Australia

A few years ago, a distinguished cove in the diplomatic service was made High Commissioner to Australia. To prepare himself for the penal colony, he invited three predecessors to lunch, for advice. The first said that he should make contact with the Billabong institute in Sydney. They were experts on the transportees’ economy. The second advised him to befriend Ned Kelly, editor of the Convict Chronicle, who knew where the political bodies were buried, having often handled the shovel. Then it was Peter Carrington’s turn; Peter had held the post in the mid-1950s. ‘Watch out in late January,’ he warned. ‘When the shooting season ends, all your friends will try

It is a century and a half since The Spectator noted the exceptional qualities of South Australia, a colony of free settlers untainted — unlike the rest of the continent — by the convict stain. ‘Everywhere … the enclosures over miles of plain, the hedged gardens, the well-grown orchards and well-appointed homesteads, proclaim the possession of the land by an industrious and thrifty yeomanry,’ wrote a Mr Wilson in these pages in 1866. ‘It is England in miniature, England without its poverty … with a finer climate, a virgin soil … more liberal institutions and a happier people.’ These days, alas, the ‘thrifty yeomanry’ has to support a ballooning public

Home After the killings in Paris, David Cameron, the Prime Minister, said that seven terrorist attacks on Britain had been prevented in the past six months. He met President Vladimir Putin of Russia at a G20 meeting at Antalya in Turkey. Mr Putin said: ‘We should join efforts in preventing terror. Unfortunately our bilateral relations are not of the best.’ Mr Cameron said in the Commons: ‘Raqqa, if you like, is the head of the snake… we need to deal with it not just in Iraq but in Syria too.’ He said funds from maintaining defence spending at 2 per cent of GDP would go to special forces, drones and

Much has been written in these pages – both by Robin Oakley and myself – about the lack of female jockeys in racing. But every single time the topic is raised, the same argument pops up: that women simply can’t compete with men because they ‘aren’t strong enough’. But yesterday Michelle Payne proved them all wrong, by becoming the first ever woman to win the Melbourne Cup. What was her message to those who think female jockeys aren’t good enough? ‘Everyone else can get stuffed, because they think women aren’t strong enough, but we just beat the world.’ ‘It’s a very male-dominated sport and people think we are not strong enough and

 Sydney Most ordinary Australians are shocked that our immensely civilised country is reviled in polite society here and abroad, when the world has so many blatant human rights abusers. The latest accusation comes from a New York Times article complaining that our policies on asylum-seekers are harsh, insensitive, callous and even brutal, and urges European nations not to copy them. Yet the policies on border protection of Tony Abbott and John Howard before him should be a lesson to Britain. At the heart of the matter is a firm but fair post-war policy that mass migration is conditional on government control over ‘who comes to this country and the circumstances

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/chinasdownturn-labourslostvotersandthesweetestvictoryagainstaustralia/media.mp3″ title=”Alex Massie and Michael Henderson discuss England’s victory against Australia” startat=1184] Listen [/audioplayer]Adelaide airport, 2006. One of those serpentine check-in queues that bring you face to face with a long series of different people. I was leaving, everyone I knew in the queue was carrying on to Perth. See you at Lord’s, then. Sure. Safe trip. Quiet voices. No jokes. Minimal eye contact. Listless body-language. An overwhelming sense of shared experience. Shared bad experience. We were like, in kind if not in degree, people suffering from disaster shock. As if we’d experienced an earthquake. A loss of certainties, identity, hope. Thank God I was leaving: those poor buggers

All across the country this afternoon struggling club sides could cheer themselves with the thought that once their batsmen had survived for 112 deliveries they were doing better than Australia managed in their first innings in Nottingham this week. Australia’s capitulation in 18.3 overs – a Nelson of deliveries – might just be the most extraordinary thing any of us have ever seen on a cricket field. Even now, 48 hours later, it still seems shocking. And when England motored to 274/4 by the end of that first, astonishing, day it occurred to me that this might well have been the single best day of English test cricket in my

I have never met an Aussie I didn’t like, but, crikey, their sporting indefatigability is exhausting. Don’t they ever give up? In the past few days, they have pulled one out of the bag against the Springboks in the southern hemisphere Rugby Championship when they looked buried; trailing 20—17 with time up, they turned down a penalty kick and went for the win with an 82nd-minute try. Their Davis Cup tennis boys came from 2—0 down to beat Kazakhstan, with Lleyton Hewitt hauling his weary muscles through the motions once more. Afterwards Hewitt said, ‘I love the back-against-the-wall situation. This is what dreams are made of.’ Now they face Britain,

Cricket-captain-turned-cricket-commentator Richie Benaud died in Sydney this morning. He would have been 85 next October.  That last pair of sentences contains, believe it or not, two of the most crucial facts in modern Australian history. As of the last (2011) census, approximately 24 million people lived in Australia. It is a fair bet that (whatever the Fourth Estate supposes) fully two-thirds of them would struggle to remember – on the optimistic assumption of their ever having known – who Malcolm Fraser was, or who Gough Whitlam was. (From the mere fact that voting at Australian elections is compulsory, it need not follow that voting at Australian elections is literate.) But