It's not difficult to see why they call it the lucky country: the sun shines, the people smile and the word recession, much less meltdown, is nowhere to be found in the local vernacular.
There was certainly no sign of the latter anywhere in Sydney last weekend and the only faint hint of a dampener in the entire continent of Australia was the distant prospect of a draw in the Aussie rules footie finals, a possibility that was mooted if only to invoke the collective will of the nation against such an outcome by Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
And so it came to pass.
She who knows a thing or two about draws - having not long emerged from an extended political impasse - proved a harbinger of the unthinkable: you'd have thought the sky had fallen in as sports commentators and the general commentariat filled the chatwaves and the news bulletins with brow-furrowing consternation.
Aussie rules, or AFL, as it is more commonly known in the country, is a seemingly obscure sport played mainly in Victoria, with a few upstarts from South Australia and New South Wales, and which bears some resemblance to Gaelic football.
It is played by men with severely constricted shorts and sleeveless tops, a dress code presumably invented sometime during the 19th century when cotton was in short supply and the game was played mainly by former convicts of Irish extraction.
We all know that rugby football had its beginnings when a rebellious toff and pupil at Rugby School called Tom Brown picked up the round soccer ball and ran with it.
With its mix of kicking, passing, bouncing, patting and leaping (AFL nuts will by now realise I know absolutely nothing about their beloved passion), AFL seems to sit more ambiguously in the tree of sporting evolution, having variously inherited the DNA of half a dozen or so disciplines: rugby, football, basketball, handball, ballet.
The teams always have two names - the formal club names and the affectionate, fan-friendly handles.
Thus last weekend's final was played out between Collingwood and St Kilda, more popularly known as the Magpies and the Saints.
Reading between the lines of commentary that is essentially a foreign language, the Magpies had the pick of the first half before the Saints marched back in to steal an unlikely draw, 68 all.
For such a minority sport, AFL evidently exercises a hugely disproportionate sway over the popular Australian imagination.
More than 100,000 aficionados packed the Melbourne Cricket Ground to see the game live; an estimated 3.7 million watched it on television.
They're great sports, the Aussies, and even greater enthusiasts and spectators, loquacious and passionate about just about anything and everything, and with those characteristics come an easy, not to say brash, sense of confidence.
They can even make car racing seem interesting, as we discovered in between visits to the botanical gardens, the Opera House, Paddington, the Rocks and Watsons Bay.
There he was, this bloke talking on the 24-hour news channel about his life on the Australian drag strip circuit - he wasn't on about lady-boys and sex-change fashions either - and it was kind of riveting: direct, unpretentious, uncomplicated . . .
That seems to define some of the more obvious generalised character differences between them and us: we are more hesitant, questioning, tepid in our enthusiasms, as if we needed the warmer climes to ripen our emotional response to the world and all it contains.
Not that this is all bad, and you only have to look at the number of Kiwi icons that our transtasman cousins have attempted to colonise to realise that envy can be a two-way street: the pavlova, Phar Lap, Fred Dagg (aka John Clarke) and Crowded House for beginners.
Arriving back on this side of the ditch, I hear those dastardly Aussies are now out for a slice of our movie action.
Australian-based union the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance is spearheading the attack, over actors' contracts for the Sir Peter Jackson-produced Hobbit films.
Sir Peter sees it as the ugly spectre of an Australian bully boy using what he perceives as his weak Kiwi cousins to gain a foothold in this country's film industry.
I'm all for actors being appropriately rewarded, given unpredictability and impoverishment are the most common career prospects for thespians in this country.
But not at the price of no work at all for anybody, which is what could happen if the actors' unions continue to play hardball.
Hardball is another game the Aussies excel at, a sport with very few rules at all.
Perhaps the best we can hope for in this particular contest is a draw and an early bath.
Where's Julia Gillard when you need her?
Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
