Your Papers.

[Arthur Crabtree]

I did actually guess that...

;)

;)

[Arthur Crabtree]

SMH and The Age to put up paywalls on their websites. One of the great pleasures of an Ashes win is reading what those two papers have to say about it. Bad news for all those in search of schadenfreude.

[OffStumpYorker]

SMH and The Age to put up paywalls on their websites. One of the great pleasures of an Ashes win is reading what those two papers have to say about it. Bad news for all those in search of schadenfreude.

Very true, especially when Australia are losing, it was great to see how the papers in Australia reacted to the defeats. Its sad that they are doing this but i sense most papers will start to do it moving forward.

[PardonWonTheCup]

Hardly any of the Aussie newspapers are readable and now the two that are decent are doing a Murdoch. So depressing.

[Arthur Crabtree]

Aussie papers seem to carry the slightly provincial flavour of local newspapers. Aussie localism can be quite a nice aspect of the country though.

[PardonWonTheCup]

There are some excellent blogs around, which I find more useful than most of the institutional media outlets now. The Old Batsman and Legside Filth are very good. There was a Pakistan writer - I think it was Short of a Length - who wrote very funny and heartfelt pieces but he's given it away. Soulberry - CricketWatcher's Journal is a lyrical writer and a ruthless researcher.

That German girl who has taken to cricket online like a duck to water keeps great tabs on Associate cricket - playforcountrynotforself.

I like AfterGrogBlog for the bitterness of spirit, black humour and at times bizarre ongoing scenarios that TT's threads produce. Some of his regulars are as sharp as a knife.

Both the BBC and the ABC have relegated cricket to an afterthought. I only use the BBC for the county commentaries now and never read any of the articles.

The Aussie papers are great for footie as that's the only sport in town really. I like the Fairfax papers for their environmental and conservation sections. Very thorough.

AC, you are right about the localist flavour of some of the papers. Perth papers do give a proper flavour of Perth or at least they do to me. Localism is a wonderful thing when you don't actually live there.

[Arthur Crabtree]

Localism is a wonderful thing when you don't actually live there.

I suppose there can be a bad side to it. I sense a residual sense of community in Australia which has disappeared from the UK. As if local issues really matter. In the UK, that seems to have been replaced by nimbyism, and a obsession with house prices and league tables.

I'm probably making a mistake in trying to judge a country through its media though....

[PardonWonTheCup]

I think that is partly true, though I find Perth people depressingly obsessed with houseprices. One of my mates has moved back and he is being driven mad by people who can only talk about possessions and property.

[OffStumpYorker]

I think that is partly true, though I find Perth people depressingly obsessed with houseprices. One of my mates has moved back and he is being driven mad by people who can only talk about possessions and property.

Thats could be the english influx, as I beleive Perth has a very high proportion of Ex-pats compared to other areas of Australia.

One reason for the regionalism in Australia is that its really down to the pure size of Australia, are NSW's inhabitants really interested in the goings on in Perth, outside of impact on Australia, and visa versa.

In the UK its a shame that a lot of the regional papers have died out, but there are still quite a few, Sheffield are the Star and Yorkshire post, and they are still going strong. In London its the Evening Standard, but thats dropped a little in quality since it became a free paper. In Birmingham you had the Birmingham Post, I'm sure Manchester has its own local paper(s).

[Arthur Crabtree]

I presume the change in the UK is the neoliberal policy of the Thatcher and post-Thatcher eras, which seek to undermine the idea of community (there's no such thing as society) and make the family or individual an economic unit. As we see most starkly with student fees. I don't suppose Australia has drifted so far over to the right. Not just in their Government, but in the hearts of the people.

[PardonWonTheCup]

Australia always seems pretty conservative to me but then I'm from WA. Too many damned rules for my liking, Coming from and visiting Perth.. my view of Australia is skewed.

It's not just NSW, I don't think anyone else from the rest of Australia gives a damn about WA. Except for the sharks and the stuff dug out of the ground.

Then living in London skews my view of the UK in the opposite way to how my view of Aus gets skewed viewing through the Perth prism. I feel like anything goes in London which is one of the reasons I like it. Sydney is probably the same, I haven't spent enough time there.

[Arthur Crabtree]

Depends if anything goes because no one cares? Which is my view of the UK. Now. It was an entirely different country a generation ago. Maybe Australian liberalism is like the American, and derives from the perpetual, endless frontier? Maybe that is significant for Perth as the last city of Australia?

The taming of the west in America was inevitably conservative and capitalist. To me that seems a great way to settle a country, but a lousy way to maintain it.

Australia gave the world the word 'mateship'. Maybe that was just a comforting self deception? Like the way UK PMs are always telling us that we (UK) are a tolerant nation.

[Arthur Crabtree]

One of the most noticeable things I found in my brief three weeks in Australia was the rules! There were notices everywhere telling you how to behave. I didn't get the impression that Aussies needed signs everywhere to remind them what they should be doing. There were signs in pubs telling you how to leave the premises. signs in the street telling you how to cross the road. That's not frontier stuff.

[Arthur Crabtree]

Although to be fair, I was at the bottom of a bottle of wine when I made those last two posts...

[PardonWonTheCup]

You could be on purest Evian. The place drives me round the bend with it's rules. The whole country is rule-mad.

Example: I found it perfectly normal to wear a cycle helmet when I got to England as Perth cops FINED you if you were caught without one. They brought that rule in back in the early 90s, and as soon as they did, there were cops cycling around on cycle paths just waiting to catch a cyclist without a helmet.

They have eased up now but that's probably because they've found some other stupid rule with which to harrass people.