ussell Crowe, Mel Gibson, Paul Hogan, Steve Irwin, Errol Flynn, Guy Pearce, Bruce Spence, Heath Ledger, Eric Bana, John Jarrod, Hugh Jackman, Clive James, Germaine Greer, Judy Davis - what a pack of mongrels!
Have you ever wondered why such a small country miles from anywhere at the bottom of the world is so over-represented on the world's media?

It’s the mongrel-factor.

Australians who want to strut the world stage have a tough road. They have to fly 24 hours straight for a job interview. Where the first question will probably be "how did you learn to speak such good English?"

They have to snap and snarl to get noticed.

To make it against these kind of odds, you have to have "a bit of the mongrel in ya" as the Australians say, a trait which can be traced to a few things.

The original colonists were criminals transported from the slums of Ireland and England. Successive waves of migrants and refugees have inter-bred to produce some tough mongrel strains.In the long run, the big, flat prison continent delivered a rare kind of freedom to the settlers. And they never forgot it.

Look at the Australian sports stars for pure mongrelism.

From Dawn Fraser to John Newcombe to Greg Norman to Kostya Tzu and Ian Thorpe. They are Gods and models for all aspiring sports-mongels and other over-achievers.

The Australian victory at the America’s Cup of 1983 was one for the mongrels – the winged keel was as a piece of sportsmongrelism almost equalled the famed "underarm ball" from the Australian cricket team headed by the that most magnificent mongrel, Ian Chappell.

HAVE A GO! GO IN HARD OR GO HOME!
Trans: Doesn’t matter if you mess it up, don’t wait for anyone to tell you the right way.

This can lead to the flip side of Australian mongrelism...the magnificent failure

The WW I debacle at Gallipoli was a defining incident in the country’s evolution. A small group of Australian mongrel fighters staged a heroic retreat after being dropped into a botched invasion of Turkey by their pedigreed British masters. The Australians lost, but they won.

The final mongrel trait - laconic tenacity and an ability to "pull things out of ya arse" Trans: improvise.

This trait was brilliantly embodied in the mobile junk heaps created by the mongrels that ruled the outback in George Miller's Mad Max trilogy.

And now years of genetic engineering have produced the uber-mongrel - Rupert Murdoch.