> The short 18 minute long movie has also managed to delight audiences in Australia and South Africa, though it is less popular there than in Europe.

Considering they mention Australia and South Africa together, then later in the same sentence say it is “ less popular there than in Europe,” I would say with 100% confidence that the author meant to say Australia, not Austria.

After all, Australia is not in Europe so if they had meant Austria then it would be strange to say it’s less popular there than in Europe.

There are also many European countries not mentioned so I don’t think anything is being lumped together.

> Australia is not in Europe

Maybe not by geography, but by Euro♡ision, it is?

I’ll leave to Europeans and Australians to debate. I’ve no skin in this game.

Some of these continental orgs are quite flexible about what countries they permit to join. For example Israel is also in Eurovision, but it’s not in Europe. Similarly Australia are part of the Asian Football Confederation rather than Oceania’s Football Confederation (and Israel is a member of UEFA rather than AFC, for obvious reasons)

I don’t think anyone is saying “Australia is part of Europe” with a straight face though :-)

Saying, no, but feeling, yes. Keating's "Asian Century" version of Australia never took strong cultural hold. Our nearest neighbour PNG is ignored except by our NGOs and spies, and few visit Indonesia other than the Bali beach resorts. A brief 1990's spurt in Mandarin teaching in schools is in decline, with European languages remaining the most popular. Australia is still by far the most Eurocentric of the post-WW2 immigration nations. And it's literally the whitest, which is why it's been the destination of choice for so many South Africans since the 1990s.

This is changing to some extent with demographics (immigration from China and India, and some generational change). But surprisingly slowly and shallowly. Few Australians know much about Asia, or even the Pacific, let alone feel theirselves to be part of it.

I wasn't suggesting it was part of Asia, rather highlighting that it was not unusual for Australia or indeed other countries to be part of continental organizations (Israel/UEFA and Aus/AFC/Eurovision) that are different from the continent they're usually considered to be a constituent of (Israel/ME, Aus/Oceania). Regardless I do not think skin tone should come into it.

My "Asia" comment wasn't really a response to you - it's been a part of internal Australian debate since the 1980's. Keating crowned the 21st the "Asian Century", and claimed Australia should turn towards Asia. My point is that never really bit culturally. Australia is geographically Pacific, economically Asian, and culturally European/American Despite self-perception, there isn't really much non-derivative Australian culture beyond some small Indigenous influence, though we're probably a century behind NZ in that respect.

> I do not think skin tone should come into it

It shouldn't, but it certainly does. Little can be understood about Australia without it (well, ethnicity at least - broader than 'skin tone'). A large part of Australia's Europe-longing comes from a historical fear of China (as a kind of stand in for people of Asiatic ethnicity).

I can confirm that in Australia SBS (a government owned TV channel) has played the show every New Years Eve at 6.10pm for 30 years and everyone I knew always watched it before heading out to celebrations.

https://www.sbs.com.au/guide/article/2016/12/19/broadcast-sb...

> usually broadcast shortly before midnight.

That’s cute. It’s been a while, but last I checked, there were 10s of broadcasts of it on the different stations throughout the afternoon, evening and night in Germany ;)

Well, you have to scale everything down by a factor of 10 to map German scales to Austrian ones ;)

We have like 2 or so (?) public broadcasting stations. One of which makes a heroic sacrifice for the audience that wants to see Silversterstadl, so we need to compromise a bit.

The typical Austrian tradition is to get unreasonably shitfaced with friends/relatives throughout the day (same as every other holiday), until you have a sufficiently positive outlook on the new year.

In that state you're then able to bare the presidents new year speech for the purpose of sarcastically mocking it, actually find Mundl's antics afterwards funny and can round it off with "Dinner for One", right before going outside and playing with explosives.