is set to continue, and accelerate. Australia is a major component of that story.

Just read the New York Times - in the past few months alone, it has published 16 stories from its Sydney-based correspondent. On what might be called the NYT index - or perhaps the Bryson scale - Australia is fairing exceedingly well.

In recent years, other major news organisations, like Sky News and al-Jazeera, have also established bureaus here. The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and Bloomberg all provide a steady and comprehensive stream of coverage.

Much of the reporting of Australia is highly favourable. Sometimes even envying. Inevitably, the success of a seemingly recession-proof economy gets this country a very strong financial press - even if, as we noted a few weeks back, the talk over the coming months will be of whether it has been infected by the "Dutch disease", an over-reliance on the booming resources sector that is having a distorting effect on the economy as a whole.

On the commercial front, companies like BHP and Rio Tinto have become Asian bellwethers, and thus also global bellwethers. So, too, has the shopping mall giant Westfield, whose results provide insights into the economic health not only of Australia, but America and Britain as well.

Soon, Brazil, that South American emerging giant, will be added to the list. Rather like the length of the queue of coal ships outside Newcastle, the world's largest coal export port, Westfield's retail results are fast becoming a global barometer.

Macquarie Group is another Australian company always worth watching, not least because it is estimated to be the single largest non-governmental owner of infrastructure in the world.

In the arts and entertainment, as we have noted many times before, the cultural cringe has been superseded by a cultural creep. Just read the adulatory reviews whenever Cate Blanchett takes a Sydney Theatre Company production to New York or Washington, or when Peter Carey publishes a new novel.

Doubtless, vestiges of the cringe still exist. I'm regularly amazed, for instance, at the overly-deferential welcome reserved for visiting writers, scholars and polemicists, some of whom are granted a star status here that they could never hope to achieve at home. The "what do you think of Australia?" syndrome is evident still, especially in the quality press and on ABC.

On the lifestyle front, Australia remains a global superpower. The food. The beaches. The staggeringly beautiful countryside. The coffee. It's all happening. Only this week, The Economist judged Melbourne, that great over-achiever, to be the world's most liveable city. Sydney, Perth and Adelaide joined it in the top 10.

If further proof of Australia's lifestyle clout is needed, just venture into a bookshop in London and see how many homegrown chefs and interior designers are offering coffee-book-table advice on how to replicate the Australian way of life. Then see how many people are buying them.

For all that, the reporting of this country regularly returns to some strong negatives, as well. Still shocking to outside observers is the chasm in living standards between white Australia and black Australia. However, this is not an urgent national priority, nor is it likely to become one.

Sometimes, I wonder what would have happened if, say, the independent MP wielding the balance of power in the House of Representatives had come not from Tasmania or New South Wales but been an Aboriginal MP from the Northern Territory (by the way, the first and only Aboriginal member of the House of Representatives is a Liberal from Western Australia). Alas, indigenous voters do not comprise a significant voting bloc in federal elections, and never will. Politically speaking, the first Australians are largely ignored.

The asylum seeker issue is another area where Australia continues to incur reputational damage. Numerically, the problem is comparatively small from an international perspective. Politically, the problem is disproportionately large. For the BBC, this is not a numbers story, but a reaction story. A boatload of, say, 37 Sri Lankan asylum seekers is never our headline. Rather, it is the Pavlovian response to each new boat arrival from both sides of politics that gives us our story.

Were there more news around or were the economy in worse shape, perhaps the problem would not loom so large. The press and the politicians would have others things to hyperventilate about. On a number of levels, then, the boat people issue is what might be called a successful nation problem.

Asylum seekers want to make their futures here for obvious reasons. In the absence of major economic headaches, politicians are looking for "wedge" issues and other points of divergence. The press is in need of stories - especially ones that come with such strong pictures, which helps explain why "boat people" asylum seekers attract more media attention than those arriving by air, who come in far greater numbers.

Tellingly, both of these negatives involve race. But we are not talking here of a redneck nation. Rather, I have always thought that the big racial story over the past 50 years has been one of successful multiculturalism and assimilation.

Sure, this is a country which gave rise to Pauline Hanson and where there is a still a lot of racial insensitivity and low-level racism. But the larger story is one of racial success and inclusiveness, especially given the massive demographic changes that have overtaken this country since World War II.

My final negative concerns Australian politics. In the most recent past, I have always written with great affection about a country that I love, but it has been hard to summon much enthusiasm for politicians on either side. There is something very dismal and second-rate about the quality of politics and politicians in Canberra. Indeed, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott seem to revel in their parochialism, and reinforce it in each other.

When Julia Gillard stated that foreign affairs was not her passion, the rest of the world responded, justifiably, with the same indifference. She has been nowhere near as newsworthy as her recent predecessors, Kevin Rudd, John Howard, Paul Keating, Bob Hawke. Tony Abbott has also expressed a preference for being a "stay-at-home prime minister". Indeed, he turned it into a campaign boast. Both the major parties then are led by figures whose limited ambitions are happily accommodated within these shores.

That is why I have found it so hard to report on Canberra - in recent times, it has made a mockery of the sophisticated, modern and relevant country that is evident elsewhere.

The anger and hostility is currently being compared with the mood in 1975 during the Gough Whitlam dismissal crisis. But it also has a late-60s feel - a post-Menzies, pre-Whitlam interlude when the country appeared to be treading water, and waiting for something to happen.

Certainly, there is something stultifying and stalled about the national life right. In my final week, the headlines came from David Hicks, John Howard, asylum seekers and the governmental response to climate change. In other words, pretty much the same headlines which predominated when first I arrived.

So my advice to any new arrival - and, in particular, my successor Duncan Kennedy - would simply be this: don't judge Australia by its politics. It is a far more clever, sassy and consequential nation than that.

You were very generous in your comments at the end of the last blog - too kind - and I hope that many of you will stay in touch via email (nick.bryant@bbc.co.uk) or Twitter (@nickbryantoz).

Certainly, this country will forever be a major part of my life. As the regulars know, my wife is a beautiful Sydneysider, and our fabulously cheery son does indeed come from the land down under. Australia is writ large in my family's DNA.

But in this space, I have tested your patience for long enough. So a quick leave-taking.

There is, after all, a recent journalistic precedent. And that is simply to say: thank you and goodbye.

Four hours' drive inland from Sydney, over the Great Dividing Range that separates this vast continent, the scenery is classic Australian bush.

Dry scrubland. A parched stream. Rust-coloured soil. Peeling eucalyptus trees, with barks that look like ancient parchments.

Yet the sound of kookaburras singing in the trees is drowned out by the undulating whine of expensive metal detectors.

Prospectors still venture out with old-fashioned pans, sifting through the sludge, pebbles and debris scooped up from the creek. But the modern-day tools of the trade are top of the range detectors.

For some this has become a career.

Kim Ellis and her husband, Linc, gave up their jobs to pursue what started out as a hobby full-time.

"I was working for a construction company, and Linc had a business painting and decorating. He just said to me one weekend, 'I'd like to do it full-time.' And I had the confidence in him to sell our houses, quit our jobs, buy a caravan and a few quad bikes, to pack the galah [cockatoo] and the dogs and off we went."

Since then the couple have made hundreds of thousands of dollars. They also have shops in Western Australia and New South Wales packed with equipment, hi-tech and old, for Australia's new prospectors.

Their core clientele used to be the so-called "grey nomads" - retirees looking to augment their pensions. Now, increasingly, they are seeing young people from the cities coming through their doors. No wonder: gold prices have risen almost 25% since the beginning of this year.

Prospecting is also a pretty lucrative occupation for another prospector, Mike Honeysett.

He's deaf, and rather than relying on the high-pitched whine of the metal detectors he keeps a close eye on its digital display. Right now it reads 90%, and he drops to his knees, with spade in hand, to start scraping away at the soil.

He picks up a clump, and again the detector registers a high reading. Then he divides the soil in two, in an attempt to isolate his find. Now he can feel a small metallic fragment in his hand. He scrapes away the soil, to see if he has found gold. Alas, all that he has dug up is a small lump of lead.

This can be back-breaking work, for even in the favourite haunts of local prospectors most digs end in failure. Kim says there is a one in 20 hit rate. Most "finds" turn out to be false alarms. But gold has a powerful allure, and keeps people going.

Sure enough, moments later, Mike's persistence pays off. He's uncovered a tiny fragment the size of a small ladybird.

It is worth about $100 (£65), and is a valuable addition to his week's haul. He has been out prospecting about four hours this week and found about $500 worth of gold. Not a bad return. Had he uncovered a nugget, he could have made $2,000 (£1,300) or more.

The nearby town of Mudgee stands as a landmark to the riches that a gold rush can bring. With some impressive Victorian civic architecture and an air of prosperity, it is one of the most elegant towns in rural Australia.

It is hardly witnessing another gold rush. Locals reckon that only four people have come to live in the town as a result of the gold. But it is becoming something of a golden hub for weekenders from Sydney and elsewhere who want to try their luck.

Steve Mini is among the novices taking it up. A professional motorcyclist, he sees it as something he could perhaps do when he retires from biking.

Wearing a baseball cap to protect him from the sun, he's moving slowly through the bush, hovering his metal detector about 5cm above the ground and moving it gently from side to side.

Then the pitch of its whine hints at possible success. "This could be my life-changing nugget," he says hopefully.

