Men Down Under are so dodgy

You only have to watch 10 minutes of Aussie Rules Football to understand the antipodean male psyche. Professional boxing aside, it is probably the most physical, brutal, macho sport ever invented. It's the proverbial sport of hard knocks and Aussie blokes love it. It's as close as you get to heaven without the beer: a national game where you're a sissy unless you come off the field with your shirt ripped and dirty and your face covered in blood. There are, of course, no women involved. All that's missing is the XXXX, but that comes later.

The English may have perfected the lager lout, but the Australians invented him. That's why they love Russell Crowe, a New Zealandborn honorary ocker.

He's a proper bloke: he gets drunk, punches people, treats women badly and vomits a lot. And he wears terrible clothes and looks as though he never washes.

That's what we call a real man. Australians like their men to be men. They would love the pictures of Crowe this week, dishevelled and unrepentant, having just had a punch-up in a trendy Pom restaurant.

Four vanloads of policemen turned up at Zuma in Knightsbridge after the incident was reported. Crowe is in Ned Kelly-hero territory now. They don't want James Bond, they want the Aussie battler, and Crowe personifies that.

Things are just different out there. I know at the Christmas party in Perth for the "rellies", the men will stand outside with their tinnies, manfully poking chunks of red meat and snaggers around the barbie. I will be with the women in the kitchen, my female ear attuned to the sound of a thirsty male.

This is a bloke's country. It was only recently that the first line of the national anthem was changed from "Australian sons lift up your voice" to "Australians all..."

It's little wonder that there are so many jokes about the courtship ritual of the average Australian male. You must have heard the one about an Aussie's idea of foreplay?

"You awake Sheila?" I wish it were a joke.

A bloke thinks he has made an effort for a woman by pulling on a clean-ish pair of stubbies (they are little shorts similar to those worn by Aussie Rules footballers, and there is a direct relationship between a man's fondness for wearing them and the unsuitability of his legs) and letting her watch the footy with him and his mates: provided she feeds them of course.

This is such a maledominated, red-necked, bull-bar country that the most popular item on the evening television news bulletin is a list of local petrol-station prices. Brits were lulled into a false sense of security by Australia's three principal male exports: Rolf Harris, Dame Edna Everage and Clive James. Back home these guys are all regarded as sissies.

The biggest insult you can give any bloke is to call him a girl. When I was growing up in Australia, it was my father's favourite rebuke, especially when my older and much larger brother was using me as a punch bag.

"Stop behaving like a bloody girl," dad would say. "Get back in there and fight." Two of my abiding childhood memories are of my father singing "Jesus loves me" out under the gum tree after Sunday school then giving me a lesson in fighting.

Not the old "give him a good kick in the goolies" routine, but proper lessons in landing a punch. And as my dad was fond of saying: "You gotta down him in one Mandy, 'cause you only get one chance. Then run like hell." I've only once had to employ the Platell Punch, but it was a beaut.

In Britain, grandmothers teach their granddaughters how to arrange roses. In Australia they teach them how to snap the little finger of a man's hand, or rip off his ear with your teeth, or when to gouge his eyes out. All in self-defence, of course.

Australians are not known for their gentility or restraint. It's a hard country and despite the fact that it is now almost relentlessly middle-class, the idea of the Aussie battler fighting his way through the elements under the searing Australian sun is deeply embedded in the national psyche.

But let's not forget that the flip side to this is that Australian men fight for what they believe in, they are courageous and they have faith in themselves and their own.

These are fine qualities, the same qualities that make them such fine sportsmen whether on the football field, the cricket pitch or the rugby ground. And, I must say from my own experience, such fine fathers.

The Aussie men I know, especially my dad and brothers, would stand in front of a bus for me. That's what I look for in a man. In a world full of new men, give me a redblooded bloke any day.