Previous Dispatch ? Golden Meddling at the Olympics Australia isn't a difficult place to understand. The population is just 19 million. It only has five large cities. People speak English, some of them in such a clear, neutral manner they are chosen to present CNN newscasts.

So why do American journalists have such a tough time getting this place right?

Australians living in the U.S. are familiar with distorted, almost unrecognizable visions of their homeland being reported by U.S. media - that is when Australia, admittedly relatively insignificant, is reported at all. But with Internet access expanding massively in Australia, locals are able now to see for themselves how they are presented by the U.S. press.

For a start, we are apparently under seige, and not just by the 17,000 journalists here for the Olympic Games. Poisonous creatures lurk everywhere, poised to kill! Valerie Finholm of the Hartford Courant is awed by the number of toxic snakes, spiders and sea beasts which thrive Down Under, and quotes U.S. travel writer and 'fraidy cat Bill Bryson. 'Australians are so surrounded by danger they have evolved an entirely new vocabulary to deal with it.'

That vocabulary might include words like 'bogus', 'ridiculous', and 'nonsense'. Among the evil creatures listed by Finholm, her main source for this information being a terrified American woman now living in Queensland, on the country's east coast, are the 'venomous cane toad' (an introduced species yet to kill a single human being) and the kookaburra, a kind of Australian kingfisher. They 'look menacing', she writes, 'when you see a bunch of them swoop down and attack a man at a bus stop.'

I would like to see this. So would anyone else familiar with kookaburras, possibly the most genial and beloved of Australian birds. Finholm or her source have confused the hefty kookaburra with the slight Australian magpie, a thrillingly territorial creature adored by schoolchildren for its harmless swooping antics.

Most of Australia's genuinely deadly animals - snakes, mainly - dwell in the far north, a long way from populated zones. Writing about them in relation to Sydney and the Olympic Games is like warning visitors to New York to beware of Death Valley.

Pity poor Rick Telander, columnist with the Chicago Sun-Times. Desperate to see a kangaroo ever since he arrived, he believed he'd finally achieved his ambition during a drive through rural New South Wales: 'There he - or she - was, a three-foot kangaroo, illuminated in my high beams, dark fur mottled from gray to almost black.'

Three foot? Dark fur? Almost black? Rick has merely seen a wallaby, a stumpy, darker cousin of the larger, lighter-toned kangaroo. Keep looking, Rick.

And keep listening, too. Like most U.S. journalists, Telander is besotted with Australian slang, and like most he deploys it with terrific inaccuracy. Take his despatch of September 25, in which he farewells a group of Dutch tourists: 'I bid them all g'day and return to my journey.'

Mate, 'g'day' is a term of greeting, not farewell. When we bid someone farewell, we use this freakishly esoteric Australianism: 'Goodbye'.

C.W. Nevius of the San Francisco Chronicle makes a similar contextual mistake, writing that NBC's ratings are 'copping a bagging, as they say Down Under'. No, they aren't. A 'bagging' is a bad review, not a poor performance. It's entirely possible for a television program to be 'bagged' yet still rate highly. Like Survivor.

But both Telander's and Nevius's errors are minor compared to Cathy Harasta's 'How To Speak Australian', which appeared in September 7 Dallas Morning News. Possibly armed with an ancient dictionary of Australian slang terms, Harasta wove them into sentences, perhaps to make their meaning more clear.

Harasta's wily tactic produced lines like: 'If your Shiela thinks you're a bludger, buckle down and cut the macaroni.' I've been telling people this all day, but nobody seems to understand what I'm talking about, least of all me. I've hit them with other Harastarian constructions ('A doer will saddle up and then give it the herbs', 'No proper kitchen is complete without a billy for those late-afternoon pick-me-ups') but all I get are demands to shut-up and take my Ritalin.

However grating, these language gaffes are mostly trivial. More infuriating are the basic research flaws evident in so much U.S. reporting.

The Hartford Courant's Mary K. Feeney is intrigued 'by ads for carmakers unknown here (Holden, for example)'. Holden is General Motors' Australian arm, the same way Vauxhall is in the U.K. and Opel is in Germany. General Motors is 'unknown' in the U.S.? Maybe only in Hartford.

Also, according to Feeney, Australian newsmagazine The Bulletin is 'a big seller' (it moves fewer than 90,000 copies per week, actually - it's a loss-maker) and the Cantonese Chinese phrase 'Yum cha' (referring to a meal of dim-sum and tea) is 'Aussie slang'. C'mon, Feeney ... buckle down and cut the macaroni!

Many Americans were lured to Australia in the 19th century by the discovery of gold. During the Olympics, the desolate Australian outback - or at least that part of the desolate Australian outback closest to Sydney - holds a similar power over American journalists. First of a wave of U.S. visitors to Silverton, in New South Wales' north-western flatlands, was the Denver Post's Woody Paige.

Alas, Woody's excitement overwhelmed his computational abilities. 'To reach the lonely and dormant Outback from the crowded and busy Summer Games in Sydney,' he wrote, 'a stranger in a strange land must travel almost a thousand miles by taking a small prop plane to Dubbo.' Or he could drive 240 miles by road. Dubbo is just five hours from Sydney by car.

Woody next took a two-hour flight to Broken Hill, then hired a car to take him the final leg to Silverton, a place so remote that mail is only delivered twice a week, 'on Wednesday and Sunday'. It's Tuesday and Friday, Woody.

Trailing the Denver Post have been representatives of the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post, all keen to experience what Silverton Hotel publican Jo Casey calls 'the outback, but not so far out back that you can't get back to the city on the same day.'

Maybe the Chronicle's David Steele was one of those outback daredevils. Steele has had an angry few days in Sydney. He believed he was a victim of racism at a Darling Harbour restaurant where he and a fellow African-American columnist waited 20 minutes for service.

Steele is wandering into dangerous territory here. Yes, many Aborigines are marginalized, and many Aborigines have a history - a very recent history - of tragic ill-treatment. But when Steele says he's met 'only nine' Aborigines, he's marginalizing the many Australians of part-Aboriginal descent who wholly identify as Aborigines, yet may not satisfy American ideas of what an Aborigine should look like. Put bluntly, how does Steele know if the people he's seeing are Aboriginal or not?

He should compare notes with Rick Telander, who while visiting a massive meat-packing plant at Dubbo asked the millionaire plant owner's son if the plant employed Aborigines.

'Oh, yes,' came the reply, from a young man who Telander noted was more tanned, shorter and had greener eyes than his father. 'My own mother is Aboriginal.'

Journalism is about questions. America's journalists should ask more of them.