I haven't read Robert Hughes' book but this one

was quite an eye-opener to me on Australia-related matters.

Having said which, if I were told I was being transported to Australia tomorrow I don't think I'd be too disappointed. I should probably be living there now if it weren't so far away from all the other places I need to be within regular reach of.

Neither have I, Ollie - though my admiration for Robert Hughes has gone on record elsewhere (even if I don't take him entirely seriously when he trots out his usual line about contemporary art*) and I should probably get The Fatal Shore fairly soon. I probably will, after Colin's and George's endorsements.

Oh, or when he writes in the Preface to his Goya book that 'West Australian justice is to justice what Australian culture is to culture'.

wiki reveals a sad life, and a man hardened against it...:

[quote wikipedia]
Hughes married his first wife, Danne Patricia Emerson, in 1967 and was divorced in 1981. Danne was repeatedly unfaithful to the marriage. In Things I Didn’t Know Robert writes at length about Danne's infidelity, including her sleeping with Jimi Hendrix and subsequently passing on to him (Robert) a sexually transmitted disease ("the clap") [[4]]. During this marriage, Danne also spiralled into cocaine and heroin addiction. Danne died of a brain tumour in 2003 at the age of sixty. "She was enormously fat from the aftermath of a prolonged cocaine addiction from which her lesbian girlfriend had struggled, on the whole successfully, to free her," Hughes wrote in The Sunday Times (London) on August 20, 2006. "I do not miss Danne at all."

Hughes and Emerson had one child, Danton (30 September 1967 - 2002), named after the French revolutionary, Georges Danton. Danton became a sculptor and lived in Sydney's Blue Mountains with fashion designer, Jenny Kee (21 years his senior) whom he had first met in London when Jenny was the baby-sitter to the then three-year old Danton. [1] In 2002, at age 34, Danton Hughes committed suicide by gassing himself with his car in the garage. As explained by Robert Hughes, "He was very sad, he was very alienated, a condition for which I partly blame myself, as parents always do and must, I suppose, but bad things happened to him that he genuinely wasn't able to handle and that's all I can say about it." [2] More recently Hughes has written: "I miss Danton and always will, although we had been miserably estranged for years and the pain of his loss has been somewhat blunted by the passage of time."
[/quote]

A sort of Antipodean Kenneth Tynan? Every country needs one - although one is probably enough.

Dogs have masters, cats have staff.