Quotes About Australia

I had always been fascinated by the whole idea that Australia was this different ecology and that when rabbits and prickly pears and other things from Europe were introduced into Australia, they ran amok.

I contracted malaria in rural Mozambique. I was a youth ambassador for Australia. For a year after high school, you give positive speeches about Australia and as part of it I traveled to lots of different countries.

Yet the small house, probably more than anything else that man has done, has made the face of Australia and to an extent the faces of Australians. Australia is the small house. Ownership of one in a fenced allotment is as inevitable and unquestionable a goal of the average Australian as marriage.

Even before the discovery of copper South Australia had turned the corner.

No one knows, incidentally, why Australia's spiders are so extravagantly toxic; capturing small insects and injecting them with enough poison to drop a horse would appear to be the most literal case of overkill. Still, it does mean that everyone gives them lots of space.

Probably my mother's life was prolonged beyond that of a long-lived family by her coming to Australia in middle life; and if I ever had any tendency to consumption, the climate must have helped me.

To the former child migrants, who came to Australia from a home far away, led to believe this land would be a new beginning, when only to find it was not a beginning, but an end, an end of innocence - we apologise and we are sorry. To the mothers who lost the maternal right to love and care for their child - we apologise, and we are sorry.

I was born in Norwich in 1946, and educated in England, Zimbabwe, and Australia, before my family settled in North Wales.

I understand that artists and critics make a big deal over the Grammys. But when I go to my shows and I'm selling out arenas in London, and when I'm in Australia and Japan, there aren't any Grammys there. There are human beings who I've touched. There are human beings who are inspired by me, who I love dearly. And that's what my career is based on.

I'm popular in the United States and I'm popular in England. England is just more concentrated. The people are closer together. Venues are closer together. Many albums of mine have been popular in England, but, no hit singles. All the hit singles I had were before I went to England. So, I'm not necessarily more popular in England, I'm just popular in England, and more so for my performances than hit records. But, I enjoy doing concert halls all over America, England, Scotland and Australia.

I am in favour of the notion of Australia as an immigrant society

Whether you go to Turkey or Mexico, China or Australia, find time to involve yourself with the people you're dealing with.

I had a good personal relationship with Lee Kuan Yew and I used him, in the sense, that he... He made a statement in 1980, and he said in that statement that, "If Australia keeps going the way it is, it will finish up the poor, white trash of Asia." And he was right, because we were just going backwards.

I never really wondered about getting from London to Lahaul. It all seemed such a natural progression. In London I felt I was in the wrong place and wanted to leave. I'd thought about going to Australia or New Zealand. It's nothing against England, but I knew I wasn't meant to be there.

I've seen it [Australia] go from a lot of small towns to big towns, but I think it has found its identity in all this time... it's a very special country, I could easily live here.

If you try to come to Australia by boat, even if we think you are the best person in the world, even if you are a Nobel Prize winning genius, we will not let you in.

We live in a world of terrorism where evil acts are being regularly perpetrated in the name of your faith. And because it is your faith that is being invoked as justification for these evil acts, it is your problem. You can't wish it away, or ignore it, just because it has been caused by others. Instead, speak up and condemn terrorism, defend your role in the way of life that we all share here in Australia.

I think we should stop drinking bottled water. There's no need to be drinking it if you're living in western communities. The other thing I would suggest - and I feel it particularly here in Australia, because we have very severe drought - is to be aware of how much you're actually consuming. Right now, it's very rainy, but that doesn't mean we can drink all the water we want. Conserving and constantly thinking, "how much do I really need?" should definitely be part of our vocabulary.

In Australia I was seen as somebody who did only very modern, contemporary stuff. Then as soon as I went overseas I did two period pieces so it was like, 'When are you going to get out of the corsets?' And I was thinking I just got into them!

As nations we should also commit afresh to righting past wrongs. In Australia we began this recently with the first Australians - the oldest continuing culture in human history. On behalf of the Australian Parliament, this year I offered an apology to indigenous Australians for the wrongs they had suffered in the past.

Sometime, it will be found that people can be changed only by changing their surroundings. It is alleged that, at least ninety-five percent of the criminals transported from England to Australia and other penal colonies, became good and useful citizens in a new world.

There are two kinds of systems in the world. There are many-party systems and there are two-party systems. And our English cousins, both England, Canada, Australia, India, tend to have majority rule elections, rather than proportional elections and that tends to lead them to have two sort of competing parties. So in England, you know, it's been, you know, since the '20's, that anybody other than Labor or the Conservatives have formed a government and gotten a Prime Minister in the Cabinet, and so on.

