The Irish love Australia, from the people to the weather and the beaches. Now that everyone's watching Kath and Kim, Donald Clarke wonders what all the fuss is about.
What is it with the Irish middle class and the Antipodes? On the rare occasions that their mouths are not jammed full of polenta and kumquats, the Celtic bourgeoisie can usually be found comparing their own excellent country unfavourably with the land that brought us Yahoo Serious and Pauline Hanson. Everyone's so laid-back there. The weather is just divine. The beaches are heavenly. And don't you just love - wait for it - the bahbies? (For some reason, everybody who has holidayed there seems to find it knee-slappingly hilarious to pronounce the popular abbreviation for barbecue in a bad Australian accent. My advice is to feign incomprehension until they say the word properly.)
Let me make it clear that I have nothing whatsoever against Australia or its citizens. The country has produced many great artists and thinkers - Robert Hughes, Germaine Greer, Nick Cave - and I choose to draw no conclusions from the fact that so few of them remain in the southern hemisphere after achieving fame.
I just wish the Irish - and, for that matter, the British, who are even worse in this regard - would stop whingeing about wanting to emigrate to the wretched place. You know where it is, for Pete's sake. Just keep digging until you smell Vegemite. Nobody will miss you.
So what, exactly, is the appeal? Many commentators trace the surge in enthusiasm for moving to the bottom of the planet back to the arrival of the soap opera Neighbours, in the mid 1980s. It seemed that the prospect of living in a version of Maida Vale with more ghastly weather - by which I mean blisteringly hot and very accommodating to giant insects - was a welcome one; by the decade's close, every corner of every wine bar echoed with paeans to the joys of eating outdoors in Melbourne. "The seafood crawls out of the ocean, dips itself in butter and lies right down on the charcoal," men with peeling noses told me. "You can't beat an Aussie bahbie. Ha ha!"
I'm sorry. I don't understand what you're saying. You can't beat a whatie what?
I suppose, to return to another argument put forward at dinner parties, Australians are indeed quite laid-back people. They may have voted the mean-spirited John Howard back into office. And, sure, one of the nation's loudest independent voices belongs to Mrs Hanson, a hatchet-faced fish-and-chip shop proprietor whose views on race would have unnerved Enoch Powell.
But most Australians - not those who supported the turning back of the boat people, you understand - are relaxed, easy-going, jolly sorts. So are the dead. We have an eternity of being laid-back to look forward to. Surely, rather than spending our time reassuring one another that we have "no worries", we might better prepare for oblivion by getting properly worked up about stuff.
But, as I mentioned earlier, I really have nothing against Australia (every time I say it, you believe it a little less, don't you?). It's this casual assumption that what we all want from life is malaria, crocodiles, sunstroke and grilled swordfish that gets me down. Mention at a Sandycove get-together that you don't much fancy the idea of moving to the other side of the globe and the hostess will look at you as if you have just spat in the couscous.
With this in mind, I have made it my task to come up with the perfect alternative. What we're looking for is a country that is everything the other place is not. "Oh, I would really love to live there," I want to say of this fine nation. "The people are so wonderfully uptight, the weather is bracingly cold and the food, though vile, is, thank goodness, never cooked outdoors." After I have droned on for several hours about the impressive lack of beaches - I think, ideally, we need somewhere landlocked - my fellow dinner guests should, if all goes well, bellow at me to shut up about this, to them, uninviting locale. "Now you know how I feel," I shall retort.
I toyed with Austria for a while, but the same people who want to move to Australia go skiing there, so that's no good. Then the blissfully coastless Mongolia came to mind, but it's a little too exotic. I think it has to be Uzbekistan, one of the only two countries in the world to be double landlocked (that is to say, entirely surrounded by other landlocked countries).
The CIA handbook claims that current concerns include terrorism by Islamic militants, an inconvertible currency and the curtailment of human rights. But, darling, I just can't wait to get there. Pass the dim sum.