But when he sinks his spade into the turf, all he comes up with is a bucketful of worthless dirt.

Going into polling day, I did not think it would survive much longer than John Howard. Thanks, largely, to your continued support, however, we are still in business almost four years on.

And what a four years it has been. We've witnessed the end of the Howard era and the demise of another prime minister who also looked like he would have the word "era" attached to his name. We've seen the elevation of Australia's first female prime minister, and also the appointment of its first female governor-general.

We've seen the worst drought in 100 years, the worst flooding in Queensland's history and the worst bushfires that Australia has endured. Over "the ditch" in New Zealand, the residents of Christchurch continue to struggle with the after-effects and aftershocks of the costliest earthquake in the country's history.

We've seen Kevin Rudd apologise to indigenous Australian for past injustices, an act of national atonement that even brought tears to the eyes of leading "sorry sceptics". Never in Australia have I seen anything quite so stirring as the sight of indigenous Australians turning up at parliament dressed in t-shirts emblazoned with the word "Sorry" and leaving in new tops printed with "Thanks".

We've seen Australia avoid recession after the global financial crisis, resume its mining boom and benefit hugely from the seemingly inexorable rise of China. In recent months, we've also seen a "wonder from down under" economy replaced by a "boom and gloom" economy.

Republicanism has been put on hold, successive governments have struggled with a policy response to climate change that is politically sustainable and the asylum seeker issue has continued to inflict reputational damage on a country that prides itself on being genial and welcoming.

On the sporting front, Australian cricket was still on a high from thrashing England 5-0 when first we went to press. Now it is only a middle-ranking cricketing nation, while England is number one (you knew I could not leave without mentioning that!).

My posting draws to a close at the end of the month, and I'll file a final blog before heading off into the sunset. Ahead of that, I thought I would share some thoughts on blogging, which is something of a virginal experience for most BBC correspondents.

First the plusses. As most of you probably know, the main focus of our journalistic endeavours continues to be radio and television, but the blog has enabled us to touch upon subjects that would not have caught the eye of the other, more traditional BBC outlets. Film, literature, the arts, architecture, history and the kind of day-to-day politics that, for the most part, goes unnoticed by the rest of the world. Most of the work we do for radio and television still has to meet a "global resonance" threshold. It has to be internationally relevant. The great thing about the blog is that it has allowed us to discuss subjects of primarily local interest - although in a way, I'd hope, that can engage people who have never stepped foot in Australia.

Some of the subjects have been deliberately obscure. Some of them probably self-indulgently so. Still, you have been kind enough to embrace them. Who would have thought, for instance, that a blog on Robin Boyd's early-sixties opus, The Australian Ugliness, would attract 117 comments? Not me for sure. I thought we would be lucky to reach double figures.

A second major plus? For me, the cross-flow of ideas and information has been particularly useful and hugely educational. I have learned heaps from your comments, especially from some of the old-timers like Wollemi, who have leant a lot of historical knowledge and perspective. I've looked upon some of you like curators of the comments section, giving the blog a kind of institutional memory that I simply do not possess. I've tried to read a lot of Australian history, but I have not lived Australian history, and obviously, there's a huge difference between the two that commenters have helped fill.

Your comments have also toughened me up. All foreign correspondents now go on hostile environment courses to help deal with the most unwelcoming of situations, but one thing they never prepare you for is the brickbats occasionally hurled in an ill-tempered comments section. When I started blogging, I was ridiculously thin-skinned and vulnerable to attack. Now, thanks mainly to this blog, I have the hide of a rhinoceros.

That said, most of you have been unusually kind to a Pom trying to make sense of this often confounding land - and often hilariously funny in the process.

I'd also like to thank the vast majority - the silent majority, I sometimes think of you as - who have never left a comment on the blog. But many of you I have met in person: on planes, at airports, in the streets, at sports stadiums, at universities, in newsrooms, on Parliament Hill, and, inevitably, at the cafes where many of the blogs were composed, usually with the mind-stirring help of a couple of skinny flat whites.

I'd be the first to admit to the shortcomings of this blog. They have been in the moment, and the analysis has often been pretty shallow. Factually, they have often been incomplete. They have not always benefited from what foreign correspondents value the most: the luxury of patient observation.

True to the spirit of the genre, I have tried to draft them quite quickly, which has often been evident in the inelegance of the writing, and, more occasionally, in errors that have crept in. They have always been my own. Indeed, at this point, I should thank the team in London, particularly my colleagues on the Asia-Pacific desk and Julian Duplain, for saving me from more blushes.

Looking back, I wish that I could have been responded directly to more of your comments. My failure to be more responsive was partly due to my technological ineptitude, and partly due to time constraints. As I said, the blog represents only a small fraction of our output from here. In my defence, I have read probably about 95% of your comments in full, and started reading virtually every one. As I hope you already know, I've never had any contact with the moderators and never sought to influence who gets put in the sin bin.

Subject-wise, a few too many blogs have concentrated on cricket, rugby and Australia's sporting sectarianism. Some of the arts coverage has been very superficial. National identity questions have also got a lot of play. Perhaps too much. There has also been a Sydney-centric bias and doubtless an urban bias, too. Over the years, we have visited every state and territory, and spent a good deal of time in the bush and the outback. In the main, however, the view has tended to be from my window in Sydney.

As some of you know, I'm staying in this fair city for the time-being, and I'm hoping I'll get to meet more of you over the coming weeks. By a strange quirk of scheduling, my new book comes out the day after my posting ends, a hefty chapter of which deals with the last five years in Australia. So over the coming weeks, I'll be speaking around the country.

Of all the things I have done as the BBC's Australia correspondent, this blog is actually the one I have enjoyed the most. By far. It's a rare treat in journalism to be allowed to write about whatever happens to be on your mind, and a rare treat to get to interact with the people who take the time to read what paltry thoughts you have.

From start to finish, this has been a rare pleasure. Thank you for making it so much fun.

Or if John McCain had studied more closely the record of an obscure governor from Alaska before inviting her to join his presidential ticket in 2008?

Had David Cameron chosen to use notes rather than to speak extemporaneously without them at the Conservative Party Conference in 2005 would he have become Tory leader? And would he have gone on to become prime minister had Gordon Brown decided to call an early election soon after replacing Tony Blair?

The "what ifs" of political history are always fun to ponder, and Australia has produced no shortage of them in recent times.

What if John Howard had decided to step down when members of his cabinet met secretly on the fringes of the APEC Summit in September 2007 and urged him to hang up his tracksuit? Kevin Rudd would still probably have gone on to win the election, but Peter Costello, Mr Howard's heir apparent, might have blunted Labor's call for generational change. What if Mr Costello had not spat the dummy quite so often over his boss's limpet-like determination to remain at The Lodge?

What if the former Labor leader Kim Beasley had not mixed up the names of Rove McManus, a television personality, and Karl Rove, George W. Bush's closest adviser - a lapse that amplified doubts about his gaffe-prone leadership? Kevin Rudd might never have mounted a challenge.

What if, on the morning after John Howard's defeat, Peter Costello had decided to seek the leadership of the Liberal party rather than to announce his withdrawal from front-line politics? Given that the global financial crisis followed a year later and that the former Treasurer was one of Australia's most economically literate politicians - he had warned of an impending financial tsunami in the run-up to the election - he might have proved a more formidable opposition leader than either Brendan Nelson, Malcolm Turnbull or Tony Abbott.

What if Malcolm Turnbull had decided to wait until the outcome of the Copenhagen summit before pledging bipartisan support for Kevin Rudd's plans for an emissions trading scheme (ETS)? Arguably he might still be Liberal leader.

And what if that global summit had produced a stronger deal? Kevin Rudd would have returned to Australia hugely emboldened and called a quick double dissolution election had the Senate continued to block the ETS. Instead, he retreated from an issue he so famously described as the great moral issue of our time, which contributed to his fall.

What if David Marr's opinion-shifting Quarterly Essay "Power Trip: The Political Journey of Kevin Rudd" been scheduled to come out, say, in October rather than June. Unquestionably, its publication at a time when Mr Rudd was struggling with the mining super-profits tax and the fall-out from the postponed ETS fuelled the mutinous mood amongst Labor insiders, many of whom had rejected Mr Rudd's personality long before David Marr started mining it for flaws.

What if a story had not been leaked to the Sydney Morning Herald detailing how Mr Rudd's staff were testing the loyalty of MPs ahead of a possible leadership spill, a move that reportedly enraged Julia Gillard so much that she finally decided to mount a coup?

Staying with leaks, would the election have turned out differently if the Rudd camp had not decided to brief against Julia Gillard? The Labor powerbrokers who made her leader - the famed faceless men - certainly thought so.

Historians will also ponder for years the what ifs of the inconclusive federal election in 2010, and what would have happened if just one of the independent MPs had changed his mind. And would the outcome have even been in doubt had Kevin Rudd still been the prime minister? My hunch is that he would have seen off the challenge from Tony Abbott, whom he had trounced in a health-care debate earlier that year.

What if Tony Abbott had not taken to calling himself the prime minister-in-waiting in the days following last year's election? Not a good look in the eyes of three of the four independent MPs he was trying to court.

And what would have happened, Julia Gillard could be forgiven for thinking, if the Health Services Union had not issued corporate credit cards?

The national broadcaster ABC axed its flagship culture show, Art Nation. Fans of the programme described the move as an act of cultural vandalism.

