So I stumbled across an opinion piece in The Australian claiming (more or less) that there are no good Australian Beers.

Full of wonderful hyperbole. Rather misleading on that one important point.

Sure, much of the local beer that gets promoted to us is awful, adjunct lager crap. The same goes for imported beers though - personally I’m sick of having average euro lagers marketed in Australia as premium beers at premium prices. Some of them are almost enough to make me want to drink Crown Lager. Almost.

Still, saying that Australia doesn’t have good beers because of the poor quality of some popular local beers is akin to saying that we don’t have good wine because people drink Passion Pop.

As for the tendency to serve the beer extremely cold. I think that’s sometimes forgivable. When it’s 35 degrees celcius you don’t have much choice but to serve the beer a little bit cooler. Granted, it’s a bit of a double edged sword in that it can mask good and bad beers. However, if the beer is really, really skunking ordinary then the usual trick around these parts is to turn the beer into something else by adding lime. Not beer, just a nice cool drink on a hot day.

For anyway looking for a starting place to find some good Australian beer, Murray’s have just released their limited edition Best Extra Porter so if you’re a porter lover, get in quick.

Welcome to our first ausculture.comment, where we grab a story off ausculture.com and run with it. (When we trip over our laces and chip a tooth, please try not to laugh...)

We start with this Sunday Telegraph story, linked by god. In it, we’re told that career women in Sydney are creating a nationwide sperm shortage as they race to get themselves preggers before hitting the Big Four-O.

We’re told the number of single women seeking sperm donors has risen by 40% – but not how many women we’re talking about. However, with less than 5 registered donors in NSW and a current limit of 10 donees (soon to drop to 5) for each, it’s not hard to see how there would be a shortage.

“Dr Joel Bernstein, medical director at Fertility East, believes social change was driving the rise in single women seeking sperm donors.”

Yes, well that’s a pretty vague kind of thing to say, isn’t it. What precisely, besides social change, would be driving it? Some enticing new FlyBuys offer on semen phials?

Ellen Connolly’s article plays it safe, neatly avoiding saying anything that would be likely to offend NSW career women – an important section of the paper’s readership.

(Not) Finding Mr Right

I think women tend to take the business of finding their Mr Right pretty seriously. They’re genetically programmed to do so, just as men are programmed to try and win the right woman. The woman’s mission, it seems to me, goes something like this: Try to find the best mate out of the pool of available males. And don’t fall pregnant until you’ve found a man who will help you raise the child.

In a small village, 20,000 years ago, this would have been a simple enough task. The pool of males would have been a two-digit number, and the comparisons made without playing Hide The Salami.

But then things started getting more complicated. First, people started living in towns and cities. Then, in the 1950s, the introduction of The Pill meant sex without pregnancy. (Incidentally, new research indicates that the hormones in The Pill tend to make women less interested in men.) Economic changes and jet flight made it easier to travel. From the 1990s, the communications revolution meant someone could easily get to know people regardless of distance.

Enter the world of bulk email. Many women make careful use of cyberspace, either on dating sites or in less obviously overt ways. Some female journalists include an email address in their articles, even when their column doesn’t have an obvious interactive aspect.

2008 sees the mission in crisis. For a single woman living in, say, Sydney, the pool has become an ocean – a figure of at least six digits. Sex is now in the mix, because the risk of pregnancy is so low. And this affects the emotional bond – love – diluting it a little with each encounter. So however many boxes a potential Mr Right might tick, for many women it’s never possible to make a definitive decision and commit to just one.

The Career Woman

I’d suggest that most career women are still actively involved in the above mission. But for some, especially those who’ve given up on cracking it, the control of doing away with the man in the equation evidently has appeal. Some claim not to have time to find the right man, but I think they’re forgetting how much time it takes to bring up a child, and how much harder it is to do right without a partner. As for the biological clock, the safe deadline for having a first child is closer to 25 than 40. Regardless of the method of insemination, there is, sadly, a greatly increased risk of complications if the first pregnancy takes place after the late 20s.

The Sex Addict

This is a serious addiction – and an epidemic. It affects the search for Mr (or Ms) Right because the addiction is all about variety, and however wonderful the partner, the addict will subconsciously sabotage the relationship (or consciously cheat on it) to satisfy the craving.

Religious Abstinence

Personally, I abstain from all religions. But they do have a point when it comes to human relationships. They promote a lifestyle in many ways similar to that traditional, village one. And they foster relationships that actually last. Don’t worry, you don’t have to become a Scientologist(!) in order to fix your personal life. But here are a few suggestions:

Get yourself a good vibrator (and some rechargeable batteries!); don’t have any relationships for 3 months; don’t have sex with anyone until you’ve been out with them 14 times; have a break of at least a month before you start going out with anyone else; substitute any sex you’re missing out on by socialising (with people you’re not attracted to). Good luck!

Image: Oxford Scientific Film