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I confess to being a complete sucker for an end of year list. So let's finish 2009 with a look back over the decade, and a question: what were Australia's ten most significant events of the noughties. Here are my suggestions, in no particular order and with the disclaimer that it's by no means exhaustive - not even close:

1 - 2000 Sydney Olympics: Australia staged what arguably remains the best modern-day Olympiad, finally killing off any lingering sense of 'cultural cringe' with a fun-filled showcase that set the gold standard for other host cities.

2 - 9/11: John Howard, the then prime minister, was in Washington on that dreadful day and thereafter offered unwavering support for the Bush administration's War on Terror. Australian diggers were dispatched first to Afghanistan and then Iraq. At home, anti-terror legislation was minted in law, and security was noticeably tightened in the major cities and at airports. Many returning Australians, who left before 2001, reckon that their homeland has become a lot more authoritarian as a result (comments please), as well as more watchful and suspicious.

3 - The Bali bombing 2002: 88 Australians were killed after the explosion of three separate bombs in a murderous plot executed by Jemaah Islamiah. As Clive James wrote at the time: 'The shock wave from the car-bomb outside the nightclub in Kuta Beach in Bali went all the way to Australia in a matter of minutes.'

4 - The continued rise of China: it helps explains the big economic story of the past decade, a remarkable 10 years of recession-free growth for Australia. Of course, Australia helped make it own luck, with a tightly-regulated banking system, and what many economic commentators would say was fiscal responsibility of the Howard government.

5 - John Howard's fourth election victory in 2004: with control of the Senate as well as the House of Representatives, John Howard pushed through his unpopular WorkChoices legislation, a key factor in his ultimate defeat. During his fourth term, he also mounted the federal takeover of the Murray-Darling river system, a major change to federal/state relations, and announced the controversial Northern Territory National Emergency Response. He also refused to stand down in favour of Peter Costello, and the failure to put in place a succession plan until it was too late explains much of the present-day turmoil in the Liberal Party.

6 - The ongoing drought: in rural Australia, especially, the big story during the back half of the noughties was surely the Big Dry, the worst drought in a century. The big cities were hit as well, with tough water restrictions.

7 - The Sorry: Kevin Rudd's national apology to indigenous Australians for past injustices will surely be viewed by historians as the decade's single most important contribution to the ongoing process of reconciliation between white and black Australia.

8 - Black Saturday: the worst disaster in Australian peacetime history, which led to a rethink of how to respond to bushfires.

9 - Tampa crisis in 2001: the Tampa crisis, where the Australian navy blocked a boat which had rescued 438 Afghan asylum seekers, led to John Howard's controversial 'Pacific Solution'. The crisis also helped him win the 2001 election, thus reinforcing the view that being tough on asylum seekers yielded a big political dividend.

10 - Cronulla riot in 2005: most Australians were shocked by the ugly sight of a racially-motivated crowd going on the rampage in Cronulla, Sydney, targeting Australians of Middle Eastern background. A creeping Islamophibia was arguably stopped in its tracks.

Obviously, there's no shortage of noteworthy events- the election of Kevin Rudd, for one. The global financial crisis has also demonstrated the resilience of 'the Australian model'.

Perhaps the fact that Chinese immigrants have just overtaken new arrivals from the UK and New Zealand might come to be viewed as a major turning point in terms of Australia's changing demography.

Perhaps we might one day speak of Cate Blanchett's Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, for it produced yet more evidence that the cultural cringe has been replaced by the cultural creep.

Perhaps it will be the introduction of a new broadband network, which will make Australia more wired. Lots of options. I would love to hear yours...

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I have never much liked the title of this blog - and know that many of you would nod your heads in even more vigorous agreement had I had omitted the words 'the title of' from that opening sentence.

So, as a Christmas gift - or peace offering - I give you Mark Twain's Australia, Charles Darwin's Australia, Agatha Christie's Australia, along with the thoughts and musings of other literary travellers who have visited the Great Southern Land.

They come in a treasure trove of a book, Brief Encounters by Susannah Fullerton, which is packed with baubles, gems and the occasional brickbat.

Impressed by what they saw and witnessed, most thought that Australia - or the six colonies, as they were then - was a land of rich potential.

Farewell Australia, you are a rising infant and doubtless some day will reign a great princess in the South," wrote Charles Darwin.

"But you are too great and ambitious for affection, yet not great enough for respect; I leave your shores without sorrow or regret."

Afterwards, Darwin revised his opinion, saying that Australia was a "fine country" and likely to become a "very great one".

