Working my way back to Australia after a long exile in the US, I stop off in London the day poor David Bowie’s death hits the headlines. In the 1970s I bounced around to Bowie as enthusiastically as any other baggy-trousered, platform-shoed teen. But if you’d been in a coma for the last three decades you’d be forgiven for assuming, from the acres of newsprint and oceans of tears his untimely demise has engendered, that this was a man who’d distinguished himself in a more exacting field than the recording of catchy but (let’s be honest) nonsensical pop songs. The MP of a London ward where Bowie once parked his car may even convince the Commons that the man responsible for Ziggy Stardust and the – ahem – Spiders from Mars should be commemorated in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey. What would be the equivalent homage in Australia? A statue of Steve Irwin on the steps of Parliament House? Profiles of The Wiggles on our coins?

When I moved to the US most yanks still saw Australia as a wacky, warm and essentially wonderful place whose only downside was that it had more than its fair share of dangerous critters. So when FOX first aired Khaled Sharrouf’s child brandishing a severed head it was seen by American audiences as a Ripley’s Believe-it-or-not one-off. By the time the networks had reprised the same grisly images in the wake of their live coverage of the Martin Place siege, the shift in public perception was palpable: no longer a beach-and-barbie bucket-list tourism destination Oz is now seen by many Americans as a hothouse of radical Islam and a major Daesh recruitment centre. You know, like Paris.

It must be hard to get to know a place warts-and-all if you’re constantly surrounded by people whose job it is to hide the warts. The intellectually progressive Washington DC that Kim Beazley has described since leaving it doesn’t chime with the quasi-apartheid its ordinary citizens encounter on a daily basis. Despite a decline in numbers in the last few decades, African Americans still make up almost 50 per cent of the population but most middle-class whites only encounter them in taxis and at supermarket checkouts. The title deed of the 1950s house my ex-wife’s parents own in one of the more affluent suburbs still contains a clause stipulating it can ‘never be sold to a negro’ – as do the title deeds of most of the other houses in the neighborhood. When I asked why this clause had never been removed – since it is clearly illegal now – I was told with a shrug that it was probably because no African American had ever tried to buy one of those houses. Or was likely to in the foreseeable future, was the implication. Given its current occupant, it would be interesting to see if the original title deeds of the city’s most famous – and most famously white – residence are the same.

It’s hard for Australians to take the moral high ground in such matters, of course, when the ‘title deed’ to our own country still contains a piece of legalese which denies the existence of its indigenous population. Along with many other people I wondered if Mr Turnbull might mark his first Australia Day in office by doing or at least saying something about this, but he chose instead to address a constitutional chestnut which he knew would be much less contentious. And by reminding the opposition that the country now has more pressing matters than the economically inconsequential issue of republicanism he also managed to make one of the most flagrant volte-faces in recent political history look like statesmanship.

It will be interesting to see if the affection many Australians seem inexplicably still to have for the British royal family – and for its younger members in particular – is in any way diminished by the new play Charles III, which opens here in March. I saw it on Broadway, and cannot recommend it too highly. The premise of the play is: what constitutional crisis would occur in the UK if the Queen dies? Spoiler alert: she does.

I’ve swum in North Sydney pool every day since I’ve been back, and am convinced that Australian children have gotten fatter since I’ve been away. So I check and learn child obesity levels are almost as high here now as in the US and rising faster than in any other major Western country. So another cause for national shame, then: the swollen generation.