Australians have reacted with outrage to an article written by one of the country's most prominent expatriate intellectuals, Germaine Greer, in which she dismissed her homeland as a sports-obsessed suburban wasteland devoid of cerebral stimulation.
Greer, 64, who left Melbourne for England in 1964, said Australia's city centres were 'marooned in oceanic tracts of suburban doldrums'.
The Cambridge-educated author, best known for her feminist treatise The Female Eunuch, said Australia was defined by suburban mediocrity personified by the residents of Ramsay Street in the soap opera Neighbours.
'If your ambition is to live on Ramsay Street, where nobody has even been heard to discuss a book or a movie, let alone an international event, then Australia may be the place for you,' she wrote in The Australian newspaper.
'The pain of watching its relentless dilapidation by people too relaxed to give a damn is more than I can bear.'
It was the country's parochialism and lack of professional opportunities that had forced a million Australians to live abroad, she said.