With great imperial condescension, Anthony Trollope noted: "As a group, they are probably the most important of our colonial possession, and they are certainly the most interesting."

Kipling predicted that Australians "would do wonderful things some day" but were presently too busy having picnics.

Trollope is particularly interesting because he identified early signs of what would come to be known as 'cultural creep'.

"Colonists are usually fond of their adopted homes - but they are at the same time pervaded by a certain sense of inferiority which is for the most part very unnecessary...this feeling produces a reaction which shows itself in boasting of what they can do."

Trollope also spotted the egalitarianism that Australians continue to hold dear, and that was an affront to many visiting Britons. Noticing a self-confident young maid at one of the inns that he stayed at during his travels, he said she "has the pertness, the independence, the mode of asserting her manner that though she brings you up your hotter, she is just as good as you."

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle observed "the perfect equality of the Australian system, which would have the best man at top, be who he might?"

Most of the literary travellers were struck by Australia's happy informality. Kipling spoke of Australia's "leisured multitudes", and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle clearly had a fine old time. "We all devoted ourselves to surf-bathing," he wrote, "spending a good deal of our day in the water as is the custom of the place. It is a real romp with Nature."

By contrast, Agatha Christie remained impressed by the Aussie way, and expressed herself through some of her fictional characters. They thought Australians were "a bit too sociable", "a bit too hospitable for English ideas" and "over friendly".

But many of these visitors were also struck by the cruelty inflicted on indigenous Australians. "Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aborginal," wrote Darwin. "Their fate is a dark stain upon Australia," wrote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Many happily weighed in on Australia's great civic rivalry. "When I think of Melbourne, I vomit!" said Robert Louis Stevenson, even though Anthony Trollope looked upon the capital of Victoria as "the undoubted capital" of Australia. Agatha Christie thought Sydney was vastly over-rated - "I had expected too much of it, I suppose," she wrote - but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had "no idea it was so great a place".

And here's a thought from Rudyard Kipling, which is particularly germane given the discussion on The American in Australia: "This country is American, but remember it is second-hand American."

Charles Darwin spoke of the early obsession with real estate, noting: "Everyone complains of the high rents and difficulty in procuring a house." Rudyard Kipling thought there was "too much politics for a young country," a comment with which some of you might agree.

Most were immediately impressed by the landscape. "I was entranced by landscape coloured as I have never seen landscape coloured before," Agatha Christie rhapsodised. "It is [an] extraordinarily subtle, unknown country. The gum trees are greyish, with pale trunks - and so often the pale, pure silver dead trees with vivid limbs," wrote DH Lawrence.

Trollope reckoned that "Tasmania ought to make jam for all of the world", while Darwin said he drank "some admirable Australian wine" - and that's what I intend to do over the coming couple of weeks.

Whether you find yourself in a snowstorm or near a beach, whether the "white" in "white Christmas" refers to snow or the froth and bubble of the surf, have a super festive period.

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How will 2009 be remembered in the Australian mind? With enormous heartache and anguish for many, since any audit of the Australian year has to start with the awfulness of February, and the blackest of Saturdays, when 173 people lost their lives and over 400 were injured. Already, it has been written into the history books as the worst peacetime disaster since Federation, and already it has prompted a rethink about how Australia confronts what has always been an unsettling reality: that the country occupies one of the most fire-prone corners of the planet.

2009 was supposed to be the year when Australia was consumed by the global economic environment. On its very eve, the December quarter had delivered that most perplexing of economic oxymorons - three months of "negative growth" - and most predicted that a recession was inevitable.

Instead, the last 12 months have been dominated by Australia's physical environment: the worst bushfires in living memory, the continuation of the worst drought in over a century and a policy row over how to contend with climate change that dragged on for much of the political year and led to its chaotic denouement. By early December, when global leaders gathered in Copenhagen to decide how to confront the perils of anthropogenic climate change, the political debate in Australia had reverted to the question of whether it even existed. 2009 was the year when Australia's fragile political consensus on climate change came to an abrupt end.

In a year when Australia was reminded once again of the economic benefits of its powerhouse resources sector, perhaps 2009 was not the most audacious time for the Rudd government to push for its emissions trading sector. The argument that it would damage the very thing which continues to underwrite Australia's prosperity had even more resonance, and gained even more editorial traction, in a year when, against all the odds, Australia remained so very prosperous.

In 2009, the country managed to complete an impressive hat-trick, avoiding recession during the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, the 2000 dot-com bust and now the global economic downturn. With its strictly regulated banking sector, the Australian economic model fashioned by Hawke, Keating and Howard was much envied at the start of the year. Now it is spoken of in almost hallowed tones amongst public policy experts around the globe.

