It has always seemed to me that Australia has been situated in three different locations over the years, and has apparently been bodily lifted up and moved elsewhere as time has gone by.

Location One   I believe there is no doubt that Australia was originally situated on the Far Side of the Moon. Everything seems to point to an apparently ultralunar location. Over my lifetime, at home or abroad, during all those Location One years I’d never met any Australians, never heard of any in the newspapers, never saw any in the entertainment world (I only recently found out Errol Flynn was from Hobart, Tasmania) and somehow doubted if any really existed. Well, at the turn of the 20C there was Dame Nellie Melba the opera singer, after whom both Peach Melba and Melba Toast were named. Perhaps Melba and Flynn came down on the occasional space ship from their ultralunar habitat.

But then there was all that fauna--kangaroos, wallabies, koalas. Maybe there were more unusual animals like that than there were people? I remember being in elementary school and the teacher saying that we were going to take a special field trip to the Bronx Zoo (also known at the time as the New York Zoological Park) because of two very special and highly unusual visitors from Australia, a duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed, egg-laying mammal, the venomous platypus (which I now learn is the animal symbol of New South Wales) and another egg-laying mammal, a spine-covered, slender-snouted, ant-eating, hedgehog-resembling echidna (i.KID.na). Although the entire class was excited in anticipation of seeing these two creatures, as it turned out, we had to be satisfied with seeing other zoo inhabitants instead, since neither platypus nor echidna ever emerged from its burrow--not once--leaving us kids with an abiding suspicion that Australians might be rather inhospitable to visitors in general.

Location Two   Then, starting a mere few decades ago there was a fundamental sea change, and the entire situation moved from the sublime to the ridiculous. Australia, as I understand it, was lifted up and bodily moved to its second location, this time in the Pacific. Not where you think, but into the northeast Pacific, directly off the California coast. As a matter of fact, it located itself so close so that the Catalina ferry, going from Long Beach to Avalon on Catalina, just extended its regular route one more stop after Avalon to dock at Circular Quay in Sydney Harbour.

The apparent reason the Australians arranged this canny move was so that it would be so much easier for Australian troops to land on California beaches, such as at Malibu, Santa Monica, and Venice. The troops were only temporarily distracted by all the thonged people skating next to Venice Beach, and then moved on to their real goal. This was not a political move, since they had no interest in taking over any government entities. Their goal was to move from Santa Monica up Santa Monica Boulevard inland and take over Hollywood and surrounding areas. That done, they were then essentially in control of the US film and entertainment industry, expanding from there to New York to take over Broadway entertainment--and then the world.

(There is a rumor/rumour that Australia also had a secondary location in the Atlantic just off of Long Island in order to take over Broadway, but I do not believe this. My opinion is that the Broadway invasion and THAT subsequent takeover occurred as a satellite operation from the original Location Two off the California coast.)

The change in recent decades in the US and around the world since Location Two has been nothing less than phenomenal. If the Australians thought that by dint of raw talent they could take over the world, or at least the entertainment world--well, apparently they were right. And this Australian Drang nach Osten / Drive to the East from the Pacific across North America and beyond has not only affected entertainment--I see it all the time in the streets.

Three events that really happened recently: last week, coming off a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, I met a woman who was looking for Broadway; I helped her, but she was from San Francisco, so it was no big deal, and nothing unusual. I’m used to that. A few days earlier, on my street corner, a couple was struggling with a subway map. It turns out they were Italians from Bologna, so I walked them over to the subway where I was going anyway. Also nothing out of the ordinary. But last month, I got on the subway, and a woman with two teenage sons was wondering about long waits to go to the Statue of Liberty. I told her a quick solution is just to take the free Staten Island ferry and they’d get a great view of the Statue as a reasonable alternative. When I asked her where they were from as we chatted all the way to Times Square, they turned out to be from Melbourne. Aussies! Coming out of the woodwork! Wandering around underground New York! As Steve Irwin would have said: Crikey!

Beyond that, the US has become in recent decades much more Australia-conscious, although perhaps sometimes in pseudo-Australian ways. In 1988 the informal restaurant chain Outback Steakhouse was founded, not in Australia, but in Tampa, Florida, where it still remains centered. Contrary to popular belief, it serves American cuisine that is “Australia-inspired”. Even its signature dish, the very Australian-sounding Bloomin’ Onion, consists of a breaded, deep-fried, and very American, vidalia onion (growing area restricted to parts of Georgia), cut to resemble a flower and served with a dipping sauce. Although other restaurants imitate the dish, it’s a registered brand of Outback Steakhouse and is little-known, if at all, in Australia. Still, it’s a good-hearted gesture toward the Aussies. However, how’s this for cross-cultural ties: the very American, pseudo-Australian, Outback Steakhouse has branches in 21 countries--including Australia!

Aussie Celebrities Sown Hither, Thither, and Yon   From next-to-none to numerous Australian names in the entertainment world almost seemed to happen overnight, a fact that seems to corroborate Australia’s new location directly off the California coast. While not attempting to summarize all Australian entertainers who have become celebrated across North America and beyond in recent decades, I will mention a selected few who come to mind that have become anything from recognizable at the very least to outright household names.

