AT the end of the Atlanta Games next month, Australia will get a brief taste of the international attention that it craves. It will come during the Olympic flag handover ceremony, lasting just seven minutes. The details are still under wraps but artistic director Stephen Page, an Aboriginal choreographer, has described his concept as "an exotic fruit salad sprinkled with Bush medicine".

His brother, David, who co composed the music, said last week the ceremony was aimed at "showing the world there is more to Australia than meat pies, football and Bondi beach life".

It's hardly an original sentiment but one that in the lead up to the 2000 Games in Sydney is becoming something of an imperative duty in cultural circles.

During the 1980s, Paul Hogan charmed movie goers from Paris, France to Paris, Texas with his portrayal of the Antipodean innocent abroad. More recently, Australia has exported bottled sunshine to Europe in the form of soap operas. But image conscious Australians claim neither Crocodile Dundee nor Neighbours hints at the sophistication and diversity of Australian society.

We are the world's most urbanised society, a melting pot of cultures, a showcase for multiculturalism, they insist. This might not be obvious to the visitor who tunes to Australian cultural television, but a perusal of the print media gives a more representative picture. Here, then, is an up to the minute snapshot of Australian cultural life, based on a trawl through the last week's headlines.

A sneak preview of the Australian Publishers' Association Top 10 lists for 1996, to be published officially later this month, reveals that an advertising man turned popular author, Bryce Courtenay, has topped both the Australian and adult fiction categories with The Potato Factory, the first book in a trilogy about early settlers in Australia.

David Malouf's story of a white boy raised by an Aboriginal community during the 1840s, Remembering Babylon, which won him the inaugural IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize in May, did not feature in any Top 10 list. However Tim Winton's Booker Prize - shortlisted novel The Riders - which begins with an Australia family deciding to settle down in Ireland after two years roaming Europe, came second in the Australian fiction and fourth in the adult fiction categories.

Meanwhile, the National Library's decision to stop collecting European and American books and journals - but not those of some Asian countries and the Pacific - has provoked reactions such as this from a Canberra academic: "Two key words from Matthew Arnold spring to mind the neglect of a major part of the nation's history memory might well be called barbarian, and the neglect of culture might well he called philistine."

In the same week that Australia's best known, and most controversial architect, Harry Seidler, was presented with the Royal Institute of British Architects' Gold Medal in London, the Royal Australian Institute announced that no buildings were judged good enough to win either of New South Wales's two top architecture awards.

One form of building which does not win awards but is mushrooming around the country is the cinema multiplex. Australians are not only avid readers, but also movie mad. It's mostly Hollywood tare, of course, although the local film industry seems set for a vintage year, with a slate of new titles by "new wave" directors ready for general release after enthusiastic receptions at either the Sundance, Cannes or Sydney film festivals. One of the more unusual is Floating Life, by Chinese director Clara Law, in which a migrant family from Hong Kong struggles to make sense of Australian suburban life. It was made in three languages, and after its Sydney Film Festival premiere, the producer stood up and announced that it might be the first and last multilingual Australian film.

The federal government's funding agency may not invest in any future drama project that is predominantly in a language others than English. "It's even more discriminatory than the White Australia policy was," the producer, Bridget Ikin, said. One step forward, one step backwards . . .

The majority of the new films are anchored in the present and have, urban settings. A notable exception - in setting - is the surreal comedy Love Serenade, winner of the Camera d'Or at Cannes, about two sisters in a small country town competing for the attention of a new arrival from the big smoke, a disc jockey who is fishy rather than dishy.

The South African born author, Bryce Courtenay, believes that Australian history is hugely underwritten: "We are ashamed to come from the scrapings of the barrel." Certainly Australia's young film makers, having been weaned on costume dramas, are shunning the past.

SO too are her playwrights although it must he said that they are not thick on the ground. In fact one writer, David Williamson, who likes to portray himself as "a storyteller to the tribe" - the tribe being exclusively middle class carries the Australian theatre industry on his back. His latest play, Heretic, which pits famous American anthropologist Margaret Mead against her Australian bete noire, Derek Freeman, has just concluded a sell out season at the Sydney Opera House and is about to tour nationally. Williamson's previous hit, a critique of deconstructionism entitled Dead White Males, is now back for a fourth season.

It is in opera where perhaps the greatest stage advances have been made in recent years. Now packing them in its third season is young director Baz Luhrmann's production of La Boheme, updated to the Paris of the 1950s with Rodolfo as a new age James Dean.

The Eighth Wonder, a dramatisation of Danish architect Joern Utzon's struggle to realise his vision of the Sydney Opera House, was a worthy addition to the Australian Opera repertoire last year: the company has just concluded a successful trial run of a new Magic Flute designed to play one night stands in the Bush. It features a beer swilling Papageno, a character straight out of a Barry McKenzie movie.

Also dinki-di but one hopes much less ockerish is a new opera (to premiere in August) based in a classic Australian play about canecutters called Summer of The Seventeenth Doll. (There's yet another opera, inspired by the Lindy Chamberlain disappearing baby saga, in the pipeline.)

No one is yet working on an opera about Brett Whiteley, the Australian artist who died of a heroin overdose in a South Coast motel room four years ago, leaving an ex-wife, mistress and a daughter fighting over his estate. But with two new books on him competing for space on the shelves while a major retrospective tours the country, it's only a matter of time.