Do you know seven Australians?
Off the top of your noggin’ name seven Aussies—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven!
Geographically, Australia lies primarily northwest of New Zealand, across the Tasman Sea, but culturally those “Aussie, Aussie, Aussies! Oi! Oi! Oi!” are forever part of the Kiwi landscape, with many Kiwis choosing Australia as their first overseas trip.
As a Kiwi sports fan, I have a love/hate relationship with my trans-Tasman rellies. I love seeing them lose to any New Zealand team and hate…yeah, nah, “hate” is too strong a word…what’s that feeling you get when your head is delivered (think Medieval feasts with a pig’s head) on a silver platter with an apple in your mouth. Aggrieved?
The last time I was “aggrieved” was the 2015 Cricket World Cup Final at the MCG when Australia won the match by seven wickets. Slice of pork, anyone?
Anywho, a tip of the black jacaru to the following seven Australians:
1. Evonne Goolagong-Cawley: The first time I met an Aboriginal Australian was at Bruce McLaren Intermediate School. A trio of aborigine musicians visited our class and played their didgeridoos. The low-frequency hum was spellbinding. At the time, my sprog lexicon didn’t include words like “ethereal,” “eerie,” and “astral,” but I distinctly recall my soul going walkabout.
Growing up in the 1970s, the most famous aborigine I saw on the telly and heard adults chinwagging about was Ms. Goolagong-Cawley. She dominated women’s tennis in the 70s and early 80s, and was ranked as the number one female player in the world in 1971 by the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA). In her illustrious career, Goolagong-Cawley won 86 WTA singles titles, including seven singles majors, and seven doubles majors.
One of Australia’s eminent ambassadors, her post-tennis career involved founding The Evonne Goolagong Foundation “to give as many indigenous children the opportunity to be the best they can be.”
2. Shane Warne: “Warnie,” or “The King of Spin,” was an Australian rockstar—with a cricket ball. The King moniker was fitting as he was a master right-arm leg spin bowler.
Charismatic, good-looking with signature peroxided blonde hair and thick white zinc sunscreen smothered on his lower lip and nose, Warnie was quite the colourful chap both on and off the field (he was briefly engaged to stunner Elizabeth Hurley).
My favourite on-field cricket delivery was the “Gatting Ball,” also known as the “Ball of the Century.” It was Warnie’s very first delivery on English soil on June 4th, 1993, during the opening Test of the 1993 Ashes series at Old Trafford, Manchester.
Warnie drifted the ball toward Gatting, pitching it 12 to 18 inches outside leg stump. Gatting lunged forward with his left leg and bat to defend the ball. Upon hitting the ground, the ball spun across Gatting’s body and clipped the top of off stump.
Gatting was gobsmacked and looked lost (Yes, mate, you’re out. Back to the pavilion for an early tea break. Boo hoo).
Fortunately for fans around the globe, cricketing rockstar Shane Warne wasn’t a member of The 27 Club. He was a founding member of The 52 Club, leaving us on March 4th, 2022, while on holiday on the island of Ko Samui, Thailand.
Hailing from Victoria, Australia, it was pertinent that on March 30, 2022, a state memorial was held in his honour at the MCG. My sister Kim and I watched the televised event.
We wept.
3. Bob Hawke: I first heard about Mr. Hawke from my father. As a kid, many times over dinner, while I was executing my worst-to-best dinner strategy—peas, spuds, steak—Dad would bring up his name and croon the praises of the then president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU).
Mr. Hawke’s magnetic charisma certainly extended beyond the Australian Labor Party and his nation to include one orchardist in West Auckland, New Zealand. Dinner would conclude with the paternal presage: “One day this man will be prime minister of Australia.” And so he did: he became the 23rd prime minister of Australia from 1983-1991.
4. Judith Durham: Have you ever heard a kookaburra “sing?” I use the term generously for, technically, the kookaburra belongs to the kingfisher family and will never be mistaken for a songbird. And John Keats was never inspired to write “Ode to a Kookaburra.”
However, their vocal sound is unique—a signature chuckle, guffaw, hysterical laughter—that once heard will remain forever in your internal laugh track. I did whilst traveling on the Puffing Billy Railway through the Dandenong Ranges. Unlike the Bee Gees, I started a joke which started all the kookaburras laughing.
There is an Australian human songbird worthy of an ode: Ode to Judith Durham. For this vocal nightingale could sing.
I first heard her iconic voice on the radio in New Zealand, singing alongside her fellow Seekers—Athol Guy, Bruce Woodley, and Keith Potger. Their unmistakable sound became part of the soundtrack of my childhood, especially when “Georgy Girl” was frequently played.
With her signature vibrato and rich, warm tone, Judith had me whistling along and feeling instantly uplifted.
Over the years I also got to appreciate their other hits, “I’ll Never Find Another You,” “A World of Our Own,” and “The Carnival Is Over.”
In 1968, she left The Seekers to pursue a solo career, releasing albums For Christmas With Love, Gift of Song, and Climb Ev’ry Mountain.
Yes, Judith, you’re right: we know we’ll never find another you.
5. Francis Birtles (1881–1941) was a renowned Australian adventurer, filmmaker, bushman, photographer, and gold prospector—a true force of nature and trailblazer of long-distance cycling and motoring.
In 1909, he rode a bicycle from Fremantle to Sydney, setting a new cycling record for the continental crossing, and, being a bugger for punishment, followed that feat by embarking on a 14,000-mile journey around the perimeter of Australia in 1910-11.
Birtles became the first person to drive a car from England to Australia. He departed London on October 19, 1927, in a modified 1925 Bean 14 car nicknamed The Sundowner.
He drove via Europe, Egypt, Persia, India, Southeast Asia and Northern Australia before completing the arduous nine-month, sixteen-thousand-mile journey at the finishing point at the General Post Office on Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, on July 25, 1928.