The celebrated cartoonist, Robert Crumb, who is renowned for his sexually explicit cartoons, decided to pull out of an arts festival in Sydney. He did so because the tabloid The Sunday Telegraph described him as "self-confessed sex pervert".

Edmund Capon, the country's most highly respected arts scholar, announced his retirement from the Gallery of New South Wales, leaving a big void not easily filled.

The arts community has also been mourning the death of one of Australia's best-loved artists, the fabulously feisty Margaret Olley, who died at the age of 88.

In another blow to the standing of high culture in this country, the Arts Minister Simon Crean was prevented from attending her memorial service in Sydney because the opposition leader Tony Abbott has banned the use of voting pairs in parliament. It means that MPs are confined to Canberra when parliament is sitting.

Former Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull, a friend of Margaret Olley's and an enthusiastic patron of the arts, was also in effect barred from the event. To apply this hostile tactic so rigidly seemed especially silly seeing as Mr Crean and Mr Turnbull on this occasion formed such a natural "pair".

But then, Tony Abbott could hardly be described as a renaissance man. A traditionalist in his artistic tastes, he once described the parliamentary collection of paintings as "avant-garde crap".

Neither has Julia Gillard offered much in the way of artistic leadership. When the cameras were invited to film her adding a few personal touches to the Prime Minister's office, it was her Western Bulldogs footy scarf that took pride of place, along with a Sherrin football, rather than, say, a landscape by Sidney Nolan.

For all that, the arts in Australia seem to be in much stronger shape than when first I started my posting. Brisbane has a fabulous new Gallery of Modern Art. Tasmania has the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), a destination gallery if ever there was one. Canberra can also boast the new National Portrait Gallery, which is housed in yet another cutting-edge building. Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art is also about to get an impressive new wing.

The Archibald prize for portraiture goes from strength to strength. This year's winner, oddly, was a portrait of Margaret Olley. Then there is the ever popular Sculptures by the Sea open-air festival on the coastal path between Bronte and Bondi.

Sydney Biennale, the country's largest and most ambitious festival of modern art, has been another hit with the public. The National Gallery of Victoria, which sounds oxymoronic I know, and its offshoot The Ian Potter Centre in Federation Square continue to burnish Melbourne's status as Australia's cultural capital.

On the arts front, the story that I would love to have covered during my time here was that the Sydney Opera House had been given the go-ahead and the money to fully realise the original vision of its Danish architect Jorn Utzon.

The interior was intended to be just as exhilarating as its stunning exterior. Alas, Utzon was forced to resign - the phrase "constructive dismissal" has rarely been more inapt - before the building's completion. A local architect finished the inside.

Still, the Sydney Opera House continues to be one of the country's most thrusting and forward-thinking cultural institutions. And here's more proof: the Ship Song Project, a celebration of the Opera House with the help of Nick Cave and friends. I love it. I hope you'll enjoy it, too...

For many of the councillors, the issue was clear-cut. They thought it was simply historically dishonest to go on describing white settlement as anything other than an invasion, given that Australia was already home to the world's longest continuous living culture and that Aborigines were conquered and slaughtered by the British. After all, the first settlers routinely used words like "invasion," "warfare" and "enemies" when they spoke of the indigenous population.

Peter Fitzsimons, one of Australia's most read popular historians, has applauded the move. "Just say that next week, a flotilla came into Sydney Harbour with people and weaponry so powerful that we were powerless to resist their intent to occupy our land, and they did not even begin to recognise our ownership of it," he wrote recently. "Just say that within a few years we had been all but wiped out, with the survivors pushed to the outer regions. Here is the question, requiring an intellectually honest answer. Would that be characterised as 'an invasion', or not? We, surely, all know the answer, however uncomfortably that answer might sit."

Writing in The Guardian, the Australian journalist John Pilger also expressed his full support. He said the move "counters a cowardly movement of historical revision in which a collection of far-right politicians, journalists and minor academics claimed there was no invasion, no genocide, no stolen generations, no racism."

Others have condemned the move by Sydney Council. The Sydney councillor Phillip Black, noted: "Healing the past will not be achieved by alienating others." The New South Wales Aboriginal Affairs Minister Victor Dominello said the term invasion was divisive and thus unhelpful. "Reconciliation and progress can only be built on language that unifies us, not language that divides us," he said. The historian Keith Windschuttle, who has long claimed that the violence of white settlement has been exaggerated and who has also railed against what's called "the black armband view of history" said the council's decision "fans hostility and hatred".

The Sydney Council decision, which has echoes of the row over whether Australia Day should commemorate British colonization, has opened up a new front in the ongoing culture wars in Australia. The arguments over history have always been some of the most angry and intense, especially when they touch upon the moment when what at that time was the world's most modern culture clashed with the most ancient.

Where do you stand?

Virtually every morning, it seems, image-makers in the gainful employ of opposition leader Tony Abbott and Prime Minister Julia Gillard conjure up some kind of unimaginative photo-opportunity, where their leaders appear brandishing a blow-torch, a spade, a butcher's knife, an on-button or some kind of piece of light industrial machinery.

As often as not, Mr Abbott is bemoaning the introduction of the carbon tax, while Ms Gillard is trying to convey the sense that her minority government is capable still of getting big and important things done. Hours later, these images appear on the evening news shows, usually accompanied by a voice-track packed with lame puns from political correspondents whose daily misfortune it is to cover this miserable spectacle.

These are the dog days of Australia's permanent campaign, a rolling partisan battle that began in the weeks after the Copenhagen climate change summit, when Mr Abbott mounted the Liberal comeback, and has gone on pretty much uninterrupted ever since.

Perhaps the only brief respite came in those weeks of uncertainty following the federal election, when the prime minister proved much more accomplished as a backroom negotiator than a front-of-house performer.

Since finalising her deal with the Greens and independents, however, the leaders have been acting as if the campaign never truly finished. For Mr Abbott especially, politics is being conducted at the Defcon 1 level. With Labor just one seat away from losing its majority, war is imminent, and he is therefore in a state of maximum readiness. Now the Liberals are beginning to think that they are on the verge of a fatal strike.

The analogy of the hour, of course, is that the conservative opposition is a heartbeat away from a parliamentary majority. And at present that heartbeat belongs to Labor MP Craig Thomson.

The member for Dobell is a former national secretary of the Health Services Union, who is accused of paying for escort services and drawing out more than $A100,000 ($104,000; £63,000) in cash on the union credit card. Mr Thomson has claimed that other union officials had access to that credit card, and denies any wrongdoing. But Fairfax media claims to have obtained documents revealing that phone calls were made to two Melbourne brothels in 2006 from rooms hired in his name. Fair Work Australia, the national workplace relations tribunal which carried out an initial probe, has reopened the investigation.

Before these details emerged, Mr Thomson had mounted a defamation suit against the Sydney Morning Herald which first published the allegations. As the Herald's political editor Peter Hartcher notes in a detailed piece, that is fairly standard practice. Just as the case was about to go to court, however, the MP dropped his defamation claim. Now it has been reported that the New South Wales Labor party helped Mr Thomson with his legal bills to the tune of $A90,000. Bankruptcy disqualifies people from sitting in parliament.

Mr Thomson, who entered parliament after the 2007 election, continues to claim that the allegations are "completely untrue". "I've denied these allegations before," he said. "There was nothing there that was new at all."

Publicly at least, he also has the complete public confidence of Ms Gillard, who said he is doing a "fine job" of representing his New South Wales constituents. "I look forward to him continuing to do that job for a very long, long, long time to come." But rarely has the phrase "she would say that wouldn't she" been so applicable. She has no other choice but to back him to the hilt.

Mr Thomson holds his seat in the Central Coast of New South Wales with a majority of 5%. Given the Gillard government's deep unpopularity, the Liberals would be expected to win a by-election at a canter. If Labor loses that seat, of course, it also loses its parliamentary majority.

Mr Abbott has labelled him a "protected species as far as this prime minister is concerned".

So do not be distracted by those fluorescent safety jackets and white hard hats. The story to watch is the one that Labor least wants retold: that of a little-known MP called Craig Thomson. Inevitably and drearily, it has already been labelled the "Hookergate" scandal. But in this instance it is not so much a case of following the money as tracking the credit.

The airline has encouraged this, of course, with its sentimental advertisements featuring the Peter Allen hit, I Still Call Australia Home, and its sponsorship of national sports teams, like the Wallabies, the Socceroos and Australia's Olympians.

When Cadel Evans recently made his homecoming to Melbourne after winning the Tour de France, Qantas mounted a sham photo opportunity timed to coincide with the breakfast news shows that showed him coming down the steps of a parked Airbus A380, even though he had actually touched down on another plane earlier in the morning.

Now Qantas stands accused of a much more egregious pretence: of planning to use Australia not so much as a home but as a lay-over. It follows the announcement of a corporate-restructuring that will see the expansion of the airline's operations in Asia, big changes to its struggling international operations and the loss of 1,000 jobs from its 35,000-strong workforce.

Qantas plans to launch two Asia-based airlines, including a budget airline operating out of Japan. It has not decided where to base its other so far nameless joint-venture, though Singapore and Kuala Lumpur are potential hubs.

The airline, which made a healthy pre-tax profit on the back of its domestic routes, says it has no other choice because its international operations are set to lose $A200m ($208m, £126m). It has been hit by short-term factors like high fuel costs and natural disasters, including volcanic ash clouds.

