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landscape gardening company, devotes much time to his favourite hobby of growing orchids, and readily admits that he too is becoming a trifle weary of the well-hyped ‘gorilla’ image. Sadly, these stereotypes are often the only images of Australia promulgated abroad. Currently being promoted is a huge ‘Buy Australian’ campaign, and many marketing consultants are trying hard to gainsay the predominantly ‘ocker’ impression created by such advertisements as Paul Hogan’s amusing Fosters’ lager series, and the Castlemaine XXXX publicity, which is now taking a very definite turn for the better!
    The phenomenal box-office success of the film
Crocodile Dundee
, where Hogan plays a crocodile-hunting, beer-downing rough diamond from the Outback, will do little to help those suave sophisticates of the PR world in their ‘Australia really is a terribly civilised place’ efforts. For the majority of people who have never actually made it Down Under, the Hogans, the Sir Les Pattersons, and the ‘Terror’ Thompkinses represent the stereotype Australian they far prefer to believe in.
    The flight from Adelaide to Melbourne does not take long, which is just as well. Neither does Thommo’s book. It took nearly as long to read it as it must have done to write it.
    The Melbourne Cup, which falls traditionally on the first Tuesday of November, is without doubt the high spot of Melbourne society’s social calendar. Imagine Ascot, Wimbledon, Henley and a royal wedding all rolled into one, and you’re beginning to get the idea of the Melbourne Cup. The actual Cup day is a state holiday in Victoria, of which Melbourne is the capital, but Melbourne itself is enveloped in frenzied Cup fever for an entire carnival week. To give you an inkling – over the four days’ horse-racing this year (Derby Day, Cup Day, Oaks Day and the Ampole Stakes), over AUS$120 million were wagered. (You may reckon on about two Australian dollars to the pound sterling.) Other items of Melbourne Cup expenditure include AUS$12 million spent on ladies’ finery: a more modest AUS$250,000 spent on men’s clothing; AUS$5 million spent on rented marquees, car parks, cocktail and private parties; AUS$250,000 on flowers; and AUS$25 million on alcohol (including 100,000 cases of champagne). The Melbourne Cup, as they would say in Ireland, is good crack.
    I was invited to the Cup by Channel 9 television personality, Mike Willesee. Willesee, who, according to aforementioned Channel, ‘almost invented current affairs’, is an Australian amalgam of Terry Wogan, David Frost and Sir Robin Day. His early evening chat show is nearly always top of the ratings and no one really knows whether he is going to be acerbic, sympathetic, relentless or generous. His great specialities are hauling double-talking politicians over the media coals, or extracting uncomfortable facts from shady business men, and he is compulsive viewing. His researchers also deploy tireless efforts to net international megastars for the programme, but sometimes even they screw it up. So it was that Phil and I were on the programme.
    Our appearance was courtesy of a satellite link-up while we were still in England and it was, by all extremely biased accounts, an entertaining performance. I personally cannot remember; it was very early in the morning. Afterwards Phil raced off to Lord’s to meet the 9 am deadline for delivering his contract to the TCCB. One of the strictures of the contract was that players would not be allowed to give radio or television interviews, and so Phil simply signed the contract
after
appearing on
Willesee.
Two weeks later, however, he was severely reprimanded and almost dropped from the tour party for our second Edmonds duo, an interview this time with David Frost on
Wogan.
We did a little double act. According to his contract, Phil was not allowed to talk about the cricket, and so to circumvent the letter of the law, he pretended telepathically to read my mind. It was a