We've grown so close ... it'll feel even better beating you bastards in the Ashes

A LOT of people in Britain pooh-pooh Australian table wines. This is a pity as many fine Australian wines appeal not only to the Australian palate but also to the cognoscenti of Britain. Black Stump Bordeaux is rightly praised as a peppermint flavoured burgundy, while a good Sydney Syrup can rank with any of the world's best sugary wines.

This from Monty Python, a joke that was pretty funny around about 1970 ("another good fighting wine is Melbourne Old and Yellow"). But these days, Australian wines are drunk around the world with pleasure rather than heavy-handed humour. What's more, the old cultural cringe jokes ("Bruce teaches logical positivism and also is in charge of the sheep-dip"; from another Python sketch) no longer have quite the bounce they used to.

It was all so simple once. Anglo-Oz rivalry was about the clash of old and new: a country that was in the course of inventing itself before our eyes and could be anything it chose, and a country that had all the burdens and the certainties of history. Young and free versus old and rooted: you're right from your side and I'm right from mine. There was an easy certainty about our divisions.

Australians were loud and brash and uncompromising and manly ("no poofters!"). Poms were stuck up and decadent and seldom washed. England was part of Europe and with centuries of traditions. England had literature and art and a sense of connection with the past and the rest of the world. Australia was out on its own and that was the making of the place. God's bloody own!

Australia played sport in the same uncompromising style with which they farmed the outback. The only time an Australian walked was when his car ran out of petrol. Didn't stop them whingeing like hell when Douglas Jardine invented Bodyline, but we can all embrace a contradiction in a good cause. It would, it seemed, always be like this: moustached fast bowlers howling insults at craven Pommie batsmen while the prime minister (good on yer!) pats the queen on the bottom.

With every Ashes series the old banter is polished off once again. Same old Poms, soft underbelly and all: while the Australians are unlettered oafs, admittedly quite good at sport but as Dame Edna herself said, that's because of the sun, the sea, the outdoor life and the total lack of any intellectual stimulation whatsoever.

And we're happy with that. My old Australian friend Alan Hargreaves suggested: "The Anglo-Aussie rivalry is one of the few bits of inter-cultural banter that has survived political correctness, possibly because both sides are prominently white. Use any of those jokes outside the Anglo-Aussie arena and it will be billed as casual racism, a term that recently got traction in Britain. These days the word 'bastard' can only be considered endearing if aimed at Poms."

The banter continues - despite the fact that every year it gets more inappropriate to the two nations themselves. Australia is no longer a new place. It is no longer true that Australia can be anything it wants to be. Australia has a history: a quarter of a millennium of it. These days Australia increasingly treats Aboriginal culture as a matter for respect and even pride, and that adds another 60,000 years to the history books. Australia has roots, Australia has tradition. Australia won't blow away or change overnight.

Australia has art and culture (read Patrick White's Voss). Australia could deal with a gay rugby league player without throwing a fit. Australian brought us Priscilla Queen of the Desert. In the modern world, Australia is no longer cut off from anything except the British climate.

Australia has changed dramatically since World War II. The population has tripled, and like Britain it has become a multicultural nation, with all the attendant tensions and benefits. The fact is that Australia and England have grown together: two established nations with a common history refreshed by new adventures into multiculturalism. When Australia held the great referendum of 1999, they voted to keep the queen. It suited the historical rootedness that Australia has established across two and half centuries.

This cultural convergence is reflected on the pitch. You no longer get a collision of public school snootiness and roughneck aggression. The Australians may have introduced sledging, but now when they play the Poms they are as much sledged against as sledging. And the only time an England player walks is when his sponsored car runs out of diesel.

The differences still exist. An Englishman stills feels that sense of release from some of the more wearying traditions of the home nation. You leave the class system at home; Australia is still the country where every man craves the approval of the dustman. A sense of freedom comes from the endlessly fine weather and the still prevalent youthfulness.

But Australia came of age with the Melbourne Olympics of 1956 and celebrated its status as a fully baked grown-up nation with a sense of its own identity and its own established traditions with the Sydney Olympics of 2000.

Once Australia liked to see itself as a brash young nation that got off on bullying the former colonial masters by beating the crap out of them at sport.

Now Australia is an established place with its own traditions and Lord help us, England and Britain are doing some great things in sport. Since the turn of the century England have won the rugby World Cup (in Australia) and three of the past four Ashes series, an Englishman has won the Tour de France, a Scot has won a grand slam tournament in tennis and Britain was fourth and then third in the medals table at the last two Olympic Games.

Ah, sweet memory: Brisbane four years ago when after a somewhat torrid start England began the great fightback. "Nice to see your blokes making a game of it," someone said. Patronising Aussie git. Our blokes made a game of it all right, before moving on to the great triumph of Adelaide, a match that changed the sporting landscape.

The banter between our two sporting nations was invented to stress our differences. It continues because it stresses what we have in common. Things like language, history, tradition, culture, love of beer, love of wine, multiculturalism, a changing society, increased tolerance for differences of culture, religion and sexual orientation, love of horses and the outdoor life, increasing consciousness of the need for the conservation of the wild world, love of sport, love of cricket in particular, love of banter itself.

The two nations have grown together. These days there are far more things that unite us than divide us.

I love Australia, I love a few carefully selected Australians. They are us and we are them. And it's because of what we have in common that I look forward so much to the unprecedented spectacle of back-to-back Ashes series, and do so with the pious hope that we will take on our dear friends and beat the bastards in a savage and unpromising fashion.