The Sun-Herald

Wisteria Lane, Wollongong

by David Dale.
It doesn't stay a mystery for long, once you think about it: why Desperate Housewives is a bigger hit in Australia than in any other country. More than two million of us will switch on tonight's season finale of the US melodramedy.

Although they've been doing less well this year than last year, the Despos are regularly watched by one in every nine Australians, compared with one in every 13 Americans. What's the special appeal?

The answer, I think, is that we recognise ourselves in them. That's not to say we're in the habit of murdering our neighbours, sleeping with our gardeners and burning down the mansion across the road. But consider these details: Australia is the most suburbanised nation on earth. Two thirds of us live in capital cities. Three quarters of the homes in those cities have three or more bedrooms, but half of those homes contain only one or two occupants.

So Australians embrace the Despos because we aspire to Wisteria Lane as our spiritual home. Like Bree, Susan, and Gabrielle, we live in houses way too big for our needs in comfortable suburbs that cocoon us from reality. We feel safe in the village, meeting our friends for coffee and gossip, because it's a self-contained environment, where the issues of the outside world never impinge and all crimes and crises are generated and resolved within the extended family. Or that's what we hope.

The last American entertainment embraced so wholeheartedly by Australians was Friends, back in the late 90s. Our response to that was also a demonstration of a changing self-perception. Friends came along at a time when Australians had just dumped the myth about a nation of sun-bronzed billy-boiling bush battlers and realized we were actually a nation of obsessive urban coffee drinkers. So of course we were going to identify with six caffeine-addicted 20-somethings seeking love and success in the big city.

I think the particular quality that drew Australians to Friends was loyalty. Here was a bunch of independent people distanced from their families, at odds with authority, trying to cope in a new environment, with only each other to rely on. Isn't that a description of how the first white settlers on this continent would have seen themselves? The only encouraging thought the convicts had going for them was mateship, which is just another name for blind loyalty. Channel Nine should have renamed the series "Mates".

We've found that core value again in Wisteria Lane. The Despos may battle and bitch and sulk and scheme, but they're there for each other most of the time. At least two million Australians enjoy the idea that in our safe little universe, we could be like that too.

This is David Dale's 'Who We Are' column from The Sun Herald of July 30, 2006. David Dale is the author of Who We Are - A miscellany of the new Australia (Allen and Unwin). To read other columns and discuss Australian attitudes, go to http://blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.