Actress Dame Judith Anderson was from Adelaide. Actress Zoë Caldwell is originally from Melbourne. Actor Peter Finch (born UK) was raised in Sydney. Singer-Actress Olivia Newton-John (born UK) was raised in Melbourne. Opera singer Dame Joan Sutherland, from Sydney, followed in the footsteps of Dame Nellie Melba, who was from near Melbourne. Tennis player Evonne Goolagong, an indigenous Australian, is from New South Wales. Cyril Ritchard, best-known for his portrayal of Captain Hook, was from Sydney. Actress Nicole Kidman (born US) was raised near Sydney. Actress Judy Davis is from Perth.

Also from Perth was the late, gifted actor Heath Ledger, shown here as Ennis Del Mar, a role for which he will be particularly remembered, along with Jake Gyllenhaal in Ang Lee’s 2005 Brokeback Mountain, a role for which Ledger was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar.

Actor Russell Crowe (born NZ) stands out in my mind particularly for his 2001 portrayal of the schizophrenic mathematician John Nash in A Beautiful Mind.

The late Steve Irwin that I just mentioned, who was from the Melbourne area, was a conservationist, wildlife expert and television personality easily recognizable by his khaki shorts and outfit, not even to mention: Crikey!

Paul Hogan, from northern New South Wales, first became visible in the US as a non-celebrity actor when he made a series of advertisements shown there between 1984 and 1990 promoting the Australian tourism industry. The best-known of these includes the famous “shrimp on the barbie” phrase, which has since come to be often used in the US to make humorous reference to Australian pop culture, and which even became the title of a 1990 movie. Those four words became much better known than the actual slogan used, which was “Come and say G‘day”. The complete invitation to stop by ended with “I’ll slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you”, but is chock full of irony. While “barbie” is Aussie slang for a barbecue, the word “shrimp” is a very US word to refer to what the rest of the English-speaking world, including Australia, refers to as a prawn. “Shrimp” was used to avoid the confusion that would have been caused by “prawn on the barbie”, and which would have defeated the purpose of enticing Americans to Australia. Of course total Americanization would have been “shrimp on the barbecue”, so the final decision is in reality very much an Australian-American hybrid.

But then a sensation in the US was caused in 1986 by Paul Hogan’s portrayal of “Crocodile” Dundee in the film of the same name, followed by two sequels. By the time the film came out, his face was recognizable from the commercials, and he finally did become a celebrity. In fact, Hogan, with friends and other cast members, privately funded the film about an Outback hunter in New York City, and Hogan wrote the screenplay, for which he was nominated for an Oscar. It became the most successful Australian film ever, and Hogan won a Golden Globe Best Acting award. Still, as with the shrimp/prawn issue, there are some “language” issues involved here. Two separate versions of the film were made, one for the domestic Australian market and one for the American/International market. The major difference is that the domestic version uses so much local and rural Australian slang as to be totally incomprehensible to the outsider, so the alternate version had to be made with more easily understood vocabulary, to some extent making it almost a translation. I’d love to hear and see some examples of this.

I’ve been talking more about the cinema, but I have a few names, perhaps less well-known, that have been popping up on television. With all due respect to the excellent talents involved, and continuing tongue-in-cheek, I’ve been finding more Aussies on US TV than if I’d been playing the arcade game Whac-a-Mole. Dispose of one, and three more heads pop up. I’ve taken to checking bios on Wikipedia after I see someone new on television whose performance I really enjoy. Last year I liked the program Without a Trace, particularly Poppy Montgomery’s work. I checked her bio and Wham! she’s from Sydney, not that you’d tell from her speech patterns. When The Mentalist had its début I liked Simon Baker’s work. Wham! he’s from Launceston, Tasmania, and grew up in NSW and Sydney. (I note that on the program, which is filmed in California, he plays an investigator in California, which seems to confirm my hypothesis of Oz having been located during this period off the California coast. Perhaps he commuted by the Sydney-Avalon-Long Beach ferry.)

Finally there was the performer that had just a one-shot guest appearance as a judge on Law and Order (as so many actors do). I really liked his judge-like quality, so I zipped back to the beginning of the program (I always DVR anything before watching) to find that his name is Alan Dale. It seems he’s originally from New Zealand, and at age 32 went to Australia, where he subsequently became famous in the five-day-a-week TV series Neighbours. He was in it for the first eight of its 25 years, but then became so typecast in Australia that he moved to the US in 2000, where he’s been working ever since. We’re lucky to get him, but it’s Whac-a-Mole all over again.

Let’s move over to Broadway with Geoffrey Rush from Queensland, but only after we mention his 1996 Australian film Shine, for which he won a Best Actor Oscar. Telescoping his many achievements as with everyone else here, in 2009 Rush made his Broadway debut (!!) in Exit the King, a play that won multiple awards, but included for Rush the Tony for Best Actor in a Play. In addition, the production came over from the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne. (!!!)

