Norman an Australian icon but not a 'great'

Barry Humphries must have felt like a eunuch at an orgy

The British like to think of themselves as a nation of sports lovers, and so do the Americans, but neither of us have anything on the Aussies. Last year, six million of them went to watch Aussie Rules football matches. That is almost a third of the population. Here is an even more impressive statistic: there are 12 sports arenas in the world with retractable roofs, and three of them are in Melbourne. Venue for the first Olympic Games in the southern hemisphere, in 1956, Melbourne is already limbering up for the 2006 Commonwealth Games. No wonder Barry Humphries, who loathed sport, got the hell out of his native city. He must have felt like a eunuch at an orgy.

Sport, or a conversation about sport, is never far away. Last Thursday, for instance, I had dinner in the Stokehouse, a beachside restaurant in St Kilda. This is the suburb with an Aussie Rules team once graced by Shane Warne, before he decided that his future lay in cricket. A lot of Australians who succeeded in other sports started off playing Aussie Rules. Pat Cash, also a Melburnian, is another. But they were probably wise to pursue different-shaped balls. Aussie Rules, which was invented in Melbourne in the early 1860s as a means of keeping cricketers fit during the winter, is not, in fact, good for the health. The average career span of an Aussie Rules footballer, I was amazed to learn, is a mere two years and three months.

Anyway, at dinner I sat next to a man with a great name: Barry Matters.

Which indeed Barry does; he is managing director of Australian Pacific Tours, the country's leading coach tour company. During a rare lull in the conversation I asked Barry whether the British obsession with lists – the 10 greatest this, the 10 finest that – had yet reached Australia? He said not, and advanced the reasonable theory that it might all be tied up with the Pommie affection for queuing. Whatever, I invited him to name his top three Australian sportsmen or women of all time, and pretty soon a debate was raging all round the table. Although my memory is blurred by far too much of a very decent Yarra Valley white, I have a feeling that even the waitress contributed.

It would not happen in England. There were about eight Aussies around the table and they all aired a strong opinion, which was invariably backed up with statistical evidence.

The only person on everyone's list was Don Bradman. Other than the Don, the following names received support often verging on the vehement: Rod Laver (a tennis player), Ian Thorpe (a swimmer), Greg Norman (a golfer), Peter Thompson (a golfer), Dawn Fraser (a swimmer), Herb Elliott (an athlete), Cathy Freeman (an athlete), Walter Lindrum (a billiards player), Hubert Opperman (a cyclist), Michael Doohan (a motorcyclist), Heather McKay (a squash player), and Phar Lap (a horse). Absolutely no consensus was reached, although the chap who suggested Greg Norman was shouted down by more or less everyone else.

To his credit, he stood his ground admirably, arguing that Norman is one of the few Australian sportsmen to have truly iconic status. Which is incontestable. Last week, the Melbourne-based broadsheet newspaper, The Age, not only featured Norman on its sports pages, but also on its news pages, devoting not a few column inches to whether he thinks Australia should contribute to war against Iraq. He does, of course. Professional golfers are not known for their liberal instincts. Gary Player once bent my ear for what seemed like hours on the virtues of Margaret Thatcher.

Norman's arrival in Melbourne – to play in the Heineken Classic, which was won yesterday by Ernie Els – caused quite a stir, not least because he brought his boat, which interestingly enough is called Aussie Rules, and reportedly set him back A$60m (£21m).

Like the Americans, but unlike us, Australians seem to get a kick out of each other's success. In Britain, it wouldn't be long before someone dragged a key along the side of a A$60m boat, metaphorically if not physically. Yet The Age devoted an admiring news feature to it. Norman's boat is evidently the biggest of its type in the world, and has a shark logo picked out in mosaics at the bottom of its swimming pool. Not to mention a helipad.

On Wednesday, the evening before the tournament began, I took a river-taxi along the Yarra River, and there was Aussie Rules in all her considerable, almost preposterous, splendour. It is hard to look at her and muse that the man who bought her is probably more celebrated for failing at his job than succeeding. Who knows, maybe that was what Norman had in mind. He might or might not be one of the three greatest Australian sportspersons of all time, but he's sure as hell the richest.

b.viner@independent.co.uk

* Brian Viner travelled to Australia as a guest of Austravel (0870 1662070) and British Airways.