Quotes About Australia

We have much to contribute to the world; ways of knowing and being that are going to be essential to everyone's survival on our planet. As true citizens of Australia, properly acknowledged in our constitution, we can look forward not only to improving our own lot, but helping Australia contribute to the well-being of all the world's peoples.

You are not prime minister of Australia because of some kind of process of divine selection. You are prime minister of Australia through the gift of the Australian people.

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.

There's a sort of absurdity to Australia and the so-called New World nations. I sensed it all the time growing up in Western Australia, which is really remote.

I think I made some mistakes, in different areas, but it's great to be working in a show again now, many years down the track. I have worked in many other different shows in Australia and I've been able to learn from my mistakes. I'm lucky that I made those mistakes early on in Australia, and I definitely won't make them again in the States, but you've got to learn that stuff.

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.

Fantastically, Australia is still the lucky country. We have the flawed but necessary gift of democracy. Currently there is a debate about whether there is racism in Australia. There is racism in every country in the world. Relatively speaking, we are tolerant of one another. We have a large and giving land and, if you haven't seen its beauty, you haven't seen a beauty precious to the earth.

I was born in North London, migrated to Australia when I was four. So when I first came to Australia people saw me as a little English boy. Over the years that feeling of being a little English boy diminished and I felt much more Australian.

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.

When you think of how much violence, how much blood... how much has been destroyed to create the great nations, America, Australia, Britain, Germany, France, Belgium - even India, Pakistan. Having destroyed so much to make them, we must have nuclear weapons to protect them - and climate change to hold up their way of life... a two-pronged annihilation project.

The last thing Australia needs right now is instability and uncertainty.

Australia has a thing where apparently it's fine for me to dress up as an Asian woman. No one has questioned that.

I want to see an end to sovereign risk questions over Australia.

The President of the United States ordered me to break through the Japanese lines and proceed from Corregidor to Australia for the purpose, as I understand it, of organizing the American offensive against Japan, a primary objective of which is the relief of the Philippines. I came through and I shall return.

I was always nervous about coming back to Australia which was a complete hangover of the days when I left when ballet was not accepted, when I was not accepted, when I was considered a freak for wanting to be a ballet dancer. And, to be 100% honest, I rather dreaded coming back.

I've been to Australia a couple of times, but never to the north or the centre. I would love to see Ayers Rock.

It's definitely different in the States. Americans are much different people compared to us. We're much more laid back. I itch to get back to Australia every summer because it's so fast paced there and so stressful.

I've been lucky to travel through quite a bit of Europe and Australia, but I would love to do Asia and South America and South Africa.

The death of Malcolm Fraser underwrites a great loss to Australia... I always thought Malcolm would be around a lot longer. I must say, I wished he had been.

The best hope for Australia is the ballot box and good education.

In fact, soon after that [South African sanctions], I was going on an official visit to the UK and Margaret Thatcher instructed every minister to clear the decks of any outstanding matters between us - Australia and the Brits. And she went out of her way to make sure that that was as successful a visit as it possibly could be.

I also know Patrick White in Australia, both personally and as a writer, and Salman Rushdie in India.

We had a level of tariffs of about five per cent. Now a lot of those will go, most of them will go over time, some of them immediately. Now that means that electronic goods and other things, white goods, coming into Australia, will be cheaper for our community. It also means in many cases that the inputs used by our high-end manufacturers to make a final product are also coming in cheaper than they otherwise would - so it makes those manufacturers more competitive.

The strongest initiative that government can take to ensure Australia is prepared for population ageing, is to maintain a strong economy, and a secure nation.

Labor is at its best when we are the party of ideas and action - ideas that empower the powerless and actions that build a better Australia for the long term.

Now, I know that there are some Aboriginal people who aren’t happy with Australia Day. For them it remains Invasion Day. I think a better view is the view of Noel Pearson, who has said that Aboriginal people have much to celebrate in this country’s British Heritage.

I have no problem with my age. I've been acting for 50 years in Australia and everyone knows my age because I started at 15. So there was never any point in lying about it.

Australia seems to strike a balance between big and small. It's big enough to have that diversity, but not so big that it disintegrates into something that is not connected.

Never was a continent naturally so clean, and made so dirty, as Australia. There was not an animal pest, scarcely a vegetable pest; fools and the old world supplied them all.

My list would be Russia, Morocco, Turkey, and South Africa I'm doing which is somewhere I've wanted to go, Australia, Japan maybe, and China, if I have the energy to go and play at all those places.

Americans are the most generous country on the planet. I've worked in Europe, I've worked in Australia. There is no where else where you get absolutely no attitude for being a foreigner. If you do your job well, they embrace you.

Australia played some good cricket, but they have forgotten how to win.

Australia is not very exclusive. On the visa application they still ask if you've been convicted of a felony - although they are willing to give you a visa even if you haven't been.

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.

Australia is this former British colony at the foot of Asia. We've been involved - we've been in lockstep with America in every battle you have fought for a century. We were there in Vietnam. We were there in Korea. We were there in Iraq. We were there in Afghanistan. We are slightly apprehensive about the rise of China.

Glenn McGrath had a reasonable career in Australia.

I LOVE Australia! Its like my second home.

I suppose I was very disappointed that I was injured during training for Korea. In fact, I had an argument with a grenade and it won, and consequently I was forced to come back to Australia for twelve months.

It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can only come from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame. Do you know how sometimes on very fine days the sun will shine with a particular intensity that makes the most mundane objects in the landscape glow with an unusual radiance, so that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time.

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

I was fortunate enough to visit a lot of beautiful places around the world. The most astonishing and memorable experiences were my trips to Africa and Australia.

I think I've actually benefited from Australia being a kind of combination of both British and American culture. We kind of got the best of both British and American television and books, science fiction and fantasy, and so on. So I'm familiar with a lot of, for example, American books and television that a British author of my generation might not be.

I got to work with [Carlos] Santana, who's been my idol forever. When I was 18, I got up with him in Australia and jammed with him. That was an amazing moment because I got up in front of my hometown crowd.

Then Mission Impossible brought me to Australia and that was great because I fell in love.

I feel really qualified to write about Australia.

For the Amahuaca, the Koyukon, the Apache, and the diverse Aboriginal peoples of Australia - as for numerous other indigenous peoples - the coherence of human language is inseparable from the coherence of the surrounding ecology, from the expressive vitality of the more-than-human terrain. It is the animate earth that speaks; human speech is but a part of that vaster discourse.

Australia was once a leader in taking global warming seriously. The former PM [Kevin Rudd] called it 'greatest moral challenge of our time'. But in the past couple of years the national consensus has been eroded and Australians are being encouraged by the polluters and their mates in Parliament to forget it was ever mentioned. It's heartbreaking.

Hostility towards China distorted Australia's international affairs for 20 years until 1972, but reconciliation with China 30 years ago had produced a quarter century of constructive bipartisan relations with our region and the world, unmatched in Australian history.