The "wonder from down under", as the country's economic resilience came to be called, also helped burnish Kevin Rudd's international credentials, in a year when he was asked to become a "friend of the chair" at Copenhagen, and a senior administration official in Washington said publicly that he was Barack Obama's most trusted fellow leader. On that front, . The gossip in Canberra is that the secretary-generalship of the United Nations has become the main target of Kevin Rudd's personal ambition, in which case 2009 has been useful in embellishing his curriculum vitae, even if it ended in disappointment at Copenhagen.

But the Australian prime minister will be concerned about the deterioration in relations with two other countries which are set to dominate the 21st Century: India and China. Beijing fell out with Canberra over its thwarted plans to invest in the resources sector, the visit of Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer, and the arrest in Shanghai of the Rio Tinto executive and Australian national, Stern Hu. Kevin Rudd's fluent Mandarin has yet to translate into a happy diplomatic relationship with China.

Australia's relations with India, meanwhile, were hampered by a spate of ugly attacks on Indian students in Melbourne and Sydney, and a sluggish response from Canberra. At Copenhagen, the Indians also described Rudd as an "ayatollah".

The Rudd government also confronted another South Asian problem, with a surge of boat people from Sri Lanka and Afghanistan who were trying to reach Australian shores and leave behind their war-torn homelands. Some 1,500 asylum seekers will spend Christmas in the heat, humidity and cramped conditions of the Christmas Island detention centre.

The attacks on the Indian students, combined with what was viewed by some international observers as the paranoiac reaction to the boat people, raised that perennial question of whether Australia is unusually racist. Then, the question was given primetime impetus by the revival of a hit television show from the Seventies and Eighties, Hey Hey It's Saturday, which featured its now notorious "blackface" skit.

For me, there were happier journalistic diversions. A meeting in Fremantle with Claude Choules, the oldest surviving combat veteran of World War I. The apology to Forgotten Australians and former child migrants. Cate Blanchett in A Streetcar Named Desire - even if it took over a month for me to see her performance in all its glorious completeness. There was Samson and Delilah, my Australian film of the year, and, no surprises, the AFI's film of the year. Even a few holes of the longest golf course in the world, which stretches across the vast emptiness of the Nullarbor Plain.

For all that, the journey that I will remember most from 2009 was the winding road, lined with blackened trees, smouldering shells of properties and burnt-out cars, that took us to fire-blighted Kinglake a few days after Black Saturday. High in the hills, an hour north of Melbourne, it is easy to see how it has long been regarded as a route of happy escape for locals and Melbournian weekenders. But on Saturday, 7 February, 2009, it became the scene of a flight of unspeakable terror.

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A play on the "Kevin 07" T-shirts worn by Labor activists at the last election, Australia's Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is often known as "Kevin 24/7" for an unrelenting work ethic.

Copenhagen may well go down as the sternest test yet of his stamina, and as the negotiations drew to a close he urged his fellow world leaders to "work, work, work".

But have they done enough?

Mr Rudd himself has described the last-ditch agreement reached between the US, China and other key states in the Danish capital as a "big step forward", for the simple reason that developed and developing nations have agreed to the goal of limiting global warming to 2C.

It is all the more important, a weary Australian prime minister suggested, because on Thursday night the talks "stood at the point of total collapse" - an "abyss".

But the Copenhagen "deal" has already been slammed by Mr Rudd's political opponents and Australian environmental groups.

Here are the views of newly-appointed opposition leader Tony Abbott, whose unexpected political rise late last month came as a result of his opposition to the Rudd government's plans for an emissions trading scheme.

"Copenhagen, it seems, has been a very Kevin Rudd kind of agreement," said Mr Abbott. "There's been a lot of words but not many deeds come out of it."

Mr Abbott had claimed that his party's new position of blocking the creation of an emissions trading scheme had been vindicated. One of his central arguments had been that it was wrong for Australia to engineer such a major reform of its economy before the outcome of Copenhagen was known.

"I hope that he'll now entirely reconsider his climate change policy," said Mr Abbott.

The Greens have been scathing. Bob Brown, the leader of the Australian Greens, said Copenhagen had been an abject failure.

His colleague, Senator Christine Milne, described it as a "superficial last-minute statement... with no substantive progress made on any of the critical issues".

Greenpeace Australia has said that no deal would have better than this deal, and here's what Damien Lawson, a spokesman for Friends of the Earth, has had to say: "Kevin Rudd will try and blame developing countries for the failure of these talks, but he must take a large share of responsibility. The rich countries of the world, including Australia, must stop holding the rest of the world hostage with low ambition and unjust proposals."

