CS just responded to my previous post
that I had a "Sweet" voice...why thank you CS...not something we Australians would expect...in fact some years back our writing group, ( half of who were recently off the boat from Pommiland) had to read out stories on local radio and the husband of one of the readers said "You can pick out all the best readers, they're the Poms" - and he was Australian! ... So CS you can see why your compliment was well received. You Yankees must be a bit kinder than the Poms.
I was gobsmacked because was being read out in Australia, on the Australian Broadcasting Commission's radio station - coming from a generation which is way past cultural cringe of being England's leftovers I wrote this which was read out at our next meeting with great approval from my Aussie compatriots...

The Verdict

The verdict is now in; we can all do our sums,

From Yorkshire and Scotland, or from London slums,

Their musical, modulated enunciation,

Their rich and well-paced pronunciation

And for their accented, articulate, articulation

We stand in awe and absolute adulation,

With wailing and gnashing of teeth for

No matter how correctly they give us their instruction,

The best readers in our group appear to be Poms.

Not like us, us low bred; bred from convict scum,

From a motley lot who don’t know where we came from.

Drawling slow and dreary - as bleak as a hot Sunday afternoon,

Under brazen open skies our narrowed lips and eyes,

Droning flat our vowels - flat as the land of our birth,

Or rattling out our words like bullets

So as not to take up someone else’s time –

we’re an unselfish lot we are, that way.

Nah! We’ll never read as good as any Pom.

But stone the crows and starve the lizards,

we’ve got colour in our language.

It sears with sarcasm, hot as tar in February

And a flick of a word from a closed mouth can wound or praise,

Even though you might have to ask for it to be repeated.

Yes, and we’ve learned from the Master - Paul, (Ex PM)

from Bankstown, that a soufflé rising twice

has nothing at all to do with cooking. Thank you Paul.

But nah! We’ll never read as good as any Pom.

Even “Blind Freddie could see that Poms all read so well

And so what if they “have more hide than Jessie”,

and don’t know “whether they’re Arthur or Martha”.

So what if they’ve got “more front than Myers”

And are well known to be shy of water,

But we’re such happy little “Vegemites’

(Or should I call us Dickie Mites, now they’ve sold our National icon,)

We’ll let them read on radio, with their peculiar pacing pronunciations

All sounding vaguely like Judy Dench, God love her -

That’s the sort of people that we are,

But nah! Still, we’ll never read as good as any Pom.

I am off to Sydney today and will catch up with things when I can access a computer...