Greg Sheridan, a likely lad from the antipodes, and his adventures in England

Greg Sheridan as literary critic:

I once read a novel, The Innocent, by Ian McEwan, partly because it was set in Berlin. It turned out to be absolute rubbish and the Berlin setting entirely incidental. If it had been set in Bonn (West Germany's former capital, said, unkindly, by some Germans to be half as big but twice as dead as the Chicago city cemetery), I probably would never have read it at all.

Surely even allowing for a pompous t0ngue stuck firmly up between the cheeks, that's a rich slice of loon cake.

A further clue:

One reason Tom Wolfe's novel The Bonfire of the Vanities was so much more successful than its successor, A Man in Full, was because the former was set in New York, the cultural capital of the world, whereas the latter was set in Atlanta, Georgia, inherently not a particularly interesting place.

Or how a young lad from Connecticut lost in King Arthur's court learned to say bugger off William Faulkner. But how to explain Hamlet being set in Denmark, a really dull place, and Macbeth in Scotland, which is full of bagpipes, haggis, heath, and Scottish people?

Never mind, a further clue:

While I was in London, a bookshop in the West End was holding a display on my all-time favourite writer, P.G. Wodehouse, full of fascinating arcana about the master craftsman's life. One day I went to see Robin Niblett at legendary think tank Chatham House on St James's Square and was a little astonished to find that we were sitting in what had once been William Gladstone's bedroom.

P. G. Wodehouse and William Gladstone? Say no more. A nudge is as good as a wink to a wanker.

Or how Wooster and Jeeves overcame their tendency to broadcast German propaganda and save prostitutes in the streets (for more on Wodehouse, here, and more on Gladstone's prostitutes, here, showing I keed, I keed, unless of course you refer to his diary, his love of pornography, and his self scourgings, here).

Sheridan on the importance of not mentioning Gladstone's fixation with prostitutes:

For Australians, Gladstone is part of our history. He was an immensely important prime minister, for his views on everything from Irish self-rule, to the slave trade, to the role of Christianity in society and a million other things. You cannot be a culturally literate Australian if you've never heard of Gladstone. Yet he rightly means less to us than he does to the British themsleves (sic).

Sheridan on how the hard drive can get full to overflowing:

People who favour one special bit of knowledge, as I for example have always favoured Asian literacy, often argue, quite dishonestly, that adding one more thing to the core curriculum of what we need to know to navigate our situation intelligently doesn't diminish any other part of the core. Yet this is not true. The human mind is a zero-sum game. We can exhort all people to read and study more, to watch better movies and attend more galleries and all the rest, but in the end there is a more or less fixed quotient of cultural and historical space in the average mind.

You see, if you push too much stuff into the hard drive, then it will either automatically over-write, or somehow you'll lose the files, or it might crash altogether. Sheridan apparently knows a lot about hard drive crashes:

A file that big?
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.

Rather than a beep
Or a rude error message
These words: File Not Found

Having been erased
The document you’re seeking
Must now be re-typed.

Which naturally leads us to Sheridan as curriculum designer:

A bit more Asia means a bit less Britain and so on. Any culturally literate Australian needs a lot of space for specifically Australian stuff, but if that means only Australian stuff is included then he will turn out to be an idiot. Any culturally literate Australian needs a lot of American, British, European, Asian and specifically Australian content. The balance will be different for everyone but the need to strike a balance is there for all, and for the designers of school and university educations.

Um, better partition that hard drive now. I suggest five partitions, apart from the one containing the OS and critical applications. Label them American, British, European, Asian and Australian. If you don't, you'll turn out an idiot.

Sheridan on startling new evidence that living in Sydney or Melbourne is roughly analogous to living in Missouri:

Our situation is analogous to someone living in, say, Missouri, in the US. They need to know all about broad US history, as well as the history of Missouri state. Some of their Missouri leaders, such as Harry Truman, will become national leaders in the US and some will become global figures. There will be Missouri novels that have a universal appeal and others that manage to reach only a Missouri market.

You might take this to imply that Harry Truman was only a national leader and not a global figure, and it is true that ordering the dropping of the only atomic bombs deployed in war time was a minor decision of only small reach, purport and significance outside the Missouri market.

Greg Sheridan on the 15% or so of Australians not from Britain or its outposts:

Any literate Australian is an inheritor of British culture, broadly defined, as well as Western culture more generally. We also have access to other cultures, but it was from these roots that our society sprang.

QED. They're illiterate Australians, who might have access to other cultures, but really don't have a clue about their real roots. Don't get me started on the Chinese and the way they only know about western culture through the Opium Wars and the governors of Hong Kong.

Greg Sheridan on the term culture cringe:

It was Melbourne critic A.A. Phillips who coined the term "culture cringe" to convey the sense some Australians had of the inferiority of their cultural output. In particular he had in mind the need some Australians felt to find approval for their art -- be it literature or music or architecture or whatever -- in London before they could deem it worthy of their own unqualified respect.

Which explains why P. G. Wodehouse is so much better than Ian McEwan, who sets novels in dull German towns.

Greg Sheridan on surmounting the cultural cringe:

I truly believe we are now long past that time. This is especially important in terms of our relationship to Britain. Australians are generally very popular in Britain and the Brits are generally so kind to Australians that we can sometimes mistakenly think we are being patronised. But the old days of the culture cringe are long gone. This is a liberation in part because it allows us to appreciate Britain as an immensely important nation with a great deal of shared interests and shared values with us.