Neither is the Australian union movement impressed. ACTU president Sharan Burrow said the deal "won't meet the needs of trying to protect continents like ours, or indeed the vulnerability of our Pacific neighbours".

No doubt, much of the post-conference commentary in Australia will focus on Mr Rudd's personal contribution in the run-up to Copenhagen and at the conference itself.

Appointed a "friend of the chair" by the Danish prime minister, he had made a huge investment in time and energy. Critics here have suggested that his ultimate ambition is to become a UN secretary general and this was something of a dress rehearsal.

Mr Abbott was savage in his criticism of Mr Rudd's personal role at Copenhagen.

"I think that it was always a great conceit to think that Australia could save the world on its own

"The Australian voice should be heard in the world but I think it's wrong for people like Mr Rudd to imagine that they can be much more than the mouse that roared," Mr Abbott said.

But the highly-respected environmentalist Professor Tim Flannery has praised Mr Rudd's efforts.

"I think that our prime minister has played an outstanding role," said the former Australian of the Year. 'He's been working very hard for the last few months... and he's just been fantastic all the way, he just shines at it... he's been really important through these meetings".

Prof Flannery described the agreement as "good but not perfect".

The lack of a stronger agreement at Copenhagen, and the continued uncertainty about emissions targets, sets up an intriguing Australian election, which will likely come before world leaders meet again in Mexico City towards the end of next year to try to hammer out a legally-binding agreement.

It was already being dubbed the "climate change election" and being framed as a referendum on the Rudd government's plans for an emissions trading scheme - or the "giant new tax", as the Liberals are now portraying it.

Perhaps the opposition will be able to play on that continued sense of global uncertainty, and argue that Australia would be foolish to commit itself. Mr Rudd may well argue that if Australia is going to be a good global citizen it has no other choice.

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What will be your abiding memory of the Australian sporting year? Maybe you started 2009 at the New Year's Test in Sydney, when the crowd at the SCG stood as one when the South African captain Graeme Smith walked from the pavilion in a plaster-cast in a valiant, if unsuccessful, attempt to save the match. Perhaps you were at the Oval, when, after five-and-a-half hours at the crease, Michael Hussey was deceived by the off-spinner, Graeme Swann, thus handing England the Ashes. Perhaps you were even lucky enough to watch Tiger Woods play in Melbourne in the days when his poise and precision were the focus rather than his wayward drives. Perhaps you were watching your flat-screen plasma when the disgraced rugby league star, Matty Johns, fronted up before the Channel Nine cameras.

As with most sporting years, Australian fans have witnessed the good, the bad and the ugly. And as ever, the fastest, highest and strongest have ended up vying for column space with the most drunken, the most violent and the most boorish. Fittingly enough, at this year's Walkley Awards for journalism, the sports reporting award went to the Four Corners, ABC's flagship investigative news programme, which explored a series of sex scandals in rugby league.

It neatly makes the point, for in 2009 Australian sport witnessed more shock than awe. Its front page stories were arguably more noteworthy than its back page stories - which is all the more maddening since Australia boasts some fine, fine sportswriters.

For all that, there was much to enjoy on the field of play. In rugby league, the coach Craig Bellamy led the Melbourne Storm to deserved success, but could not do the same for New South Wales in the State of Origin, which has arguably become the biggest annual sporting event on the calendar.

Aussie Rules Football produced the almost all-conquering St Kilda, which won a club record 19 consecutive matches but could not extend their winning streak all the way to the grand final, where Geelong took the honours.

In rugby union, there was an imposing win for the Wallabies against the Springboks in Brisbane, and the emergence that night of Will Genia, a George Gregan-like scrum half.

In cricket, Ricky Ponting and his new look band of brothers celebrated an overseas victory in South Africa and hoisted again the Champions Trophy.

But Australian sport was beset in 2009 by something which outsiders do not commonly associate with Australian sport: chronic inconsistency.

So the same cricket team that won in South Africa could not smother a fairly average England outfit during the Ashes. The same rugby team that beat the world champions in Brisbane could not even beat Scotland at Murrayfield. Even the normally all-conquering Kangaroos, the national rugby league team, could only draw with New Zealand in October, having lost to them in the World Cup final in 2008.

Surely the most consistent team of the year was the Socceroos, who qualified for the World Cup without any of the usual dramas and managed to hold Holland to a 0-0 draw - even if the oft-heard criticism of the Australians is that their game plan is to stop opponents playing great football rather than striving for it themselves. Next year, in the World Cup, they will face their ultimate test, in a talent-packed first round group which includes Germany, Serbia and Africa's main torchbearer, Ghana.

