All the years I knew him John talked about Australia with a passion that, sadly, sounds increasingly anachronistic. He was the sort of patriot that would eat a eucalypt. But he wasn't all that interested in multiculturalism, preferring to celebrate a multi-ethnic Australia where people would sign up for the local set of values which he saw as an amalgam of humour and high-mindedness, of democratic spirit and egalitarianism. Perhaps the sort of Australia that Paul Hogan celebrated before he lost his way in Los Angeles. There's a scene in ''The Goons'' where the famous Eccles arrives in London in the middle of summer, surrounded by his own personal snow storm, which enables him to drive his huskies through Trafalgar Square. John Dixon did that with his Australianness. While it wasn't conscious or calculated, wherever he went and whatever he was doing, he brought the whole Dorothea Mackellar, Banjo Paterson, Chips Rafferty, Henry Lawson package with him. I reckon that if he cut himself shaving, you'd have seen gum tree sap trickling from the cut.〔Phillip Adams, "Australian as eucalypt", ''The Australian'', 18 December 1999〕