Wait, wait, it's a slow build to the moment of cultural cringe:

Of course it's still hard to avoid running through some of the old moves, as a kind of automated reflex, an echo of a past condition, an atavistic response triggered almost subconsciously by certain stimuli. Thus when checking into a London hotel, I was asked by the girl behind the counter whether I was British.

Yep Sheridan is getting close to a deep Freudian analysis of atavistic responses that suggest therapy might be the only answer when in the presence of the British, who so successfully find humor in Basil Fawlty groping the breasts of a young Australian woman while pretending to reach for the light switch:

"That's a terrible thing to say to an Australian," I replied before I'd given the words any thought at all. I didn't mean to be so chippy and it didn't really express any feeling I genuinely had. I wouldn't have said anything like that in response if asked whether I was American in a hotel in the US. Happily, the girl at the counter just smiled and we went on with the registration process on the best of terms. I now think of that remark as a kind of family in-joke. But as a remark it occupies a dangerous realm. It no longer expresses any legitimate feeling, but it is not so utterly and clearly fanciful as to be absolutely harmless.

Oh dear, quick, fly away back to the antipodean colony, away from the fiendishly penetrating analysis of the counter girl. Now you might think that this is mistake 101 of the innocent traveller - that slight surface contact with a member of the travel/tourist accommodation industry reveals something deeply, meaningfully intangible about the country you're visiting -but that would only show how superior Sheridan is in his thinking.

Sheridan on globalization and his dedicated bid to find more P. G. Wodehouse novels while trying to burn any Ian McEwan novels he might find, in a bid to remove boredom from the world:

In a globalising world, the chances of us metaphoric Missourians making an international splash are better than they've ever been. This was brought home to me by a conversation I overhead in a rare and antiquarian bookshop in the sweet little Cotswolds town of Witney. An enormously large young Englishman, with a broad northern accent, who rather touchingly described himself to the shopkeeper as having no fixed address at the moment, was asking for a book published in Australia and written by Australian actress, Rowena Wallace.

To tell you the truth, I didn't know Wallace had ever read a book, much less written one. But devotion to myriad aspects of Australian culture is quite widespread in Britain, just as Australians know a lot about Britain. It's not exactly an even match. But it's more comfortable than it's ever been.

By golly, next thing you know, Sheridan will be revealing he hasn't read any books by Judy Nunn, but perhaps that's because all that Asian knowledge in the noggin has forced out any memory of Australian soap stars. Lucky he didn't know anything about Wallace's suspended sentence for social security fraud or her struggles with a weight problem, or he might have bored the "rather touchingly" no fixed address soap devotee to tears. Yep, by their love of Home and Away and Neighbours shall you know the British homeless, though happily their no fixed address might allow them access to a television.

And ain't it grand to know that Britain still cares about Australia, even if it's not an even match because they currently hold the Ashes. Ain't it even grander to realize that as an innocent Aussie abroad, Sheridan can easily outmatch Mark Twain, and sound like a prize futtock ...

Yep, you can read it all here, in Growing closer to the mother country. Yet another reason this kind of high class content can be locked up behind a paywall, and Australians will fall over themselves to forward money, by cheque or postal money order, send no cash, to Chairman Rupert, as digital content at last comes of age.

And now for a flashback to the days of Australia's cultural cringe, and The Adventures of Greg Sheridan. Strike that, make it Barry McKenzie, who come to think of it in many ways exemplifies the star struck boy from the antipodes as he wanders around Britain.

You might not think we've advanced very far in our journey from Barry to Greg, but truth to tell these days we no longer talk of queers (unless of course you want to sound the alarm about gay marriage). Other than that? Well surely Greg Sheridan's piece deserves pride of place in any reading matter on how to go troppo in Soho.

And now here in full on the intertubes, the full lyrics of The Adventures of Barry McKenzie:

Barry: You know auntie, in a funny kinda way, I was just starting to like the Poms.

The adventures of Barry McKenzie

Dinky di tales of the true blue boy

Fresh from the shores of the antipodes

Wafting the scent of the eucalypt trees

If you wanta get your sister in a frenzy

Introduce her to Barry McKenzie

He's got a great big grin and a great big chin

Give him half a chance, he'll be in like Flynn

His great big fist will flatten any Pom

He's got a great big thirst you can do your worst

When they tap the keg he'll be in there first

It's no use mate you'll never win

He's a better man than you are Gunga Din

Barry ... Barry ... Barry ...

The adventures of Barry McKenzie

Dinky di tales of a bonza boy

Lonely and lost in the land of the Pom

Wishing to hell he was where he was from

From the team that brought you Sir Robert Menzies

The adventures of Barry McKenzie

He's got a big brown hat and an Earl's Court flat

And a map to show the Poms where Bondi's at

And he rushes in where angels fear to go

He can sink a beer, he can pick a queer

In his latest Aussie double breasted gear

He's a handsome wild colonial man

He can beat the bloody world

if Genghis Khan

Barry ... Barry ... Barry ... McKenzie

The adventures of Barry McKenzie

Dinky di tales of a true blue boy

Fresh from the shores of the antipodes

Wafting the scent of the eucalypt trees

From the land that's got the whole world green with envy

The adventures of Barry McKenzie.

Barry ... Barry ... Barry ... McKenzie

And now let's never speak again of silly Australian lads going back home to mother England and then, overwhelmed, letting forth a load of rubbish.

Well perhaps there's time for one more holiday snap (click on for a larger easier read).