"And His Ghost May Still Be Heard. . ."

Australians are a sentimental lot; they cannot resist a sympathetic law-breaker. From bushrangers to army deserters to drug traffickers, if they display some act of plain human decency, Australians will admire and even adore them.

Maybe it's the recognition of "There but for the grace of God, go I". Put in the same desperate circumstances, might I not have done something similar? Killed the cop, gone AWOL, smuggled heroin? And then, when faced with the consequences of my actions, would I still have performed as well as they did?

So we have Ned Kelly as an iconic figure of nationhood, and John Kirkpatrick Simpson as a war hero, and now we have Thuoc Van Nyugen - martyrs all to our belief in one another's basic human qualities of self-sacrifice and mateship.