In the ongoing battle of the codes, Aussie Rules has ended on a high, by firming up its plans to expand into Western Sydney and the Gold Coast. Rugby league will be reflecting on a year of on-field brilliance and, for some players, off-field madness. And rugby union is in the doldrums, with even the game's most ardent fans questioning whether they want to part with money to watch 80 minutes of aerial ping-pong and place-kicking.

The individual performance of the year? I'll long remember the try scored by Fuifui Moimoi of the Parramatta Eels in the NRL grand final, when he crossed the line at dazzling speed even though half of the Melbourne Storm seemed to be hanging from his back. Then there is the poll-vaulter Steve Hooker, a gold medallists in Beijing, who won the world championships in Berlin, despite tearing his abductor muscle only the week before. And what of the boxer Danny Green's 122-second win over the legendary Roy Jones Jr - a night when all of Australia surely went green.

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I started the week reporting on how two participants in the reality show, 'I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here,' were facing criminal charges for allegedly killing a rodent and then using it as the main ingredient in a rat risotto. I've finished it filing despatches on the emergency camel cull in the Northern Territory, where some 3,000 animals have been shot and left to decay in the dust of Australia's red centre.

Obviously, it's tempting to conflate the two stories. With the first, Australian officialdom came to the belated defence of a solitary rat because they alleged it had been killed for the purpose of entertainment, which violates its code of conduct. With the second, the cull of thousands of camels was officially-sanctioned by the government of the Northern Territory. In one, Australian officialdom played the role of animal defender. In the other, it adopted the role of animal slayer.

Regular readers of this blog know that I am the correspondent who came to Australia vowing to steer clear of animal-related stories, but who happened to touch down in the week that the 'Crocodile Hunter' Steve Irwin was killed by a stringray. And ever since, I've ended up breaching the no animal doctrine on numerous occasions.

Some are daft. Some are crowd-pleasers (just about the easiest way to get lots of hits on the Ö÷²¥´óÐã website is to put up an Aussie animal story on the front page). Some take you down the most unusual of journalistic pathways. Not so long ago, I had to field a question about Koala chlamydia on the World Service. And some are genuinely intriguing and newsworthy.

The Docker River camel cull falls into that last category, because this remote outback community was being terrorised by camels, according to the locals. At dusk, hundreds of camels would come into the settlement in search of water, intruding into peoples' homes and even learning the trick of pushing over fire hydrants to get access to a fountain of water. This week the camels were herded by helicopter onto a patch of land outside of Docker River and gunned down.

Animal welfare groups have said the authorities were being trigger happy. But the Northern Territory argued that so severe had the problem become that it had no other option.

What always strikes me about these stories is the vast difference between the coverage they get in Australia and the headlines they generate abroad. The rat risotto was the front page splash on Sunday in the News of the World, Britain's most read newspaper. Similarly, the Docker River camel cull story was the 'most watched' news piece on the Ö÷²¥´óÐã website. That day, I had to look hard to find the story on the ABC Northern Territory website, ditto the Northern Territory News website, which is normally a treasure of animal stories.

I guess the dichotomy is fairly easily explained. Animal culls have long been a fixture of Australian life - vehemently opposed by animal welfare groups for sure, but hardly out of the ordinary. Not even appearing on the country's coat of arms offers any immunity, for millions of kangaroos are slaughtered every year.

So is it simply the case that the Australia bush and outback can be hostile environments, and that tough measures have to be taken against feral animals to prevent them becoming even more so? Or is there a 'cull culture' which goes too far?

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Happy birthday Bob Hawke, who turned 80 on this very morn. He'll celebrate with a black-tie dinner at the Sydney Opera House, thus giving photographers the chance to capture two great Aussie icons in a single snapshot - one with glorious white sails, the other with luxuriant silver hair.

I have the "Silver Bodgie" to thank for providing one of my more memorable moments covering Australian politics. It came during the 2007 election, when Bob Hawke was "g'daying" and "hello darlinging" his way around a pedestrianised shopping precinct as he sought to lend his charisma and panache to a rather dour Labor party candidate who was in urgent need of a personality transplant. Needless to say, the Silver Bodgie was magnificently presented: resplendent in an electric blue sports jacket, an open-necked white shirt, even whiter leather loathers, no socks and a heavy gold chain that hung lazily from his sun-tanned neck. At a distance he could easily have been mistaken for a sales rep trying to sell retirement homes on the Gold Coast, but up close there was no doubting his presence. For surely nobody else in Australia has such a extravagant head of hair, so perfectly coiffured that it looked like it has been groomed by his very own squadron of stable hands working since the crack of dawn.