But it faces long-term structural challenges. Australia's open skies policy has seen the expansion of Middle Eastern and Asian carriers, like Emirates and Singapore Airlines, which has eaten into its market share.

The announcement has inflamed parliamentarians. "I think it's official, Qantas can no longer call Australia home," said Senator Nick Xenophon.

Queensland MP Bob Katter - he of the 10-gallon hat - went further, sounding like a furious passenger who had just arrived at the end of a 23-hour flight to London only to discover that his luggage was in Sao Paulo.

"The people that make these decisions in Sydney are the slithering suits, as I call them, but for a bunch of brainless bastards there'd be few people in the world that would compare with them."

Like I say, the very word Qantas - which started life as the Queensland and Northern Territory Services Limited - unleashes strong passions.

Lawmakers are now combing through the Qantas Sales Act, the legislation that brought about the airline's privatisation in the 1990s, to see if the restructuring violates the clause ruling that the airline needs to maintain Australia as its operational base.

Meanwhile, the unions are bemoaning what they are calling the offshoring of Australian jobs, even though the airline says that the 1,000 posts are disappearing rather than being relocated elsewhere.

For our purposes, the restructuring of the airline is interesting for what it says about the globalisation of the domestic economy and the continuing Asiafication of Australia. Others have written that Qantas's famous motto The Spirit of Australia should now read The Spirit of Australasia. But perhaps the airline should even go further and paint The Spirit of Asia on its planes.

For Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce this is simply a case of chasing an emerging market. Over the next 20 years, 16% of the world's middle-class will be in East Asia.

"China may already have the world's fourth-largest population of millionaires, and India the 12th," he said. "There are many, many millions of premium travellers in waiting."

By 2014, the Asia-Pacific region will account for a third of global air traffic - up 26% from now.

Tellingly and symbolically, Qantas has cut two unprofitable routes to London, operating out of Bangkok and Hong Kong - another indication of Australia's reorientation.

The competition that Qantas now faces from airlines like Emirates also speaks of the opening up, deregulation and globalisation of the Australian economy.

Why, Etihad, the Gulf-based airline, even has naming rights on Melbourne's indoor Docklands stadium. Also gone are the days when Qantas had a near stranglehold on the lucrative trans-Pacific route. It was a duopoly shared with the American carrier United. Signed in 2008, the open skies agreement between Washington and Canberra ended all that.

As people will have noticed during Alan Joyce's media blitz this week, Qantas is also run by an Irishman, just as Telstra, the telecommunications giant, was run up until recently by an American. Again, it speaks of the internationalisation of Australian corporate life. ANZ, one of the main banks, is run by a Brit. Westpac is run by Gail Kelly, an Australian of South African descent.

Many aviation specialists believe that Qantas has brought many of its problems on itself, through bad decision-making.

Geoffrey Thomas of Air Transport Journal told the ABC's The World Today: "One of the reasons they've lost so much market share into this country is because they were the last major airline to put seat-back videos into economy, they didn't choose the right aeroplanes, and they were one of the last airlines to put premium economy into their aircraft despite the fact that Australians are the second-tallest people in the world flying the longest distances."

But many aviation specialists believe that the airline has no other option but to expand into Asia if it is to remain viable as an international operator.

Paul Keating once said that if Australia could not succeed in Asia it could not succeed anywhere. Evidently, the same now is true of Qantas.

Many, probably most, vehemently reject the science underpinning worldwide efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions.

In recent times, these protests have come to be judged not so much by their size as by their placards and slogans. On Tuesday, they ranged from the polite to the profane, the humorous to the hateful. Julia Gillard was the target of much of the spitefulness.

Indeed, the rally was timed not only to coincide with the first sitting day of the Spring session of the parliament but the anniversary of her "no carbon tax" pledge during last year's federal election. It is starting to have the same haunting effect as George Bush senior's famous cry of "read my lips, no new taxes", ahead of the 1988 US presidential election. He, of course, ended up being a one-term president.

"Juliar", was the raucous cry of many. Banners reading "Ditch the Witch" were also held proudly aloft. "Stop Destroying Australia". "Gillard Green Govt Gotta Go Now." One man had fashioned a banner reading: "Julia, we know you just hate Australia. So I will pay for a one-way ticket back to Wales." On the back it said "England's burning. Don't think it can't happen here." Another man held aloft the Eureka flag, another symbol with rebellious historical echoes.

Though the no carbon tax T-shirts were selling the best, the stall on the fringes of the rally was also doing a speedy trade in "Election Now" T-shirts. The retail spending strike being experienced across Australia right now does not evidently extend to the protest paraphernalia on sale at these rallies.

"Election now, election now," was frequently the chant, and a fallback line for some of the speakers - like the Nationals leader Warren Truss - who are not renowned for the power of their oratory. Shouting "election now" was like telling a joke that you always know will raise a laugh.

The speakers who received the most rapturous receptions were the ones who harnessed the simmering anger of the crowd. The Liberal MP Sophie Mirabella got sustained applause when she presented the carbon tax as a threat to the Australian way of life: "We don't want to de-industrialise our country," she bellowed.

But it was Senator Barnaby Joyce, the barnstorming Queensland populist, who probably got the biggest cheers of the day. "There are people in Australia who stay in bed because they cannot afford to stay warm," he shouted, as his rosy face turned a deeper shade of red. "And that is disgusting that that happens in our nation."

"It was your birthright. We had cheap power. That is one thing we had. And we had the choice between cheap power and cheap wages and we thought we would look after the Australian people. Give them a decent wage and go with cheap power. This woman wants to turn it around."

Again, the tax was presented as posing an existential threat to the Australian way.

Tony Abbott, on the other hand, exercised rhetorical restraint. It was the Liberal leader, of course, who first called for a peoples' revolt against the carbon tax. But he was criticised in March for addressing a similar rally at which ugly banners reading "Juliar" and describing the prime minister as "Bob Brown's Bitch" formed the backdrop.

Wary no doubt of how a repeat performance would be viewed on the evening news bulletins, he started his speech by saying that he agreed with some placards but not others. But there were two propositions, he said, that everyone could support: "First we don't want a carbon tax. And second, we do want an election."

A few things struck me about crowd. Many of the protesters were old and retired, as one would expect from a protest in the middle of the week. Many were attending their first ever protest rally, which is more significant. Rising energy bills was something that had got these first-timers out in force. Nobody that I spoke to at the rally thought the Gillard minority government had any legitimacy, let alone any mandate. Most thought it incompetent, and said the carbon tax had crystallised broader fears.

A surprisingly high number, curiously, were Brits who have settled in Australia. Many were farmers and blue-collar workers. But I also ran into a GP, who had given up $2000 in consultation fees for the day to drive down to Canberra from Sydney. In other words, this crowd could not be written off as a "red-neck mob", tempting though that caricature might be to supporters of the carbon tax. This was an Audi estate crowd as well as a "ute" crowd.

Afterwards, when the crowds had dispersed, I met up with Anna Maria Arabia, who heads up the nation's peak scientific body FASTS (the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies). She, like a number of scientists, has received death threats, and recently launched a campaign called Respect the Science. She was worried by the anger on display in Canberra.

"The sort of protests we see today, with extreme behaviour, sends a message to the public that this sort of extreme behaviour is acceptable and it is simply not. And it leads to the sorts of emails that are death threats and are quite extreme behaviour that climate change scientists and others involved in this field have experienced."

In parts, the debate over climate change has got very ugly, coarse, vituperative and personal.

This, of course, was not only the anniversary of Julia Gillard's pre-election "no carbon" pledge, but the death of "the King". Sure enough, an Elvis impersonator was there to bring the rally to a musical finale. "If they put a tax on burning love, I'd be bankrupt," he said.

Elvis has now left the parliamentary precincts. But on Monday, in another anti-carbon tax protest, mighty trucks will thunder into the capital in its first "big wheel" protest since the mid-1990s. The season of protest will continue, and so, too, Julia Gillard's problems selling the carbon tax.

I'm thinking protests from the Christian Right outside the Treasury Department. Fiery on-screen denunciations from some leading television evangelists. Perhaps one or two preachers might even have blamed America's demotion from AAA to AA+ status on the moral impoverishment of its financial officials. The unborn baby would have quickly become the latest proxy in America's ongoing culture wars.

In Australia, however, the news that Finance Minister Penny Wong and her partner, Sophie Allouache, are expecting a child has generated a minimum of fuss. Indeed, I can report that it has been the non-story of the week.

They conceived using IVF with the help of an anonymous sperm donor. They underwent the procedure outside of their home state of South Australia because IVF for gay couples there is illegal.

Ms Wong decided to announce the news earlier this week because she acknowledged there would be interest from the public as a result of her high-ranking position within the government and because she wanted to protect her pregnant partner from any undue publicity.

Though a strong advocate of same-sex marriage - a stance that puts her at odds with Prime Minister Julia Gillard - Ms Wong said she was not making a political point.

''You have a child because you want a family and you want to have the opportunity of raising a child together," she told Phillip Coorey of the Sydney Morning Herald.

"You don't have a child to make a political statement."

Julia Gillard publicly congratulated her friend and trusted colleague, as did Julie Bishop, the acting opposition leader.

