Sam Kerr is the latest victim of Australia’s Ned Kelly syndrome

More so than other countries, Australia expects its figureheads not just to inspire the nation but to embody it. Representing the country meets only half the job description. Ideally, they should be representative as well.

It is not enough, say, for an Australian men’s cricket captain to be an accomplished player and astute tactician. To become truly talismanic, he needs to exemplify certain national character traits. This explains why Steve Waugh so perfectly performed the role. This son of the Sydney suburbs was flinty, hyper-competitive, plain-spoken and completely unaffected by fame. Captain Australia as much as the Australian captain.

Could Sam Kerr be the latest victim of the Ned Kelly syndrome?Credit:

This peculiarly Australian tendency partly explains why the Sam Kerr controversy has become loaded with so much meaning. For here is a sporting icon seen to personify 21st century Australia. Her Indian heritage reflects this polyglot nation’s rich multiculturalism. Her engagement to the US soccer star Kristie Mewis speaks of the country’s growing live-and-let-live social liberalism. The fact that she overcame her calf injury in last year’s World Cup to score the wonder-goal of the tournament – and in the semi-final against England, no less – demonstrated fortitude in the face of adversity, and elevated her from a metaphorical pedestal to a more monumental plinth.

In terms of female empowerment, she was central to the “Matildas effect”, a cultural phenomenon every bit as powerful in Australia as the “Barbie effect” was worldwide. Small wonder that Anthony Albanese asked her to carry the flag at the coronation of King Charles, an invitation, endearingly, that initially she thought of turning down because of a scheduling clash with her commitments for Chelsea.

Small wonder, as well, that every twist and turn of the legal case in London – which late this week saw her legal team ask the Metropolitan Police to provide security camera footage from a London police station in preparation for her defence – receives such forensic focus.

“Sport is a prime metaphor for Australian life,” Robert Hughes once noted, adding, “and because of it, many of our heroes (we don’t have a lot) are sportsmen and women.”

Yet the need to characterise the nation in a single character, to see the universal in the individual, extends beyond the football pitch, cricket oval or swimming pool. The very fact that there is an Australian of the Year underscores how the question of national identity has become so unusually personalised. Britain or America has no equivalent.

Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, became a proxy battleground in the culture wars.Credit:

Often I recall the first story I covered after becoming the BBC’s Australia correspondent back in 2006. Steve Irwin had been killed by a stingray, and his dead body almost instantly became a proxy battleground in the culture wars. To his admirers, the “Crocodile Hunter” personified Australia. To his detractors, however, he was a cartoonish parody. Thus, Irwin became even larger in death than he was in life. To a newcomer, it seemed extraordinary, and exceptional, that an individual was freighted with so much national meaning.

The same tendency extends to politics. Bob Hawke so brilliantly cast himself as the quintessential Aussie that it created an expectation that the prime minister of the day should preferably be an Australian archetype. John Howard, who overtook Hawke to become the country’s second-longest serving prime minister, also portrayed himself as “an average Australian bloke”.

In the seminal 1996 ABC Four Corners episode, where he first used the phrase “comfortable and relaxed”, Howard told the interviewer, Liz Jackson: “I can’t think of a nobler description of anybody than to be called an average Australian bloke.” What the veteran press gallery scribe, Michelle Grattan, memorably described as his “awesome ordinariness” was central to his electoral appeal.

Paul Keating struggled on this front because he portrayed himself as a Plácido Domingo when the preference was more for a John Farnham, even though this blond balladeer – who became Australian of the Year in 1987 – was born in Essex. The requirement for the Australian prime minister to double as an Australian everyman has also produced some strange contortions. With his “fair shake of the sauce bottle, mate”, Kevin Rudd seemed to ventriloquise Bazza McKenzie. Scott Morrison, a son of Bronte and originally a rugby union man, re-invented himself as a Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks super-fan and cheerleader for “the Shire”.

Morrison’s recurring problem, of course, was his inauthenticity. Yet when we realised that he was not just the son of a police officer but also the descendant of a convict, it became tempting to render him as a manifestation of Australia’s contradictions. To do so, however, was to fall into the trap of projecting onto him more significance than was merited.

Whether it involves Sam Kerr or Bob Hawke, “Farnsie” or Steve Waugh, maybe we should call it the Ned Kelly syndrome: the predisposition to attach too much collective meaning to a solitary individual. And, boy, does it ramp up the pressure? Carrying the burden of the country’s sporting and political ambitions is more than enough for any mere mortal without expecting them to exemplify the essence of Australia’s national character.

Nick Bryant is the author of The Rise and Fall of Australia: How a Great Nation Lost Its Way.