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The roar of a mighty V8 motor echoes across the national capital as the American Ambassador’s preferred car, the mighty Pursuit Special, screeches out of the embassy gates, laying rubber on Canberra’s previously civilised streets.
Mad Max of the Main Force Patrol is in town. Could Toecutter and Nightrider be far behind?
From Mad Max to ambassador - it couldn’t happen… could it? Credit: Alamy
The nation’s public servants hurry for the sanctuary of departmental basements, now known as bunkers.
Far-fetched?
In the court of Mad King Donald, nothing seems too far-fetched.
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This is, after all, a berserk royal household where such luminaries as anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Junior is the US Health Secretary, spouting claptrap about Tylenol causing autism, and former Fox News entertainer Pete Hegseth runs the US military, lecturing generals that they mustn’t gain a kilo, ignoring that their commander-in-chief often appears to be in competition, waist-wise, with Howard Taft, a President (1909-1913) who was so rotund he once famously got stuck in the White House bath.
Why wouldn’t Mel Gibson get The Donald’s assent to become the next US ambassador to Australia?
We hasten to add we haven’t got the slightest proof that such an appointment is being considered.
It is no more than the merest whiff of Washington scuttlebutt, we are told, a bit of chatter aired on ABC’s Insiders on Sunday. In Washington, however, flatus is often all that is needed to evolve into an announcement on Truth Social.
More than eight months into Trump’s second term as US monarch, it happens, there is a yawning vacancy: there is still no American ambassador to Australia.
Mel Gibson at a special screening of Monster Summer in Los Angeles in September 2024.Credit: AP
And Gibson is not without credentials, in the amusing case that credentials were actually required for the job.
He has lived in Australia, and years ago resided in a farmhouse in the decidedly Australian district of Tangambalanga, not far from Tallangatta and Yackandandah, a bit up the Murray River from Yarrawonga. Why, you could write an antipodean version of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus out of such wonderfully multi-syllabled places, which would surely please a would-be King.
Gibson, happily, never took out Australian citizenship. He is a born citizen of the US, which is almost as important, in these days of Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) squads, as being a right-wing Hollywood star.
Indeed, Donald Trump not so long ago named Gibson as one of his three “envoys” to Hollywood – with fellow Trump boosters Jon Voight and Silvester Stallone – charged with keeping a close eye on unsettling signs that the movie industry was veering too far from Trump’s make-America-great-again edicts.
There was, of course, Gibson’s ugly antisemitic outburst while in his grip-of-the-tequila period.
Those with long memories may recall the story of a police officer stopping Gibson for drink-driving in Los Angeles in 2006, when Mad Max was reported to have blurted out a barrage of antisemitic remarks about “f---ing Jews”, and yelled “the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world”.
Such views, you’d imagine, would hardly be approved by a president who thinks he should have got a Nobel Peace Prize for championing a ceasefire by Israel in Gaza.
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Still, Trump is a fellow who likes to place lamentable behaviour firmly in the past, which might explain how he felt it was fine to nominate Gibson as one of his special envoys to Hollywood.
And there is always the Mad Max connection, which some might figure suits the times.
Consider one of the more compelling blurbs for the trailer of the first Mad Max movie, which made Gibson famous.
“In the not-too-distant future,” it declares, “there will be no civilisation … there will be no heroes.
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