The only politician I have seen publicly criticise Ms Wong is the Reverend Fred Nile of the Christian Democratic Party, a member of the New South Wales Legislative Council and a self-styled protecter of public morals. In the upper house of the New South Wales parliament, for instance, he claims to hold what he calls "the balance of prayer".

"I'm totally against a baby being brought up by two mothers - the baby has human rights," said Rev Nile. "It's a very poor example for the rest of the Australian population."

He also criticised Penny Wong's decision to make public the news. "It just promotes their lesbian lifestyle and trying to make it natural where it's unnatural," he said.

But his has been a fairly isolated public voice.

What can we draw from all this? The first point to make is that Australia's culture wars are very different from America's culture wars.

On the other side of the Pacific, the battles tend to focus on moral and faith-based issues, like abortion, creationism and same sex marriage. In Australia, the battleground is history, the related issue of indigenous rights, art and the environment. True, the question of same-sex marriage is starting to loom larger as an issue - the Labor Party national conference will debate it in December, and the emboldened Australian Greens are pressing for reform.

But it generates nowhere near the same passion as it does in the US.

When it comes to personal morality, Australia has moved away from the prudish censoriousness that was such a strong feature of national life until the early 1970s, and perhaps beyond. And though it remains a fairly socially conservative country - the continued influence of the Catholic Church is a key factor - it is also a socially tolerant country.

Again, this explains why Ms Wong's announcement has generated so little controversy.

Finally, Ms Wong is yet another reminder of the changing face of Australia. She is not only the first openly gay federal cabinet minister, but the first Asian-born minister. She came to Australia from Malaysia.

To these firsts, I dare say she would like another: that of being the first Australian politician to take part in a same-sex marriage.

This was an emergency measure borne of a political and logistical dilemma. The country's detention centres are overcrowded and volatile. Julia Gillard has been hammered in the polls over one of Australia's most toxic political issues. No Labor leader wants to be portrayed as being soft on border protection. Indeed, Paul Keating pioneered the policy of mandatory detention.

However, neither the politics nor the logistics have worked out as the government intended. Not for the first time, the government announced the policy before the details had been hammered out (the equally inaptly named East Timor Solution provided another example).

It did not have the backing of the UN's refugee agency. Initially, the Department of Immigration said the asylum seekers would be sent to Malaysia within 72 hours of arriving at the Christmas Island detention centre, a timeline that it could not meet. There was confusion over whether unaccompanied children would be included in the swap deal. When it emerged that they would be, the government faced fierce criticism for its alleged heartlessness and callousness. The announcement that the asylum seekers would be filmed arriving in and then leaving Australia again brought on another wave of negative international headlines. Some of the world's most vulnerable people were being used as props, was the cry.

Politically speaking, the Malaysian Solution has so far done nothing to halt the Gillard government's slide in the polls. Indeed, it has highlighted another problem: its recurring incompetence. It is not hard to imagine the Malaysian Solution appearing in the curricula of public policy schools around the world as a case study in ineptitude and knee-jerk policy-making.

For Ms Gillard, this is especially problematic. Australians do not require their leaders to be especially charismatic, telegenic or eloquent. But, in a country that has long favoured the practical over the philosophical, there is an expectation of competence.

Lambasted from both the left and the right, the government has now run into interference from the courts. On Sunday, as a plane sat on the tarmac at Christmas Island waiting to transport the first group of asylum seekers to Malaysia, a High Court judge issued a temporary injunction halting the planned departure. On Monday afternoon, the court extended the injunction until later this month, when a full hearing will decide whether the Malaysian Solution is lawful or not.

The government said it had predicted a legal challenge. But Justice Kenneth Hayne, the High Court judge who heard the application from a refugee advocates group, seems to think its lawyers were ill-prepared. He called the government's arguments "half-baked". Again, the accusation, this time from a senior judge, is of incompetence.

In response, embattled Immigration Minister Chris Bowen said there was a clear statutory basis for the policy. The Migration Act allows the immigration minister to "declare" or identify a third country to which asylum seekers can be sent. Under the law, he is also the legal guardian for the unaccompanied children put on boats by their parents in the hope that Australia will offer them asylum.

The government claims that the Malaysian swap deal will ultimately break the business model of the people smugglers, who charge large amounts to ferry asylum seekers towards Australian shores. It says the safety of the asylum seekers lies at the heart of the policy. But Julia Gillard has herself been accused of moral bankruptcy, especially for proposing to send unaccompanied children to Malaysian detention centres.

The lower house of parliament has passed a motion condemning the policy. The UN Human Rights Commissioner has also been vehemently opposed. Now a senior judge, a member of the highest court in the land, has expressed reservations. The opposition wants a return to the controversial Pacific Solution, with the reopening of an Australian-run detention centre on the tiny island on Nauru.

Should the government also look for an alternative solution?

Indeed, not since 2003, when John Howard huffily awarded the cup to the victorious England captain Martin Johnson at Homebush, have the Wallabies come close to winning rugby's most illustrious prize.

Perhaps that could be about to change at this year's tournament which starts in September, especially if the New Zealand All Blacks are afflicted by their usual quadrennial bout of stage fright and fail to end a World Cup losing streak that, remarkably, stretches back to the first World Cup in 1987. A fascinating form guide comes this very weekend, when the All Blacks take on the Wallabies in the Bledisloe Cup.

The first thing to say is that we are taking about a rejuvenated team and a rejuvenated game. This time two years ago union was not only in the doldrums but in the bad books. With the ball hoofed mindlessly from one end of the pitch to the other, and then back again, the game had become a moronic kickathon singularly devoid of flair, inventiveness and ambition. In common with a lot of union fans, I had started warming to the amputated version of the game, where 26 men take to the field rather than the full compliment of 30. Footy rejoiced in the stunning success of the State of Origin, while union was in a state of chronic disrepair.

The game's revival in Australia has come from an unexpected quarter: the Queensland Reds, the one-time whipping boys of Antipodean rugby. Deserved champions of the Super 15 title - the first Australian side to win the tri-nations championship since the Brumbies in 2004 - the Reds have stayed true to the founding heresy of William Webb Ellis: that the ball should be picked up, passed between advancing players and carried towards the try-line at maximum velocity.

The Reds' star player, Quade Cooper, doubles as world's rugby's star player. He of the acrobatic sidestep, the exaggerated dummy, and the kind of slight of hand that one would normally associate with a conjuror or juggler. But there are stars aplenty in the Wallabies team. His Queensland teammate, Will Genia, for one. The flanker, David Pocock, who would put up a good fight against the All Blacks Richie McCaw, for the starting jersey in a World XV. Then there is Kurtley Beale and James O'Connor, two speedsters with talent to burn. And we not even mentioned the remarkable Digby Ioane, another Queensland stand-out.

There are weaknesses in the Wallabies outfit. The squad lacks depth. If Cooper or Genia were ruled out through injury they would surely struggle. On tours to the northern hemisphere, for instance, the Australian front row routinely spend so much time with their faces buried in the mud that it looks as if they are attempting to tunnel their way back home.

It is a shame that rugby does not have more of a following here. It is the only major winter code without a permanent presence on free-to-air television - the Super 15 only make it onto cable. Moreover, this most physically egalitarian of sports - where else do the fat, tall and small play alongside each other quite so seamlessly - is also regarded as an elite game. Its powerhouse is the top private schools in New South Wales and Queensland which have produced so many test stars. (where I grew up in the West Country, another rugby powerhouse, we all played union, whether you went to state or private school, a key difference).

My money is on the All Blacks to win the World Cup. They play the game as it was meant to be played, with abandon, exuberance and unrelenting fluency. Attacks come, wave after glorious wave. And who would bet against a side which can afford to leave a player as gifted as Sonny Bill Williams, the former league star, on the bench?

If the All Blacks do falter then I obviously hope the beneficiaries will be wearing white shirts and be urged onto victory by cries of Swing Low Sweet Chariot reverberating around Eden Park. But it may well be the Wallabies.

The book, published in October last year, provides an account of the five years that the "Aussie Taliban" spent as a detainee at America's controversial detention centre in Cuba, and details allegations of torture against his American captors.

Hicks, who famously wore the wristband Detainee 002, claims he was subjected to stress positions, sensory deprivation and music played at extremely high volume - ear-blasting tunes which reportedly included the theme from Bob the Builder.

The book has sold about 30,000 copies, and Hicks would have received a significant advance.

For the Australian government, the issue is clear-cut: David Hicks pleaded guilty before a US military commission of providing material support for terrorism and the book therefore comes under the Commonwealth Proceeds of Crime Act, which prevents convicted criminals of profiting from their crimes.

For the Hicks family, the issue is also uncomplicated. They are arguing that his conviction should not be recognised by the Australian courts because the US military commission at Guantanamo Bay should not be recognised as a valid legal body. On this point, the entire case might ultimately turn.

Put simply: is the military commission legal, and, thus, is David Hicks a criminal in the strictly legal sense of that term?

The Australian Greens, which have labelled the prosecution a "political show trial," have argued that the US Supreme Court has already ruled that the military commission, are unconstitutional. End of story. But this ignores the crucial fact that the US Congress passed the Military Commissions Act in December 2006, which gave the commissions a statutory basis.

Hicks appeared in June 2007, after the legislation had come into effect, which, presumably, strengthens the Australian government's case. The Greens have also argued against the futility of an expensive legal process that will recoup a relatively small amount of money. They've also claimed that the prosecution smacks of censorship by another means: that it is designed to deter authors from publishing politically sensitive material.