Oddly, I had spent that morning compiling a report on how green issues had intruded on the campaign, and I was keen to get Bob Hawke's input. And he was more than delighted to help, since he claimed to be the first Australian prime minister to have been alert to the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions, and had acted accordingly. Shortly after launching into the interview, Hawkie was a few words short of a near perfect sound-bite when his voice started to be over-powered by a busker, who had spotted him approaching and decided to honour him with a musical tribute: a quick rendition of Advance Australia Fair.

Rather than stop Mr Hawke in mid-flow, I tried to make sense of the melody to the listeners back home. It was now drowning out the former prime minister, and could hardly be ignored. "They're playing the national anthem for you, Mr Hawke," I said.
"I gathered that," he replied abruptly, shooting me the most withering of looks. Then, with the microphone still on, he started to hum along with the anthem, bouncing from one word to the next - an impromptu performance in which the Silver Bodgie delivered radio gold.

That morning I left Bob Hawke thinking that the only leader I have ever witnessed do retail politics with more aplomb is another Rhodes scholar, Bill Clinton. And it helps explain why the Silver Bodgie is Labor's longest serving prime minister, with four election victories to his name. Regardless of what you thought of his politics, it was hard not to like him - from his endearing habit of breaking down in tears on national television to that moment of spontaneity on the morning of Australia's America's Cup triumph in 1983 when he essentially gave the whole country the day off.

By far the best profile that I have read of Bob Hawke comes from the pen of one of my favourite Australian journalists, Craig McGregor, who had trailed him for a few days in 1977, when he was still a union leader. "He drinks like a fish," wrote McGregor, "swears like a trooper, works like a demon, performs like a playboy, talks like a truckie - and acts like a politician....Bob Hawke is your typical Australian, oversize."

McGregor went on to say that no other country in the world could have produced a leader like Bob Hawke: "In a way he sums up the best, and the worst, of us. For that reason alone, he could make a great prime minister."

The profile also included a quote from Hawke himself, which offers a good starting point for anyone covering Australian politics. "I don't think in Australia we are going to change things dramatically," he said before becoming prime minister. "We are a very conservative country. And you have to move with within the constraints of what the nation's economic performance will allow. Whatever a future Labor government may achieve, it will live or die according to its economic performance." Prophetic words from the prime minister who "opened up" the Australian economy, and who, with his Treasurer Paul Keating, laid many of the structural foundations for its present-day prosperity.

Almost 30 years on, Hawke still has a penchant for the killer sound-bite. Asked last week what sort of leader Tony Abbott would be, Hawkie deadpanned: "Temporary."

Like McGregor, I've always looked upon Hawke as an emblematic leader, a man of contradictions who led a country full of contradictions (yes, Whitlamite, a "schizophrenic country"). He was the son of a Congregationalist minister whose catchphrase as a union leader was: "You can get f." He was a brilliant scholar who won a Rhodes Scholarship, although his students days are best remembered - memorialised even at the Turf Tavern in Oxford - by his skill at downing a yard of ale quicker than anyone else in the world. He was a heavy drinker who gave up the bottle while he was prime minister; he was a back-slapping larrikin, who thought nothing of crying in public. He was the longest serving Labor prime minister who, despite his personal popularity, had a surprisingly conservative political outlook and governing philosophy. So is it an exaggeration to say that, more so than any post-war prime minister, he was a complicated man who personified the complicated country he led?

UPDATE: To avoid any confusion, the Silver Bodgie is indeed the Silver Bodgie. Parrgirl's definition is spot on: "Bodgies were delicious blokes from the 50s/60s with the tight duds and glorious shocks of brushed back hair." And richer than the description from an online dictionary of Aussie slang: "The word was used to describe a young Aussie male, distinguished by his complete conformity to certain fashions of dress - and loutish or rowdy behaviour - the antipodean counterpart of the pommie 'teddy boy'." Seems like the the Silver Bodgie had a fine old time at his Opera House bash. It was attended by Kevin Rudd, along with the former Labor prime ministers, Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating. A burlesque stripper pretending to be John Howard also made an appearance, wearing skimpy swimwear - something which seems to be in vogue among Liberal leaders. .

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For the first time in its history, Australia's most populous state has a female premier, a photogenic 40-year-old called Kristina Keneally, who is trying to become the acceptable face of what many voters in New South Wales look upon as an ugly and repellent political machine.

