Matthew Parris: The secret Australia – and why I love it

Nations seek their souls in the strangest places. We English, for instance, have illustrated ourselves to the world and to ourselves with a stark choice between Cool Britannia and Ye Olde Tea Shoppe. When not hawking to tourists in London those T-shirts scrawled with obscenities, we picture ourselves in country lanes and rose-covered thatched cottages. A few of us actually seek out the vestiges of that countryside world and live a pretend-rural life there; but most Spectator readers would be bored to tears after ten minutes of Morris dancing; and a fortnight of hobnobbing over a honeysuckled garden fence with a rosy-cheeked jam-maker who had never heard of the Today programme would have us screaming for release, almost as horrified as we’d be in a Soho nightclub.

The Scots are even odder: one has only to cite tartan, Braveheart, caber-tossing and bagpipes to see at once that a year in a Highland croft would be hell for your working-class Glaswegian and your Edinburgh lawyer alike. But that is how Scotland advertises itself to the world and to itself. And don’t get me started on the Irish.

We all fly in our imaginations, it seems, to our own national equivalents of la France Profonde: to a place we suppose to be somehow interior and yet, paradoxically, on the fringe. The American love-affair with the frontier — and our British love-affair with the American love-affair with the frontier — encapsulates this.

Australia, whence I have just returned, is no exception. People I met in New South Wales and Queensland wouldn’t seriously identify with the world of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and have probably never even seen a hat with corks hanging from it, let alone worn one. Nevertheless, if you study television and newspaper advertising — often a discerning guide to nationally favoured stereotypes — you have to conclude that the rough diamond would be their gem of choice.