What people think about the prosecution obviously will be determined to a large extent by what they think about David Hicks. To many on the left in Australia, he became a totem for the injustices and excesses of the Bush administration's "war on terror". His detention without trial at Guantanamo also violated a very elemental sense of Australian fair play. Controversially, the former jackaroo received a standing ovation when he made a rare public appearance at the Sydney Writers Festival in May.

For the right, meanwhile, the support he continues to receive offers more proof of the left's credulousness and instinctive anti-Americanism. How could it be, they ask, that a man accused of joining the Islamic militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba and who allegedly received weapons training at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan could become a poster boy for progressives?

For some journalists and experts who have covered the post-9/11 beat, a central problem with the Hicks book is editorial rather than legal. It has been called a tell-all memoir, but the criticism is that the 35-year-old failed to deliver a more thorough account of his time in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

As I have noted before, I share a publisher with David Hicks, Random House Australia, though I have never met him nor read his book. Like quite a few old Afghan hands, I was disappointed to hear that his time in Pakistan and Afghanistan did not receive more attention within its 450-plus pages.

The journalist, Sally Neighbour, who is an expert both on South Asia and militant Islam, gave it a scathing review. She called it "a self-serving, sanitised and disingenuous account".

Guantanamo was only part of the story, she argues.

"The other parts include how he got there in the first place, what he was doing in Pakistan and Afghanistan, why he was regarded as such an important catch and why he was held for more than five years while others were freed."

The government's prosecution has provided terrific free publicity for a book which has sold less copies than its publisher would have hoped. But should David Hicks reap any financial harvest?

No doubt I will be passing on various logistical tips and pointers. Getting a satellite signal out of Perth, for instance, can involve lying prostrate on the ground in the public park next to the CBD with a receiver dish in one hand and a microphone in the other, a bodily feat that requires the kind of physical contortions that might test a Byron Bay yoga instructor.

Filming on the forecourt of Parliament House in Canberra involves getting a permit, the kind of paperwork we would normally expect to fill out in, say, Beijing or Pyongyang. I will offer advice on where to get the best coffee in Melbourne, on my favourite alfresco dining spot in Brisbane and my preferred brand of fly spray for stories in the bush and outback. Though I have never invested in an Akubra hat, it might not be a bad idea. As for budgie-smugglers, I'd be keen to hear your thoughts.

I won't bore you with any more logistics, but I'm keen to get your advice on an editorial question. Namely, what books would you recommend to a new arrival trying to get a quick handle on Australia. For help, I put this out to tender on twitter the other morning - @NickBryantOz, since you ask - and got a bookshelf full of advice.

Bill Bryson's Down Under, which is probably the most widely read book on modern-day Australia, was a popular choice, and one that I would endorse. There's the usual Bryson blend of wit, folksiness and sharp observations. That said, the American writer did not spend a huge amount of time in the country beforehand and, to some, it had the feel of a pre-Olympics quickie - published in 2000 just as Australia was about to bask in the international limelight of the Sydney games.

Robert Hughes' landmark history The Fatal Shore was another favourite. So, too, was Donald Horne's caustic polemic, The Lucky Country, which is arguably post-war Australia's most influential work of non-fiction. It is also the most misappropriated title of any Australian book. The "lucky country" was meant as a dig rather than a term of endearment.

On the fiction front, there were shout-outs for Tim Winton's much-loved Cloudstreet, Murray Bail's Eucalyptus, and Peter Carey's Booker prize-winning True History of the Kelly Gang. Helen Garner, Kate Grenville and John Birmingham were also popular choices. Birmingham's He Died with a Felafel in his Hand, which shamefully I have not read yet, is obviously a firm favourite.

Clive James's Unreliable Memoirs series, in its early instalments at least, falls somewhere between fiction and non-fiction - although some of James' best writing about his homeland, I would suggest, is to be found in his essays.

On politics, Don Watson's Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, his biography of Paul Keating, featured in the reckoning, as did Paul Kelly's March of the Patriots: the Struggle for Modern Australia. For Australian speechifying, the historian Michael Fullilove has helpfully gathered together a collection of the best and most eloquent in Men and Women of Australia: Our Greatest Modern Speeches.

Here is a kind of unofficial reading list from the Australian government, and I'd love to hear your recommendations.

For what it is worth, here are some of mine.

To make more sense of Australia's ongoing culture wars, I would read Horne's The Lucky Country and Paul Sheehan's 1998 book Among the Barbarians. Horne serves up the left's critique of Australia - he captures the stultifying conservatism of the post-war years for a start. Sheehan, who writes a regular column for the Sydney Morning Herald, provides an insight into thinking on the right, and, among other things, offers an explanation of the rise of Pauline Hanson.

Robert Hughes's The Fatal Shore is certainly required reading. Geoffrey Blainey's A Shorter History of Australia is a useful primer. Given the importance of Gallipoli, the country's oft-quoted foundation story, Les Carlyon's stunning history should make it onto any shortlist.

I'd start with the acknowledgements: "Myths are charming; truths are more interesting and harder to find. In Australia, fact and myth about Gallopoli are interwoven so well that sometimes one cannot tell where one ends and the other starts."

One of the best recent histories I have read is Unknown Nation: Australia after Empire by James Curran and Stuart Ward. For a social history of Australia in the 60s and 70s, I always look out for books by the journalist Craig McGregor.

One of the best Australian sports books that I have read is The Summer Game by the peerless Gideon Haigh.

When it comes to fiction, Tim Winton's Cloudstreet is probably the must-read novel, although I thought Breath was brilliant at making sense of the joy and wonder of surfing to people who have never ridden a wave.

The list is by no means exhaustive. As soon as I press send, other books will doubtless spring to mind. But for any new arrival hoping to make more sense of this complex and confounding land, there are worse places to start.

A real larrikin who was hilariously funny, he rattled off question after question as we all raced to be first with the answer.

"What is the chemical symbol for gold?" or some such.

"Who is the captain of the England cricket team?"

("Surely you mean 'Who is the Ashes-winning captain of the England cricket team?'" your correspondent helpfully pointed out.)

Then came a teaser that had all the Australians on board scrambling for their smart phones: "In which discipline did Patrick White win his Nobel Prize?"

Evidently, it was phone-a-friend time.

Next year, literary Australia will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of arguably its greatest ever novelist. But not one of White's compatriots on board that carriage had heard of him. (This, I suspect, would have absolutely delighted White, a man who once complained of the "Great Australian emptiness", a land in which the "mind is the least of possessions".)

I mention this not so much to highlight the gap in literary learning amongst a carriage-load of fellow rugby fans, but rather to raise the question of whether sport gets way too much attention in Australia to the detriment of other national heroes.

For that railway journey came to mind early on Monday morning when the writer Mia Freedman committed the Australian blasphemy of suggesting that the national joy following the success of Cadel Evans in the Tour de France might have been a tad overblown.

"I just don't care," she said on Channel Nine's Today show. "I just don't get it." Then, she went further. "He's a man who's paid a lot of money to ride a bike," she said, to audible groans from the on-set production crew.

Predictably, Twitterland and the blogosphere erupted in fury: "Un-Australian" was the unimaginative cry. Some of the online abuse - much of it spewed up under the cloak of digital anonymity - was ugly in the extreme. Mia Freedman would probably have known that her comments would go viral and provoke a response, but not that it would have been quite so feral.

In the hours afterwards, she penned a blog on her website: "Are sportspeople heroes?" she asked. This is how she answered her own question: "I think pursuing a life doing something you're good at for the benefit of yourself is not heroic. It's not a BAD thing, I'm not dissing Cadel (of course not!) but the idea that a sports person should be idolised because they can ride far or jump high or swim fast is, to me, a bit odd.

"I guess I'm just flagging the fact that if you do well in sport, the country and the media stop to worship you in a way that doesn't happen to anyone else for doing anything else."

In a country for which sporting success is a key indication of national success, there's no doubt that sports stars get a disproportionate share of attention, adulation and, at times, disparagement. Needless to say, heroes abound in other walks of life who never make it onto the middle pages let alone the front or back.

This blog regularly cops flak for spending far too much time talking about sport - which is probably a fair criticism - although that's probably reflective of Australia's sporting bias.

Perhaps Mia Freedman's misfortune, however, was to hang this debate on the wrong sportsman. Not only had Cadel Evans just triumphed in one of the most grueling sporting events that has ever been devised, but he is the complete antithesis of the brash, celebrity-obsessed international sportsman.

He also has a big life outside of sport, having championed issues like the Free Tibet campaign. This is a bloke, it seems, who has things in perspective.

You could also argue that Australia does a fairly good job at celebrating the quiet achievements of people outside of sport. My hunch is that Cadel Evans will probably win Australian of the Year. His name will thus be added to a roll call of recent winners which includes a plastic surgeon, an immunologist, an indigenous leader and a psychiatrist.

True, two winners over the past 10 years have been sportsman. But like Cadel Evans, both Pat Rafter, the tennis star, and Steve Waugh, the cricketer, have a significant and altruistic life outside of sport. That was partly why they scooped the award. Tellingly, you won't find Lleyton Hewitt or Shane Warne on that list.

ABC's Australian Story is usually at its tear-jerking best when it features little-known people with extraordinary tales to tell. Sixty Minutes on Channel Nine, though much more celebrity-obsessed, often does the same.