More so than her gender, it is the criticism that she merely is a puppet of the two backroom powerbrokers who installed her as Labor leader that has been attracting the most comment. That, and the fact that she was born in Las Vegas, raised in Ohio and speaks still with a distinctive American accent, even though she is married to an Australian, has an Aussie mother, and became a naturalised Australian citizen in 2000, the year that she joined the Australian Labor Party.

By strange coincidence, last week was a good one for foreign-born political leaders in Australia. Tony Abbott, who could declare himself a Londoner if ever he so desired, became the Liberal leader. In Kevin Rudd's absence, Julia Gillard, a product of Barry in South Wales, filled in as acting prime minister. In the immediate aftermath of the rejection of the emissions trading scheme, it was the Senate leader, the British-born Chris Evans, who led the attack on the opposition. And he was quickly joined by the climate change minister, Penny Wong, who was born in Malaysia.

But while Australians have long been used to European-born politicians, and are getting increasingly used to Asian-born leaders - the Hong Kong-born John So served for over seven years as the Mayor of Melbourne - will they countenance an American-born leader?

To pre-empt some of your comments, Kristina Keneally is perhaps a special case because she speaks in the accent of her homeland. To many, . But could there also be an anti-Americanism at work in much of the US-focussed commentary?

Like virtually every country in the world, Australia has fallen prey to America's rampant post-war cultural imperialism. And, often, willingly and happily so. The Australian box office is dominated by Hollywood movies. Cormac McCarthy is perhaps as popular these days as Thomas Keneally, Kristina's Booker prize-winning uncle. Channel Nine claims in its on-air promotions to be "Proudly Australian", but its schedules are packed with US imports, while its flagship news programme, Sixty Minutes, is a replica of the US original, right down to the tick, tock, tick of its iconic stopwatch. Likewise, Channel Seven's successful Sunrise programme breakfast show is modelled on NBC's Today show, with Martin Place in Sydney substituting for New York's Rockefeller plaza for the out-of-studio walkabouts. The thumping theme music of its evening news was composed by the American film composer John Williams, and is heard in America each night at the start of NBC's primetime bulletin.

The two most headline-making visitors to Australia this year were both Americans, Britney Spears and Tiger Woods, while the country has recently said farewell to one of its most-loved entertainers, the New Yorker Don Lane.

Yet for all that, the American influence is by no means overwhelming. Not even close. My ears tend to prick up whenever I hear an American accent in Australia, because it happens so infrequently. If you look at the 20 most popular television programmes this year in Australia, no American show even makes the list (nor does a UK programme, for that matter). On the ABC, the national broadcaster, the preference is for the UK- rather than US-made. Even its finest US import, the mesmerising detective series The Wire, is buried away on ABC 2, while lesser British-made programmes, like say Spooks, are given better primetime slots on ABC 1.

Listening to talk-back radio, so many of the comedic references are British rather than American, whether they come from Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, The Goons, The Goodies, The Office or Yes Minister. Last week, Malcolm Turnbull's attempts to cling on to the Liberal leadership were commonly compared to the decapitated Black Knight in Monty Python's The Holy Grail.

In sport, despite Frank Packer's confident post-war assertion that baseball was the coming thing, cricket remains dominant. And while Kerry Packer might have borrowed some US-style razzmatazz when he launched World Series cricket, it was still an emphatically Australian product - popularised by the ringing anthem, "Come on Aussie, Come on". Basketball has failed to take off in Australia's most populous cities, and American Football does not have much of a following. Sporting colloquialisms also have an Aussie and British ring. Occasionally, you will hear a "that's out of left field", but rarely a "go the whole nine yards" or a "full court press". More commonly in Australia you will find yourself on "a sticky wicket" or suffering the humiliation of being "bowled a googly".

In politics, Australia has a Senate and a House of Representatives, but that's pretty much the extent of the "Wash" contribution to the "Washminster model" of government. That said, Labor politics in New South Wales does a pretty good imitation of Tammany Hall. We've noted before that Australians do not tend to warm to the grand and flashy trappings of US presidential politics - a point driven home on Friday afternoon when I bumped into Kevin Rudd on a pedestrian crossing in central Sydney, while he was out doing what looked like some Christmas shopping. Happily, the roads were not shut, sharp-shooters did not peer down on him from roof-top vantage points and he, like the rest of us, had to wait for the light to turn green.

And just look what happened to Starbucks, which was forced to lighten its Australian footprint, largely because the local competition was way too hot and Australians rejected this American transplant. Now the American coffee giant has largely been reduced to operating in Australian tourist traps, where it plays on its familiarity with overseas visitors.

