Overlooked Australia

So I've finally gotten around to reading the famous book by Bill Bryson - In a Sunburned Country. As an interesting side note, they have this book in Australia and as far as I can tell its the exact same book - except its called Down Under. Odd.
It's been really good so far and speaks very truthfully about the Australia that I've seen since I've been here. I've often commented on how I feel like we overlook Australia at home. I don't really think about it, don't really hear about it, and don't really wonder about it very much. Yet - the US is constantly in the news here. In fact - probably about 40% of the news is about the US, 40% about the UK, and then about 20% about Australia - on the local news channels - haha! Lately of course though Michael Jackson is the only thing on all channels all the time.
The book has confirmed this idea though. The author did a brief study of how often various countries and topics were mentioned in the New York Times in a given year - he took 1997 cuz it happened to be sitting on the table in front of him. Here's an excert from his book:
"In that year across the full range of possible interests - politics, sports, travel, the coming Olympics in Sydney, food and wine, the arts, obituaries, and so on - the Times ran 20 articles that were predominantly on or about Australian affairs. In the same period, for the purpose of comparison, the Times ran 120 articles on Peru, 150 or so on Albania and a similar number on Cambodia, more than 300 on each of the Koreas, and well over 500 on Israel. As a place that caught our interest Australia ranked about level with Belarus and Burundi. Among the general subjects that outstripped it were balloons and balloonists, the Church of Scientology, dogs (though not dog sledding), Barneys, Inc., and Pamela Harriman, the former ambassador and socialite who died in Feb 1997, a misfortune that evidently required recording 22 times in the Times. Put in the crudest terms, Australia was slightly more important to us in 1997 than bananasa but not nearly as important as ice cream."
It's interesting how that happens. The author goes on to describe the story of a mysterious seismic disturbance in the middle of Western Australia. No one could figure out what it was so they just let it go. A few years later, the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo released nerve gas in the Tokyo subway, killing 12 people. It was later found that this cult owned 500,000 acres in Western Australia - near the mysterious event. There, authorities founda lab that provided evidence that cult members were mining uranium and had 2 nuclear engineers involved. Their aim was the destruction of the world and the event in the desert may have been a dry run. How did this go unnoticed???? It's definitely scary that Australia is so vast and unknown that something like this could just happen out there!