The Sundowner is now held in the collection at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra.
Some of Birtles’s notable books are Lonely Lands: Through the Heart of Australia
and Battle Fronts of Outback. And films Into Australia’s Unknown and Across Australia in the Track of Burke and Wills.
6. Trevor Chappell: February 1st, 1981, the Underarm Incident took place between New Zealand and Australia in the third ODI cricket match at the MCG.
New Zealand only needed six runs off the final ball to tie the match; Kiwi batter Brian McKechnie needed to hit the final bowled ball over the boundary rope on the full, without it touching the ground.
Aussie yellow-fellow captain Greg Chappell directed his younger brother Trevor Chappell to bowl the ball underarm along the pitch, making it impossible for McKechnie to attempt a six-run shot.
McKechnie played the ball defensively and Australia “won.”
7. Mark Savage: I first met Aussie auteur, raconteur, pick your own root-morpheme-teur in Los Angeles on April 21, 1989, through Morgan, a mutual acting friend. We’d been doing extra work, and he asked if I wanted to meet an Australian filmmaker. I did. Mark and I hit it off right away; he spoke my lingo, dingo!
Over the years, I’ve come to regard Mark as a mate’s mate, the good in “G’day”—a here, there, everywhere fellow. His sweet mum could have named her son Marco Savage for he has the travel credentials—Stuart Island, Hong Kong, England, and rumour has it…the dark side of the moon.
Mark even wrote the foreword to my book Bubble ‘n’ Squeak: A Collection of Short Stories. And if you take a drop of truth serum with your morning cuppa—it’s the best writing in the book. And his films, lo!, are distinctly Savage Sinema. You’ve been warned.
Ok, enough with the adults; let’s explore Seven Little Australians, a novel by Ethel Turner.
I am a strong proponent of the idea that the opening line of any novel should set the tone of the narrative and encapsulate all that is to follow:
“Before you fairly start this story, I should like to give you a word of warning.”
What? Wait—a warning? I thought this was a novel, not the entrance to a construction site!
“If you imagine you are going to read of model children, with perhaps a naughtily inclined one to point a moral, you had better lay down the book immediately.”
Okay, this intrusive narrator has attitude. Throwing down the gauntlet to NOT read the story!
“Not one of the seven is really good, for the very excellent reason that Australian children never are.”
And that attitude, that assuredness, that authenticity is distinctly Australian.
Ethel Turner’s classic novel, published in 1894, is not about seven adventurous sprogs—but seven Australian kids, the Woolcot family. Her narrative distinguished itself from the British Victorian blueprint of the time, with its structured plots and clear moral lesson, instead focusing on life in Australia.
Ms. Turner was uniquely qualified to explore that distinction. She was born in 1870 in Doncaster, England, and moved to Australia with her family in 1879, where she was educated at Paddington Public School and Sydney Girls High School.
As I was transported into Turner’s tale, I kept imagining an alternative title: Seven Little Australians and Two New Zealand Sprogs. It recalled the trans-Tasman tomfoolery my sister Kim and I often engage in—antics that would make us feel right at home among the Woolcot brood.
So, who are these seven colourful characters that wreck havoc in a large house named “Misrule” on the shores of Port Jackson in Sydney?
Meg, 16, the naïve eldest sister.
Pip, 14, the eldest brother, and a troublemaker.
Judy, 13, the emotional heart and ringleader of the kids.
Nell, 10, a caring motherly figure despite her youth.
Bunty, 6, pudgy, and selfish.
Baby, 4, only a baby when the children’s mother passed.
General, the child of Esther and Captain Woolcot.
Orbiting this juvenile septet of spunkiness is Esther, the stepmother, who at 20 is barely older than Meg, and whose attempts at authority exert no gravitational pull on the children.
And Captain Woolcot, their father, is a strict martinet who provides the emotional tension that drives the story, as he endeavours to rule his house and offspring as he does his military subordinates.
The ingrained Victorian attitude, on display in Captain Woolcot toward children and their raising, casts a long shadow. In 1960s New Zealand, ever and anon, I would hear close rellies proclaim sanctimoniously, “Children should be seen and not heard,” and “spare the rod; spoil the child.”
I got off lightly.
In Chapter Twelve, “Swish, Swish,” we get an onomatopoeic presage of its contents. And Captain Woolcot delivers. When his six-year-old son Bunty confesses to laming Mazeppa, his father’s beloved horse with a cricket ball, he is neither spared nor spoiled by his dad and receives a whipping. With a heartfelt paternal promise, Captain Woolcot says, “I’ll thrash this mean spirit of lying and cowardice out of you, or kill you in the attempt.
Nothing like a good beating to foster obedience and forthrightness and advance parent-child intimacy.
Not all the children’s interactions with the family’s animals are harmful. In Chapter Three, Baby takes great delight in telling her father, “I’se washing the kitsies for you, and Flibberty-Gibbet” as she lathers the animals “up to their necks in a lather of soap water.”
And despite not owning a goat, idiomatically Judy has an innate ability to corral her dad’s one.
Despite the cruel examples of corporal punishment, Seven Little Australians is not Lord of the Flies. There is a tone of joyousness, rebellion, mischief, and an untamed spirit displayed by the Woolcot kids.
This is balanced by an unflinching dark, rugged realism that Turner displays toward the end of the novel.
In Chapter Twenty-One, “When the Sun Went Down,” the Australian landscape, which itself is a salient character, provides a backdrop for a collective “dark night of the soul” for the seven young Australians, a moment that will forever impact the family structure and the children’s relationship with their father.
It is worth noting that Seven Little Australians has been in continuous print for over a century. Like the continent down under, it’s worth a visit.