Starbucks has never managed to build up a really big, loyal, local clientele, partly because it was seen as an unwelcome intrusion from the US. Will Kristina Keneally give it a better shot?

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When waded into the surf at the weekend, , few would have expected him to emerge 48 hours later as the leader of the Australian opposition.

As late as Monday, Mr Abbott himself was talking about withdrawing from the race for the leadership of the , since support seemed to be coalescing around the ever jovial Joe Hockey, the shadow treasurer, who was widely viewed as the one figure who could unite a fractured party.

Yet, shortly after I pressed "send" on the last blog, Mr Hockey indicated that he would grant Liberal lawmakers a '"conscience vote" on the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), the hotly-contested legislation that has split the Liberals in two.

On a matter of high principle, Mr Hockey was offering pragmatism in place of a policy - and it cost him the leadership of the party.

MPs had warmed to the idea of a compromise candidate, but the climate change sceptics gave his compromise stance on the ETS the iciest of cold shoulders.

So to the surprise of many, Mr Hockey was eliminated in the first round of voting, and the leadership came down to a head-to-head contest between Mr Abbott, a climate change sceptic, and Malcolm Turnbull, whose deal with the government to get the ETS passed into law before the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen next week sparked the crisis.

By the narrowest of margins - just one solitary vote - Mr Abbott carried the day.

Less then an hour later, he appeared before reporters vowing to block the ETS legislation from becoming law - even if it puts in the hands of Kevin Rudd a trigger to call a snap election.

"Oppositions are not there to get legislation through - oppositions are there to hold the government to account," he said defiantly. "Now, as leader, I am not frightened of an election, and I am not frightened of an election on this issue."

Many moderate Liberals are terrified. Mr Turnbull had warned that his once-dominant party would face an electoral catastrophe if it appeared before the electorate as the party of climate-change scepticism.

And soon we might get to test that proposition. If the Senate blocks the measure again - as now seems likely - Mr Rudd could go to the polls, after dissolving both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

In what is already being billed as "the climate-change election", most observers predict a lop-sided majority for Labor, if not a landslide.

Tony Abbott is an endlessly intriguing and entertaining figure.

A devout Catholic who once considered a life in the priesthood, he regularly peppers his public comments with profanities.

Indeed, one of the early challenges of covering his leadership has been deciding which of his most memorable quotes are fit for broadcast.

For a start, he's dismissed climate change as "absolute crap" - yes for Radio 4's Today programme, but no for the World Service - while at the end of a particularly accident-prone day during the 2007 election he conceded to viewers of the ABC that "shit happens".

Aged 52, he was born in London of Australian parents, and was awarded a boxing Blue during his time as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University.

He's also an ardent monarchist, and a fervent Howardite. Memorably, he once described himself as the "ideological love child" of John Howard and Bronwyn Bishop, a rather matronly Liberal backbencher.

He'll face a particularly hard job wooing female voters, many of whom reject his stance on abortion.

By electing Mr Abbott, many commentators think that the Liberals have entered a sort of twilight zone - that they risk becoming a fringe party.

One of the reasons that Mr Rudd ousted Mr Howard at the last federal election was because of the former prime minister's repeated refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

And, if called, a snap election would likely come at the end of what's expected to be particularly severe bushfire season - which environmentalists will cite as offering further evidence of global warming in what is already the world's driest continent.

Somewhat apologetically, I'll end with a cliche. But at least it's a seasonal cliche. By installing Mr Abbott, have the turkeys just voted for Christmas?

UPDATE, Wednesday 2 December, 0530 GMT: So the answer to the question "Will Abbott's victory trigger an election?" is "not for the time being". By a vote of 41 to 33, the Senate voted down the government's emissions trading scheme today, and since it is the second time that the upper house has rejected the measure it hands the government the trigger for a snap, double dissolution election - that's to say, all the MPs in the House of Representatives and all the Senators in the upper house would have to seek re-election.

But the prime minister hasn't proved trigger-happy. In the absence of Kevin Rudd, who was still on his way back from Washington, the Acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard has announced that the ETS bill will be introduced for the third time in February, when parliament reconvenes after the Christmas break. The festive period, she said, would give the "calmer heads" in the Liberal Party time to consider their position and act in the national interest. It rules out a snap election.

It's a smart political strategy, for it will highlight and possibly deepen the fissures within Liberal ranks between those who think the party has no other choice but to support an ETS - John Howard proposed an ETS, after all - and the climate change sceptics and deniers. Labor is hoping that a weak Liberal party will be even be even more fragile by the time that parliament resumes. And, remember, that trigger can be pulled at any time the government wants.

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