Wollongonga the Brave

Some years ago a popular song made its way to Europe from the Land Down Under. Way before Men at Work, Kylie and Dannie and even the lovely Michael Hutchence and INXS.

It was sung by an Italian-Australian called Joe Dolce and was immortally entitled 'Shuddupa Your Face'.

It was popular because it had all the ingredients of that classic art form, the 'Summer on the Costa' theme song.

These have included 'Viva Espana', 'Throw A Chicken in the Air' and the 'Helston Furry Dance' as sung by the greatest living Irishman, Terry Wogan.

'Shuddupa Your Face' was the beginning of the cultural flow from Australia to the UK. Sure, Robert Helpman had pirouetted into power some years before, Googie Withers had googied and Barry McKenzie had arrived in the pages of Private Eye long before his sex change to Edna Everage.

But I'm talking real culture: lager, vomit and head butt. The precursor of Neighbours, Home & Away and Silvania Waters.

One of the great TV shows in Australia at that time was the Auntie Jack Show, starring Graeme Bonde, wherein a muscly middle aged man wearing a dress and working boots, sporting pigtails and a moustache, round pebble glasses and a boxing glove on his left fist was driven about in a motor cycle sidecar by a skinny drip in a striped leotard. The skinny drip, real name Garry MacDonald, and known as Kid Eager in the show, went on to become the legendary Norman Gunstone. This TV character became the most famous person in Australia, far surpassing the Prime Minister.

It was as Kid Eager that he sung 'Wollonga the Brave':

I've been everywhere man,
Never a trouble or care man
I've breathed the mountain air man
Of travel I've had my share man
I've been everywhere...
I've been to Wollongong Wollongong Wollongong
Wollongong Wollongong Wollongong Wollongong
Wollongong Dapto, Wollongong

It's all a slap in the face for those who see Australia as meat pies and tomato sauce, tinnies and thongs. It's not just culture, they are leading the way in many areas of modern life.

Take integration, for example. In the Church where I was wed, St. James's in central Sydney, is a wall plaque saluting the life of one Captain Ponsonby. It seems that he helped in no small order with the lowering of the numbers of the local population when Tasmania was taken into the arms of the British Empire. Today the nation is obsessed with the reverse. Ensuring that the sacred sites of the Aborigines are protected from marauding Mammon. The Aborigines are cute, though, being a people who use the spoken rather than the written word to pass down their history, it behoves them to remember sacred sites in the most commercial places. Wait for the one under the Sydney Opera House.

In many ways the more important story of integration in Australia is the virtually instant acceptance of foreigners into the nation. By foreigners I mean non-English-speaking people. Melbourne is the third largest Greek city after Athens and New York. Sydney is filled with a polyglot of races especially after Al Grasby, the orange-suited Immmigration Minister in the mould-breaking Whitlam government, opened the floodgates with positive discrimination against the traditional immigrants from Great Britain.

The point is not that they arrived, it is that their children are Australians first, second and third. None of this bullshit about preserving the cultural heritage of the immigrant groups. The old WWI song 'We're here because we're here because we're here' springs to mind. No politician, not even one as gentle and open minded as Norman Tebbitt, is required to ask which team is being supported by the immigrants when Australia is playing an international.

The nation takes itself very seriously and the sporting mores are deeply embedded.

Two examples. Firstly, all team games are played with the school or club being at home to the opposition at all levels. So the away sides travel en masse with their own supporters. The junior side plays first, to be followed by all levels until the first teams play. All players in the preceding game are reserves for the next game. Thus everybody plays and the reserves only come on in extremis as they have already played one game.

Secondly, it is nothing for an entire family to rise at the crack of dawn and drive several hundred miles so that the children can compete in a local swimming gala. The racing is taken seriously but it is a day out for all. This dedication breeds champions.

They have complete confidence in themselves. When Greg Norman, the golfer, was being interviewed on the annual Sportsman of the Year about his victory over Sandy Lyle in the World Matchplay, in the days when Sandy Lyle really could play, he was asked if he was nervous before the game. "No way," he replied, "I knew I'd win, he's a Pom."

Stuart (left), the proprietor of Bike Fix, seen handing over the prize cycle helmet to John Coates (right), winner of the Grey Fox 'Short and Nasty' Cycle Path Competition. The competition will be re-run in the summer, when, no doubt, the number of cyclists in London will have diminished due to carnage after dark on existing cycle paths.

Bike Fix, London's foremost cycle repair studio, also sells and hires bicycles and tandems. If you are visiting London, hurry down to Lambs Conduit street and see Stuart.

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