Australia's remoteness is, for those of us who live there, possibly the greatest thing about it.
We are, in the main, undisturbed. There have been some exceptions; in the Second World War, Japanese planes bombed us in the north, and their midget submarines slunk into Sydney Harbor in the south, sinking a ferry. But generally, we are safe.
This is the way we like it. (Even if we had a rather awkward debate about whether a former prime minister actually called us “the arse end of the world.”) The author Bill Bryson probably spoke for a lot of Americans when he wrote, “Australia is mostly empty and a long way away. Its population is small and its role in the world consequently peripheral.” It is “stable and peaceful and good. It doesn’t need watching, and so we don’t.”
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