Every year, there are two stories that make an appearance in the wacky news columns of the papers. The first is of the proverbial British family, emigrating to Australia, imagining it to be some suburban-bush mix of Skippy and Neighbours. Arriving in the boiling canyons of Sydney, driving through Chinatown and decaying inner city warehouses, they take one look at the reality of their colonial vanilla dream and get on the first plane home. The other story is slightly different. It’s of the Australian couple who arrive on an early morning flight at Heathrow, engage a taxi for the day, do the Tower, Tussaud’s, Harrods, and make it back for the evening flight home. They actively didn’t want to see anything that would disturb the fantasy of ye olde Englande.
For Australians, until fairly recently, Britain could still be summed up by tea towel images. While Britons were fed both a soapy, white-bread fantasy of Oz and the no less distorting vision of professional antipodeans such as Clive James and Germaine Greer (metropolitan London intellectuals who thought that occasional visits back home could top up their 1950s and 60s memories of the place), so the Australian imagination of a crumbling old imperial city couldn’t encompass the real intensity of the furious, global, modernising capital that London has become.
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