Chapter One
Flying into Australia, I realized with a sigh that I had forgotten again who
their prime minister is. I am forever doing this with the Australian prime
minister—committing the name to memory, forgetting it (generally more or less
instantly), then feeling terribly guilty. My thinking is that there ought to be
one person outside Australia who knows.
But then Australia is such a difficult country to keep track of. On my first
visit, some years ago, I passed the time on the long flight reading a history of
Australian politics in the twentieth century, wherein I encountered the
startling fact that in 1967 the prime minister, Harold Holt, was strolling along
a beach in Victoria when he plunged into the surf and vanished. No trace of the
poor man was ever seen again. This seemed doubly astounding to me—first that
Australia could just lose a prime minister (I mean, come on) and second that
news of this had never reached me.
The fact is, of course, we pay shamefully scant attention to our dear cousins
Down Under—not entirely without reason, of course. Australia is after all
mostly empty and a long way away. Its population, just over 18 million, is small
by world standards—China grows by a larger amount each ... read full excerpt from: In a Sunburned Country ebook
