Quotes About Australian

My mother and my father had very, very strong Scots accents. We were Australian, and in those days when I was young, I spoke with a much more of an Australian accent than I have now. However I knew that if I went to England to become an actor, which I was determined to, I knew that I had to get rid of the Australian accent. We were colonials, we were Down Under somewhere, we were those little people Over There. But I was determined to become an Englishman. So I did.

There is a very special place in the Australian psyche for sport. It is one of the pillars of the Australian way of life. You don't really understand what makes the Australian nation tick unless you understand the great affection Australians have for sport.

We need to tell Australian stories,we need to encourage and fund and present Australian work but we also need to understand that for a sophisticated, educated, culturally aware, modern nation we can't be parochial.

My commitment to the Republican movement was pure and simply patriotism, a love of Australia... a desire or passion that all of our national symbols should be unequivocally and unambiguously Australian.

No one cares about the Davis Cup. How many people know I won five Davis Cups and seven majors, but that I rarely played the Australian Open?

I must say that when I first learned of the existence of the Australian Greenhouse Office, I assumed it was responsible for supplying tomatoes to the Parliament House kitchen. But, no, as I soon learnt as industry minister, it was in fact a government funded redoubt of veritable soldiers in a war against carbon dioxide. The zealotry and obsessive passion of these warriors in the battle against the apparent evils of carbon dioxide remains a curiosity to me. After fighting these people for three years as industry minister, I really did wish they would just go away and grow tomatoes.

I'm not sure (whether Demetriou did anything wrong). I wouldn't have thought so ... but I'm not the ACC (Australian Crime Commission), I'm not ASADA. I'm a football coach trying to coach a game.

It's beyond belief that any Australian could be so stupid as to carry drugs into any country in Asia.

I asked many friends if Australian anti-intellectualism was still a living force and they all told me it was. If you are above average intelligence, hide this embarrassing fact.

My task, as a member of this parliament and a 30-year member of the Australian Labor Party, as its former leader, as its former foreign minister and its former prime minister, is to now throw my every effort in securing Julia Gillard's re-election as Labor prime minister at the next election.

The Australian Gerald Murnane, a genius on the level of Beckett, is known in Australia and Sweden but almost nowhere else. And I loved Reality Hunger, David Shields' recent novel take on the art of the novel.

The Family of Man is more than 3 billion strong. It lives in more than 100 nations. Most of its members are not white. Most of them are not Christians. Most of them know nothing about free enterprise or due process of law or the Australian ballot.

Spiders frighten me. In response to the spider alerts for Australia, please can the Australian government remove all spiders from Australia and blow them into outer space.

All the arts are predominantly national, and therefore the Australian Film Commission should be funding us. The battle gets more and more vicious each year.

Australian schools have cool uniforms. I wish I had to wear a woven straw hat for maths.

All cities have one key resource: the special abilities of the people who live in them. You just have to find out what they are. In the Australian city of Adelaide, for example, which is overshadowed by Sydney and Melbourne, I discovered a number of experts in the penal system. I advised them to work with these special skills.

I've been very physical my whole life. I went out hiking and camping for days in the Australian forest, and when I trained at drama school for three years, we did a whole lot on stage-fighting techniques. And I was a dancer from 5 to 18, so I have a memory for choreography.

You see someone on the street wearing an outfit and then it's on the cover of a magazine. I love. But, you know, I'm Australian, so I'm not too flashy or glitzy.

I actually found out about Ugg on a trip to Australia, which I guess is where they were born themselves. Everyone was wearing them there, kind of slightly ahead of when they caught on globally. This was in 2002 or so. Just after I left sixth form I was modeling and my best mate was Australian so I went over there to visit her. That was my introduction to the brand.

It's a fun day, a day which kicks off the start of our tour, it's got great tradition - Australian cricketers just love tradition - and it's been a really pleasant day.

Our South Australian farmers left their holdings in the hands of their wives and children too young to take with them, but almost all of them returned to grow grain and produce to send to Victoria.

Including everyone in the economic, wealth-creating life of the nation is today the best way for Labor (Australian Labor Party) to meet its twin goals of raising national prosperity and creating a fair and decent society.

Australian Aboriginees say that the big stories - the stories worth telling and retelling, the ones in which you may find the meaning of your life - are forever stalking the right teller, sniffing and tracking like predators hunting prey in the bush.

The ideas and practices of Franz Anton Mesmer, an 18th-century Australian healer, had spread to the United States and, by the 1840s, held the country in thrall. Mesmer proposed that everything in the universe, including the human body, was governed by a 'magnetic fluid' that could become imbalanced, causing illness.

It's unfortunate, I've been the victim of some Australian press.

We are going to be a government of no surprises and no excuses; a government which keeps its commitments and a government which is straight and candid with the Australian people and that's what we intend to do.

There's a sense of humor within the Australian culture that prevails when one is in a rather difficult situation.

I've been a Nick Cave fan since the early '80s when he was part of The Birthday Party thing singing Australian self-destructive rock band and I've always followed his work and loved it.

It is tragic that we have lost one of our nation's finest actors in the prime of his life. Heath Ledger's diverse and challenging roles will be remembered as some of the great performances by an Australian actor.

It was very much an Australian/New Zealand initiative to have a nuclear free South Pacific. And the Americans were very apprehensive about this. So, I explained to them that, as far as I was concerned, this didn't involve any diminution in our commitment to the ANZUS relationship. But David Lange took it further and he barred visits of US nuclear warships to New Zealand.

The quality of players - the likes of Sam Tomkins, Rangi Chase and Lee Briers - bring an X-factor to the game. It's highly entertaining and it's something probably that the Australian game lacks a bit.

I noticed - and this is one of the people don't understand of Tony [Abbot] - he grew. To me he grew as opposition leader. He come in - he wasn't really good at the beginning when he was opposition leader. He won the confidence of the Australian people and got the job as Prime Minister. He grew in Indigenous affairs. To me, we just totally disagreed in it, but now we're very much one on one on it.

The Australian language is easier to learn than boat talk. It has a vocabulary of about six words.

The traditional dress of the Australian cricketer is the baggy green cap on the head and the chip on the shoulder. Both are ritualistically assumed

I am an Australian citizen, and I miss my country a great deal.

That was an extremely unhelpful thing for Bill Shorten to say because those of us - and as the Attorney-General I've been closely involved in this along with my colleague Nigel Scullion, the Minister for Indigenous Affairs - what we have been trying to do for some years now, throughout the life of the Coalition Government in fact, is to bring the Australian people on a journey with us - conservative Australians as well as more progressive Australians, to persuade them that it is a seemly and fitting and decent and appropriate thing to recognise the first Australians in the Constitution.

The Australian backyard was once built for tradesmen and outdoor toilets. As suburbs spread, it became a playground and source of pride.

I've always noted with some awe the reading habits of the Australian public. Australians read more newspapers and magazines per head of population than almost any other country in the world.