This week the Book of the Year went to Anh Do, a Vietnamese refugee who is now a successful comedian. So it is not as if sportspeople can claim a monopoly on national acclamation.

As for the novelist Patrick White, I suspect he might have sympathised with Mia Freedman. This was how he greeted the news that he had received the award for Australian of the Year in 1973: "Something terrible happened to me last week.

"There is an organisation which chooses an Australian of the Year who has to appear at an official lunch in Melbourne Town Hall on Australia Day. This year I was picked on as they had run through all the swimmers, tennis players, yachtsmen."

UPDATE: Robustness. Humour. Civility. Cleverness. This strand has it all. We don't get the most comments on this blog - although I guess we could play the famed "per capita" card - but there are times when I think we attract some of the best. This is one of them.

How about this one for starters from "3145927": "Try asking a train full of British football fans about Kingsley Amis. They'll probably stab you. One of the many things I love about this country is that a) someone can stand up on a train full of sports fans and launch into a pop quiz without any fear of being walloped. b) that a smart-arse Pom - me - can start heckling him, again without fear of any aggro. And c) that sports stadiums here are not segregated. Fans supporting opposing teams sit side by side."

Jimmy B68 tugs at a similar thread: "If Nick was on a train coming back from the Sydney Writers' Festival his fellow passengers would all be waving their Patrick White flags and wondering who Cadel Evans is...."

Sossige notes: "If Australia wins at anything in sport it's headline news. If they lose it's not mentioned or hidden away discreetly; a subtle type of propaganda." Elegantly made point, but not true, I'd humbly suggest. When Australian teams lose they get absolutely hammered in the press, on the front pages and back. Just look at the coverage of the Ashes. It was merciless and prominent.

A lot of you think the sporting obsession is a major plus. Here's Qokka4: "The US idolised its film starts. The Pomms like their musicians. For us, its sport. Big deal. The Russians like Chess Players".

A number of you make the point that Australia is no more obsessed than Britain, India or Brazil (I've lived in the first two of those, and you have a point). Sports makes sense for many, then, but Richard asks: "Why Australia is so obsessed with Hollywood celebrity?"

"A better question might be," suggests Nully, "Is Britain obsessed with critiquing its former colonies? There is an obvious difference in how the British media report on countries that were once colonies, and those that were not. Perhaps the echoes of the filial relationship that once existed has become ingrained in British culture." It is a problem this blog has faced since its inception. To Australian ears, the British voice often sounds like a patronizing voice. It's the main occupational hazard, probably, of being posted here. I try to avoid it, so apologies if I don't always succeed.

"3145927" also opines: "It saddens me that the BBC promotes this false narrative that Australians are unusually uncultured." To be honest, I'd like to think this blog has tried to do the opposite of that.

willre13 thinks that is Australian intellectuals who are being condescending: "Unfortunately the leftist academia in Australia has always run down sporting achievement." Patrick White was among them: "If Patrick White had been a bit better at sport', notes Colmery, "he would have less grumpy, written even better books and more of his countrymen might have read them."

Sydney Cynic reckons the arts get a fair shake of the sauce bottle. "Margaret Olley [the artist] just died and she's receiving heaps of artistic accolades. Also, what about all the coverage the Archibald Prize receives? Gimme a break."

John Smith at #39 makes a good point that sport is often the gateway to celebrating other aspects of Australian life. With the America's Cup in 1983, it was design smarts and entrepreneurialism.

There were lots of other great comments, but perhaps we should leave the final word to JayBee: "I would love to live in a country obsessed with sport, fitness and health. Can anyone offer me a job in Oz. I'll do anything!"

Get up early on virtually any morning of the week, and you will see packs of cyclists hurtling around the parks or thundering, Peloton-like, down the highways. Venture out a little later and you will often see them packing out cafes as they gather for a hearty post-ride breakfast.

I was going to call it a pre-dawn sub-culture, but it is far more mainstream than that.

No wonder then that the victory of Cadel Evans in the Tour de France is being treated as such a major national event. No Australian has ever won cycling's most illustrious prize, and Evans's triumph is being likened to Australia's dramatic victory in the America's Cup in 1983.

Then, famously, the Prime Minister Bob Hawke effectively gave the entire nation the next day off. "Any boss who sacks a worker for not turning up today is a bum," the Silver Bodgie exuberantly declared.

Few expect Julia Gillard to follow suit - and the joke on Twitter was that it would require support from the bike-friendly Greens to do so. So it will be interesting to see how many people "throw a sickie" on Monday - although victory was sealed, and presumably celebrated, in the early hours of Sunday morning.

In Victoria, where Evans went to school, people are being urged to wear yellow in celebration of his victory. But, in a country that goes its sporting ways during the winter months, the joy has been felt nationwide.

For Australian sports fans, watching his ride to victory has been something of an endurance test in itself. For three weeks each year, cycling enthusiasts live a nocturnal existence - tuning into the coverage of the tour on the channel SBS either side of the midnight hour to cheer on the best cyclist that Australia has produced.

In 2007 and 2008 Evans came close. On both occasions he finished second. Now, at last, their patience has been rewarded.

There's a common misconception abroad that Australian fans like their sports stars to be brash, cocky and brimming with braggadocio. Shane Warne or David Campese-types, if you like.

But Cadel Evans does not fit that mould at all, which I suspect explains much of his appeal. He's tough, gritty, hard-working, understated and taciturn. Some view him as a cycling version of Steve Waugh, the ultimate Aussie competitor. Like Waugh, he's also more reflective and complicated than your average international sportsman.

He's been known, for instance, to wear undershirts emblazoned with the flag of Tibet beneath his team colours.

No doubt many bleary-eyed cycling fans will be looking forward to normalising their sleep patterns after three weeks of Le Tour.

But in the early hours of this morning they will burning the midnight oil one last time as Australia's latest national hero cycles down the Champs-Elysees wearing a yellow jersey and with a flute of champagne in his hand.

UPDATE: The morning after the weekend before, the victory of Cadel is obviously headline news here. The Sydney Morning Herald came up with a nifty idea by framing its front page in a yellow border. Parts of its reports of Cadel Evans's triumph are highlighted in yellow.

As yet, however, I have seen few people heed the call to turn up at work wearing yellow. The other thing to report is that people have indeed turned up at work.

Rather disappointedly, there has been no mass absenteeism - or "chucking a sickie", which, I am reliably informed, is the correct terminology.

For an alternative take on Cadel and the significance of his victory, here is the writer Mia Freedman.

Australia is ripe for such treatment, of course, for you could easily write a half-decent history of the country through the prism of its wine glasses, rum tumblers, coffee mugs, tea cups, schooners and stubbies.

The Rum rebellion. The Six O'Clock Swill. A prime minister, Bob Hawke, who once held the world beer drinking championship - an impressive 2.5 pints of beer in 11 seconds. David Boon. Some chapters almost write themselves.

However, its latter sections might veer from the storyline that many outsiders would expect to read. For a start, beer consumption in Australia is at a 60-year low. It peaked at the end of the 1970s, and has been falling off ever since.

Data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed that consumption had fallen from 4.62 litres to 4.56 litres of pure alcohol per capita per year, the lowest result since 1947-48, the year of Don Bradman's last test. Perhaps the two are even linked.

The feeling is that Australians now prefer quality over quantity. Greater health awareness and tough drink-drive laws and enforcement are also thought to have played a part.

Rather than blowing the froth off their traditional favourites, Australians are also opting for imported beers and what are called craft beers. Ten years ago, the average beer drinker was content with three or so brands. Now that drinker is wantonly promiscuous, choosing between about seven.

I'm surprised that we haven't discussed beer before, because it also doubles as a wrecking ball when it comes to demolishing a few stereotypes and misconceptions about the land down under.

Foster's may be "Australian for lager" to British consumers, for example, but it's not a popular beer here - it accounts for just 1% of the market. Its brewer, Foster's, has a lot more success with brands like Victoria Bitter and Carlton.

Indeed, there is no such thing as "Australian for lager", Foster's famous boast abroad. Instead, the kind of beer that you drink normally provides a pretty good pointer to where you come from.

VB and Cartlon are the beers of choice in Victoria. In Queensland, it is Castlemaine, in New South Wales it is Tooheys, in South Australia it is Coopers, in Tasmania it is James Boags and Cascade, and in Western Australia it Emu and Swan.

Rather like Aussie Rules teams, beers increasingly pop up in places where you would not normally expect them - the New South Wales rugby league is presently sponsored by Victoria Bitter, for instance - but regional drinking habits still die hard.

The way that the authorities have tried to crack down on drink driving and binge-drinking also reveals the country's regulatory impulses. Random breath-testing is the norm across Australia, and the maximum breath alcohol is lower than in Britain.

I mention all this because Australia is bracing itself for what has already been dubbed a "beer war". The world's second largest brewer, SABMiller, is trying to buy Foster's, with Mexico's Groupo Modelo and Japan's Asahi also thought to be eyeing up a bid.

With Foster's main local rival Lion Nathan already Japanese-owned - Lion Nathan owns Tooheys, Castlemaine and Emu, to name but a few - it would mean that most of Australia's most famous beer brands would no longer be Australian owned. Coopers would be the main exception.

