On Broadway, it is not just Australian performers that are proving a draw, but Australian productions. In recent years Geoffrey Rush has taken two home-grown productions to New York, Eugene Ionesco's absurdist drama Exit the King and The Diary of a Madman, where theatregoers paid as much as $700 for a seat. Rush’s performance as the 400-year-old King Berenger earned him his first Tony, thus completing the coveted triple crown of acting: Oscar, Tony and Emmy.

Cate Blanchett's theatrical success in America has been even more striking, for the simple reason that the Sydney Theatre Company's production of A Streetcar Named Desire completely upended the cultural cringe. What chutzpah to take a ‘made in Australia’ production of the great masterpiece of American theatre to New York and Washington, where it was lavished with so much praise.

‘Australian aesthetic’

While Australian actors inevitably attract the most attention, they by no means monopolise the acclaim. In literature, Thomas Keneally, Peter Carey (twice), DBC Pierre and Aravind Adiga have won the Booker Prize. Tim Winton (twice), David Malouf, Kate Grenville, MJ Hyland and Steve Toltz have been shortlisted. Richard Flanagan has made it onto this year’s shortlist for The Narrow Road to The Deep North. Burial Rites, by first-time novelist Hannah Kent, has become an international bestseller. So, too, has The Slap, by Christos Tsiolkas.

In poetry, the New Yorker judged Les Murray, who writes with such an obstreperously Australian voice, to be one of the three or four leading writers of poetry in English. Many would place the late Peter Porter in the same pantheon.

The Australian Chamber Orchestra is a singular success, a Barcelona of the classical music scene because of its flair, elan and world-renowned success.

Dance is an area of rising strength. The Australian Ballet has performed to sell-out houses at the Lincoln Center in New York. The Melbourne-based troupe Chunky Move has in recent years toured the US, France, Germany, Lebanon, Hungary, Colombia, Japan, Belgium, Canada and Russia.