If you think just the Broadway theater was taken over, think again. The Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), in downtown Brooklyn and walkable from my high school, Brooklyn Tech, is the preeminent venue in Brooklyn. Its presentations are of the highest order. For example, the only time Beverly and I went there was when the Comédie Française (!!!) came over to present the hilarious 1907 Georges Feydeau farce (his most famous play) Une puce à l’oreille/A Flea in Her Ear>. Anyway, this past fall, none other than the Sydney Theatre Company (!!!) filled BAM for six weeks with a production of A Streetcar Named Desire with Cate Blanchett (from Melbourne) playing the quintessential American role of Blanche Dubois. It was described as “one of the hottest tickets of the winter”, and resulted in people on the sidewalk outside BAM trying to buy tickets, something that more usually only happens on Broadway. Blanchett is, with her husband, artistic director at the Sydney Theatre Company, and, after the limited BAM run, she was begged (!!!) to bring the production to Broadway later in the season, which couldn’t happen due to scheduling difficulties.

Although it may seem like moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, there’s no doubt that we have to mention Dame Edna Everage, shown here in “her” native Melbourne in a department store ad. She is, of course, the alter ego of Barry Humphries, who Dame Edna refers to as her “manager”. Dame Edna has appeared on TV and on Broadway several times, including early this year with cabaret performer Michael Feinstein. Dame Edna’s fictional biography on Wikipedia is worth a glance for a laugh, but I’ll just mention that she started out in 1955 as Mrs Norm Everage, a name involving two plays on words. She was supposed to be at that time an “average Australian housewife”. Note the pronunciation among some Australians, New Zealanders, and South Africans of “met” for “mat” and “bed” for “bad”, you’ll see that Everage is really “average”, one that fits into the “norm”. Only later did that simpler persona morph into the formidable and outrageous Dame Edna.

One entertainer who did well in North America, but never reached the same rank of celebrity there as he did at home in Australia was the late, flamboyant Peter Allen, also writer of many songs. He was from Tenterfield in northern New South Wales, and one of his well-known works is Tenterfield Saddler, about his grandfather, who couldn’t understand or accept the suicide of his son, Peter’s father. The Tenterfield Saddlery was classified by the Australian National Trust in 1972. Recently, Allen’s story has become intertwined with the following individual’s interpretation of him.

We finally come to the man who has done it all, film, musical theater, television, and in top form to boot, and may end up going away with all the prizes, Hugh Jackman, from Sydney. I was never involved with his Wolverine films, but first spotted him in 2001 with his portrayal of a 19C duke in New York (!!!) in Kate and Leopold. I also saw on PBS the 1998 West End version of Oklahoma!, and his portrayal of Curly was seminal. (Cate takes Blanche Dubois, and Hugh takes Curly? Will there be anything left?) This video of a 2008 concert version is clearer than the video of the West End production, as Jackman sings Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.

Jackman seems totally involved in the bicoastal entertainment world. Early last year he hosted the Oscar ceremony. I was sailing on the Victoria then, and only saw his opening number later on YouTube. Later last year, he appeared again on Broadway in a two-man play. But for three years, 2003, 2004, and 2005 he hosted the Tony Awards on Broadway, with the 2005 event getting him an Emmy for his performance.

But his most spectacular musical success was his appearance as Peter Allen in The Boy from Oz, and the sound you hear is me kicking myself for having missed it entirely. (If he ever brings it back, I’ll be first on line.) This performance got him the 2004 Tony for Best Actor in a Musical. He reprised and slightly modified his performance at the 2004 Tony Awards at Radio City Music Hall where channels Peter Allen singing Not the Boy Next Door in a tour de force performance.

On a more down-to-earth note, I also have found a pair of recordings of Tenterfield Saddler. It’s particularly interesting in that in the first part, Hugh Jackman sings it, with illustrations of Peter Allen’s life, including additional history. It is then followed at 3:40 by the reverse, an original recording by Peter Allen, with pictures of Hugh Jackman in the show.

Now go back to either 2:06 (Jackman) or 5:30 (Allen) and listen again to the words dealing with Peter Allen’s wanderings: “The grandson of George has been all round the world and lived no special place.” You also might want to look at 6:41 which shows Jackman evidently singing, but on the Australian arena tour only “I Still Call Australia Home”, a 1980 Peter Allen song of more local significance. But that gift of Peter Allen to Australia shouldn’t be missed, as it’s become a standard, describing an expatriate’s--or a wanderer’s--longing for home. This is the Outback Singers’ rendition of I Still Call Australia Home. You’ll recognize most things, but I’ll point out Uluru/Ayres Rock at 0:47 and 2:34, the Spirit of Tasmania at 2:06, and the Twelve Apostles on the Great Ocean Road at 2:48. I’m expecting to see these, and take the overnight sailing to Tasmania.

Location Three   As I understand it, once Australia conquered the world, it was picked up one final time and moved from off California to its present location, diagonally across the Pacific, and slipped in neatly between Indonesia and Antarctica. I believe it was done primarily since at that location, while the east coast still abuts the Pacific, the west coast now abuts the Indian Ocean, so that now the name of Australia’s iconic transcontinental train, the Indian Pacific, makes complete sense. Of course, it lengthens my trip to get there, but it will be worth it. Maybe after all these years I’ll finally get to see my platypus and echidna--and they even might be more sociable to visitors.