David Fickling makes a few sound points here
about the quirks
of the Australian character, but there are a couple of errors that suggest
he might be new to the Australian beat. For one thing, Ned Kelly was more the
bank-robbing than the sheep-shearing kind of larrikin. (I guess nowadays he’d
be thought of as a terrorist by some.) For another it’s a wee bit more than 200
miles from Brisbane to Sydney. These kinds of errors won’t happen once you’ve
been in the country long enough.

There’s something rather nice about having
one’s national identity be based around partying, even if it is grating to see
a conservative like Howard try and adopt that for his own image. In general I
think Australians are doing rather better at the pursuit of happiness thing
than Americans, despite not having deigned to adopt it as a constitutional
policy. I hadn’t realised quite how distinctive the larrikin figure is. Maybe
that’s why no one’s been able to figure out the point of the pranks
paper.

On a different topic, everyone who has
responded has had the same result in the vagueness
experiment. I can’t say what that is without biasing the experiment even
more than I already have, which would be a bad thing. So take the
experiment yourself and I’ll let you know how it all turns out.