“You’re stranded on a desert island and you can have three things/people with you… Shoot.” The ultimate hypothetical; one that I’m sure I have been asked upwards of a million times and my answer is always the same:
1. My dog. 2. Rob Lowe 3. A water slide. Now here I am, in reality, financially stranded on this beautiful island we call Australia; which coincidentally happens to be approximately 80% desert. I am living the hypothetical (well the beginning anyway).
If asked at this point what three things/people I would want with me, my answer would have to change: I already have my dog; Australia has multiple water slides, and I somehow doubt that Rob Lowe would ever choose to live in Canberra, let alone in my dodgy little house. So here are three (new and improved) thoughts on what three things/people Australia really needs.
- Boris Yeltsin (pre-death of course). It has recently become apparent that the days of political passion that Keating and Whitlam brought to politics are long gone. ‘Middle ground’ has now become the only ground covered by our “leaders”. This is OK*. Australia, for the moment, is stable on all fronts; but if we can’t have passion we at least deserve a bit of personality, a bit of a dancing and a bit of alcoholism in our parliament.
- A Giant Record Player. So far all of Australia’s ‘big things’ have been fairly lame or fairly ocker. I, for one, would not go out of my way to go and see a ‘big potato’ that really looks more like fecal matter. A giant record player would be a great investment from a tourism standpoint, it would make use of part of that 80% of our country that is desert and would provide fabulous entertainment were it functional. If it were solar powered - thus self-sufficient - it could also be an engineering feat that forever changed the Australian identity from “Put another shrimp on the barbee, mate” to “I could build a self sufficient barbeque to put that prawn on, mate.”
- Rob Lowe. It’s worth a shot.
*Not really.
