When I wrote on this page recently about Alan Bond’s America’s Cup boxing kangaroo mascot being repurposed by the Australian Olympic Committee, I was unaware that our largest marsupial had just been given another ambassadorial role. But Ruby the Roo, the star of Tourism Australia’s latest international ad campaign, differs from her sporty antecedent in several important respects. For one thing, she’s supposed to exude warmth and welcome, not courage and competitiveness, so she has a pouch rather than a punch. For another, she’s not a two-dimensional registered trademark; she’s a computer-generated soft toy. So as well as having greater merchandising potential she can also bounce engagingly around during the ads – and deliver the pitch. And lest there be any doubt as to who that pitch is aimed primarily at, her computer-generated sidekick has an American accent. The story arc of the campaign’s launch video takes them to every location seen in every previous Australian tourism video, and I’d like to say that Louie the diminutive unicorn is Sancho Panza to Ruby’s Don Quixote, or at least Donkey to her Shrek. But that might imply that the story is compelling and the dialogue funny. The opening scene, a possibly actionable homage to a famous Toy Story sequence, certainly creates that expectation. So we can only hope that US audiences will be too spellbound thereafter by the magnificent Top End, Red Centre and Barrier Reef scenery to pay much attention to the infantile bollocks which has been digitally imposed on it. The only relief from the clunking plot, jarring segues and laboured humour comes when our two amigos are given a potted guide to the Dreamtime by a tag-team of Aboriginal elders whose beaming avuncularity, twinkle-eyed wisdom and general shininess are so perfect one suspects they might be computer-generated, too.

The last Tourism Australia blockbuster was a 2018 spoof trailer for a hypothetical Crocodile Dundee sequel which, in irony-proof middle America, succeeded only in whetting appetites for the non-existent movie. That ad had cameos for just about every Australian most Americans had ever heard of, so presumably this one cost taxpayers a lot less, since the only celebrity featured is the delectable Rose Byrne. Her job is to deliver the ‘Come and say G’day’ tagline, and she manages to do so as if it’s the first time that greeting has ever passed her lips. But presumably that won’t bother people who refer to us as Ossies and continue to stress the second syllable of Melbourne even after they’ve been punched. The spoof movie trailer concept was certainly over-ambitious, creatively, but in 2018 the groundswell of US good will towards all things Australian which started with Paul Hogan’s shrimp on the barbie and ballooned with Crocodile Dundee, was still a tappable vein, and depicting Australia as a larrikin paradise where cocking a snook at authority is a national pastime might have gotten some traction then. Unfortunately, any ad campaign which tried to perpetuate the same myth today would bomb at the focus group stage. Because there can’t be many Americans who haven’t substantially revised their opinions of us after seeing coverage of our governments’ hysterical handling of the pandemic, and the ovine response of most of us to the suspension of our constitutional freedoms. You can’t blame those responsible for the new campaign, then, for taking the Disney Down Under route. But when it came to casting, their ad agency might have learnt from the experience of the agency which created the mascots for the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Nobody now remembers Syd the platypus, Olly the kookaburra and Millie the echidna, and at the time only AOC officials complained when medalling Australian athletes chose to share the podium with the fake-fur, machine-washable likeness of a different Australian species. A marsupial which had no official status, but whose name was repeated with delight by every US network sports anchor. If Tourism Australia wanted to revive a mascot which has already proved popular overseas, and which, even after the depredations and humiliations of the last three years, retains something of our national character, this was surely a role which had Fatso the Fat-Arsed Wombat all over it.