Growing up as a child in Australia, you can be forgiven for the feeling that the rest of the world exists on another planet. Mostly because, well, by virtue of distance, it might as well be.
News channels often focused on stories that directly affected Australia and its inhabitants, with only extremely big pieces of news journeying the many miles that separate the country from the rest of the planet. To an Australian kid, Russia is known as a really cold place where some fairly bad things happened; Germany is known as a fairly cold place where some really bad things happened; and England is basically the old little island with the little old Matriarch, and a rather pathetic cricket team.