The Government's mission is to build a strong and fair Australia capable of meeting the new challenges of the 21st century.

It so happened that I was on a German sailing vessel on the way to Australia when the ship was captured, and on the high seas I was made prisoner by the French.

If you want to appeal to everyone, you can't do a world tour and expect black people to show up at every date - when you're in Australia, when you're in Dubai, when you're in Indonesia.

When I went to Australia, I went shark diving. It was crazy. It was called 'extreme' shark diving because even though we were in cages, we literally could touch the sharks swimming by. They were huge and I'm terrified of sharks. Then I went to a wildlife park and held kangaroos. That was nice.

An ongoing challenge for Australia is ensuring equity of access to technology. Since the decline in federal funding, many schools are reverting to bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs and this puts the onus back on families to fund devices.

I race historic muscle cars back in Australia, and that's my hobby. And I try to race home as soon as I've finished a movie but don't tell anyone.

I was in Australia in about 1996 when I played some acoustic guitar for some guys at a studio down there. They were pretty happy with it, and mentioned doing an album, so about a year later I met some people who were interested in recording.

There was a band in Australia named Midnight Oil, and they were a very, very political, and they literally hit you over the head with a hammer. U2 sometimes can hit you over the head with a rubber hammer.

I read the Phantom comics when I was in Australia shooting 'Dead Calm'' and when one of the crew told me that there were plans for a movie, I went for it. That was in 1987 and I told (producer) Graham Burke I was going to be the Phantom. We had a laugh about that recently because you usually get what you deserve, not what you desire, and that is especially true in Hollywood!

Australia is a huge rest home, where no unwelcome news is ever wafted on to the pages of the worst newspapers in the world.

Two-up is Australia's very own way of parting a fool and his money.

But the people of the disaster area fundamentally needed to understand that the rest of Australia had noticed their misery and their stoicism and their intense sense of community and determination to arise from the sodden wreckage of their homes, and that Australians would dig deep to help. I helped to describe the community ethos which quickly triumphed over incipient despair. It is this mobilisation of the unifying spirit that thrills us all, even as we mourn.

God bless America, God Save the Queen, God defend New Zealand and thank Christ for Australia.

We haven't had a recession for 25 years in Australia. It's partly because of our trade with China.

Obviously all of us have thought about Vietnam, particularly in my generation in Australia that were part of conscription and fought there. Our friends came back, forever changed. So there were a lot of questions.

AUSTRALIA, n. A country lying in the South Sea, whose industrial and commercial development has been unspeakably retarded by an unfortunate dispute among geographers as to whether it is a continent or an island.

I suppose, because I am a sportsman and travel all over Australia, I see every day Australians doing small and large and often unnoticed deeds; many times I thought how nice it would be for them to be recognised, so I hope somehow that in receiving this honour that I represent these people.

The libel laws in Australia are a lot tougher than they are in America.

Whoever authorized the evolution of the spiders of Australia should be summarily dragged out into the street and shot.

Malcolm Bradbury made the point, and I don't know whether it's a valid one or not, that the real English at the moment is not the English spoken in England or in America or even in Canada or Australia or New Zealand. The real English is the English which is a second language, so that it's rather like Latin in the days of the Roman Empire when people had their own languages, but had Latin in order to communicate.

Adelaide was the first city in Australia, if not in the world, to provide for the health and recreation of all its citizens.

Every country is like a particular type of person. America is like a belligerent, adolescent boy, Canada is like an intelligent, 35 year old woman. Australia is like Jack Nicholson.

I lived in a suitcase for a year, and then a relationship brought me to New York for about four months, then I lived in Melbourne. Then I moved back to Gothenburg because the immigrant laws are strict for both Australia and the U.S., and I would have to marry someone to get into those countries. But I wouldn't really be able to get involved in a sham marriage without being able to tell anyone about it.

Going home to Australia, it's good to get home, but it's kind of bad too because you get used to that way of life again and you have to come back to America.

My ideal registration system would be an opt-out one, where every single person is registered once they turn 18. In Australia, I’m told, everyone is registered to vote and you pay a fine if you don’t vote.

It is the misfortune of contemporary leaders, across the whole spectrum of Australian life, that the community's demand for strong leadership is growing in direct proportion to our lack of confidence in ourselves. The end of this century is an unusually difficult time to be a leader in Australia.