As Andrew Main of The Australian noted earlier in the month: "The startling thing in the beer business is the difference between the image of a beer, which is usually tied to a nationality, and the often transnational reality of who owns it."

It might some, for instance, that Foster's is brewed under license in Britain by Heineken. His piece is worth a read.

So the final chapter of that book charting Australia's boozy history might end with a chapter on the globalisation of the economy, and a row of schooners producing profits that would flow offshore.

The parliamentary hearings became a major television event here - an overnight sensation, in the most literal sense of all, because they unfolded at such a late hour. The Murdochs took their seats at 2330 Australian eastern standard time. The major networks carried the parliamentary hearings in full, with only SBS sticking to its scheduled programming. By strange coincidence, cycling fans tuning in were captivated by the performance of another Australian, Cadel Evans, who is going well in the Tour de France.

For those who watched the parliamentary hearing - there were a lot of bleary-eyed people walking around today - I suspect the reaction was similar to the widespread response in Britain and America: genuine surprise that the Rupert Murdoch of popular legend has become so frail and monosyllabic. Here, as in Britain, the metaphor of the moment seems to be the Wizard of Oz. The curtain has been pulled back. The spell has been broken.

Being such a deeply polarising figure, the Murdoch appearance obviously has sparked a wide range of responses. I've heard sympathy expressed for Mr Murdoch, not only for the pie attack moment but also for being "hounded" by MPs. Others have found it inconceivable that a man who exhibited such a keen interest in the content of his beloved newspapers had so little idea about their newsgathering techniques, some of which were illegal.

More than once today, I've even heard people say that they believed the media mogul faked his befuddlement in the hope presumably of appearing as a more sympathetic figure, in which case he is an extraordinarily accomplished actor. Inevitably, there's been talk of the tall poppy syndrome, something of a lazy fallback in these kind of discussions.

As for James Murdoch, some seemed impressed by the manner in which he sought to protect his 80-year-old father. Others, in a country that favours plain-speaking, have accused him of slippery obfuscation and of faux charm. "Corporate babble" is a phrase that I've heard a few times today.

Long after the midnight hour, my ears pricked up when Rupert Murdoch evoked Gallipoli. It is Australia's great foundation story and the first draft was written by his father Sir Keith Murdoch, who defied British censorship rules to highlight the bravery of the Australian and New Zealand forces and also the idiocy of the British commanders who sent them to their deaths.

"I just wanted to say that I was brought up by a father who was not rich but was a great journalist," he noted, in one of his most expansive answers. "And he, just before he died, bought a small paper specifically saying in his will it had given him the chance to do good. And I remember what he did and what he was most proud of and for which he was hated by many people in this country for many, many years, which was expose the scandal in Gallipoli, which I remain very, very proud of."

I am surprised not more has been made of this statement in the British press for it goes to the heart of his long-standing mistrust of the British establishment and his lifetime journalistic mission. It was a theme picked up by the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

As for the political impact here, Julia Gillard appears to be issuing what might be called holding statements. Today, she said that News Limited faced "hard questions" in the light of the British scandal, but did not outline precisely what they were.

The Greens have demanded a sweeping parliamentary inquiry into ethics, regulation media ownership - many of you were shocked that Rupert Murdoch controls 70% of the newspaper market in Australia.

Crucially, however, there has been no evidence as yet of any journalistic wrong-doing in the News Limited stable. John Hartigan, the chairman and chief executive of News Limited, is "hugely confident" that an internal audit will not uncover anything improper or unethical.

So for the time being, Julia Gillard appears to be hedging and waiting to see how the scandal unfolds in Britain. In the meantime, some of her senior ministers, namely the Treasurer Wayne Swan and communications minister Stephen Conroy, have stepped up their attacks on the Murdoch-owned Sydney Daily Telegraph for trying to force an early election.

Many thanks for your comments on the previous blog. I'd been keen to hear your thoughts on what unfolded in London overnight.

Outside of a general election, it is hard to think of a moment in modern times when so much power shifted in so short a space of time.

The influence of Rupert Murdoch has been drastically curtailed. David Cameron has also been weakened. British parliamentarians, hitherto afraid to speak out against the Murdoch empire, have been massively emboldened. For long-standing critics of the Australian-born media baron, the tumble of events has had something of a revolutionary air.

So what has been the fallout in the land of his birth?

Before going on, I should say, in the interests of full disclosure, that I have written for a number of Murdoch publications, namely the Australian, the Australian Literary Review and most recently The Wall Street Journal Asia. Promiscuous on this front, I have also written for a number of their rivals.

Another important point to make is that the Australian newspaper market is different to the British one. First off, News Limited, the Australian arm of News Corporation, controls a much higher share - Murdoch-owned titles account for some 70% of the market. Largely because News Limited owns most of the tabloid titles, the competition for stories and gossip is nowhere near as cut-throat or intense. There is not a national tabloid here, and most of the papers are city-based.

The tabloid agenda is also different. There is not the same preoccupation with sex scandals and nowhere near the same salaciousness. Similarly, the flesh quotient is very small. Neither is there a tradition of entrapment. Journalists do not look so hard for skeletons in the cupboard, and even when they find them they often keep them hidden from view.

On the ethical front, many of the tabloid excesses in Australia are to be found not in print but on television. Shows like A Current Affair on Channel Nine and Today Tonight on Channel Seven are serial offenders on ABC's weekly Media Watch show.

The main criticism of the Murdoch-owned tabloids, which comes mainly from the left, is not ethical but editorial: that they whip up populist fury on issues like asylum seekers and immigration.

"Invasion," screamed the headline of the Sydney Daily Telegraph in 2009 at the arrival of another shanty boat from Indonesia, which is arrant nonsense. More recently, the government and the Greens have been critical of the Murdoch stable of tabloids for being so vociferous in their opposition to the carbon tax.

The same criticism has been levelled against the Australian, the only national broadsheet, which has also editorialised strongly against the National Broadband Network, the Gillard government's other big-ticket issue. Arguably, the Australian wields more editorial clout than any other newspaper, partly because it is so widely read by politicians and policy makers but, most obviously, because it is owned by Rupert Murdoch, by far the country's most powerful mogul.

As in Britain, Australian politicians have tried assiduously to court him, knowing that he switches sides and tends to back winners. No prime ministerial visit to America, for instance, is truly complete unless it involves a meeting with Rupert Murdoch.

When it comes to the international VIP circuit for Australian leaders, he is up there with the US president, the Queen and the Pope. Watching the body language at these encounters is especially telling, for the politicians usually come across as supplicants. After all, prime ministers come and go, Rupert Murdoch has wielded enormous influence here for decades.

From a political perspective, his main effect, perhaps, has been to make politicians on the left more publicly conservative, which is also true of Westminster.

Ambitious types, like Kevin Rudd, have also worked hard to win over senior editors and executives. When Kevin Rudd admitted to public drunkenness at a strip club in New York - which was probably the first time most people around the world first got to hear about him - he was in the company of Col Allan, the Australian editor of the Murdoch-owned New York Post. When Julia Gillard made her first policy announcement as prime minister, ditching Kevin Rudd's Big Australia policy, she did so through the front pages of the Murdoch-owned tabloids.

As in Britain, the nexus between the major parties and the Murdoch empire is strong, multi-layered and incestuous. Tellingly, the man whom Rupert Murdoch selected to replace Rebekah Brooks as the chief executive of News International in London was Tom Mockridge, a former press adviser to Paul Keating. (As an historical aside, the changes in media ownership rules that enabled Rupert Murdoch to build up his share of the Australian market came into effect under Paul Keating).

There are already signs that Australian politicians have been emboldened by the events half a world away in Westminster and Wapping. Julia Gillard has said she is open to the idea of an inquiry into media ethics and ownership, though noticeably she hedged and did not go as far as to announce one.

"I think we will have a long debate about media ethics in this country," she told the National Press Club last week, "but if I could put it as clearly I can, I'd say to you don't write crap."

Stephen Conroy, the communications minister, openly accused the Sydney Daily Telegraph of trying to force an early election and to bring down Gillard's minority government (although his accusations that the Telegraph favour regime change pre-date the present crisis).

As for News Limited itself, it has condemned phone hacking and is now conducting an internal audit of payments over the past three years to ensure all of them were legitimate. John Hartigan, the company's chairman and chief executive, says he does not expect to find any evidence of wrong-doing and has said the culture in the company's Australian newsroom is very different from that at the News of the World.

"I know the newsrooms, I know how cultures develop and I'm hugely confident that there is no improper or unethical behaviour in our newsrooms," he told ABC last week.

Traditionally in Australia, media moguls have financed some of the country's best journalism, often at a loss. The much-missed weekly news magazine the Bulletin - a kind of Australian Newsweek - did not survive many years beyond the death of its long-time owner Kerry Packer. Similarly, the golden era of Sixty Minutes on Channel Nine came under Packer. Some of the best coverage of indigenous affairs, to use that unlovely phrase, is to been found in the pages of the Australian, and the paper made much of the running during the wrongful detention of the Indian doctor, Muhamed Hanif. Clive James has said that when Rupert Murdoch arrives at the pearly gates he will come brandishing a copy of the Australian Literary Review.

But it is not journalistic benevolence that has driven Rupert Murdoch, any more than it motivated Kerry Packer. Their investment in newspapers and media outlets brought enormous sway in Canberra, and power well beyond it. So a question: is Rupert Murdoch's Australian influence finally on the wane?