Fred Frederikse: Exploring Victoria in a rented Holden

Julian Assange: Last year the UN special rapporteur on torture reported overwhelming evidence that Assange was subjected to psychological torture. Photo / file

Australia (2020 population 25 million) can be neatly divided into three millispheres: Gold Coast, Victoria and Oz. Most of Australia's population hugs the east coast, as do the Great Dividing Range and the Australian Alps. The Australian capital Canberra, by some conceptual fluke, sits where Australia's three millispheres meet.

The millisphere of Victoria covers the watershed east and south from the Australian Alps, and includes Melbourne (4.9 million) and the island of Tasmania (half-a-million).

When we visited Melbourne again in October 2001 Osama bin Laden had just levelled the Twin Towers in New York and air travel had changed dramatically. The New Zealand Army manned the Auckland airport and the Australian Army was there to meet the plane in Melbourne.

New Zealand, Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada are in The Five Eyes; a strategic information-sharing alliance formed during World War II.

American NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden described Five Eyes as a "supra-national intelligence organisation that doesn't answer to the known laws of its own countries", but the Five Eyes nations hadn't seen Osama's suicide passengers coming.

In a rented Holden we explored Victoria. At Ballarat we found the site of the Eureka Stockade - now a carpark awaiting development - where, in 1854, gold miners rebelled against the colonial authority of the United Kingdom and swore allegiance to the Southern Cross.

At Glen Rowan we checked out Ned Kelly's old stamping grounds. Appropriately born also in 1854, bush larrikin and son of a transported convict Kelly took on the squatocracy (landowners) denouncing the police, state government and the British Empire. Ned was still in his twenties when he was captured and hung in Melbourne in 1880.

Melbourne artist Sidney Nolan painted views of the Ned Kelly story. The son of a Melbourne tram driver, Nolan deserted the army during World War II when he learned he was being sent to Papua New Guinea. Going from commercial art to being one of Australia's best known modernist painters, Nolan showed Australians their unique landscape in the raw.

Barry Humphries lifted the drag act into pure satire with his Dame Edna Everage character based on a Melbourne housewife, and he was equally merciless with Sir Les Patterson - a drunken, leering Aussie politician. Politically conservative Humphries "showed a bohemian delight in transgression that made him a radical". Some in the transgender community consider Humphries, a straight man, dressing up as a woman as insensitive as dressing in blackface.

Commenting on the #metoo movement, feminist writer, public intellectual and good Catholic girl from Melbourne, Germaine Greer, said "if you spread your legs because he said 'be nice to me and I'll get you a job in a movie' then I'm afraid that it is tantamount to consent, and it's too late now to start whingeing about it" - proving you don't need to be a man to be a larrikin.

Fred Frederikse: When we visited Melbourne in 2001 Osama bin Laden had just leveled the Twin Towers in New York and air travel had changed dramatically.

Cyber larrikin publisher and activist Julian Assange had lived in about 30 different Australian towns before settling in Melbourne as a teenager. Assange studied maths, physics and programming at the University of Melbourne before helping set up Wikileaks in 2006. Assange got into serious trouble in 2010 when Wikileaks published the Baghdad airstrike collateral murder video supplied by Chelsea Manning.

The US Government didn't appreciate being shown to the world to be war criminals but the Obama administration did not prosecute Assange because "there was no evidence that his actions differed from those of a journalist".

Not surprisingly all that changed with Donald Trump and Assange has been charged with violating the US Espionage Act. Currently held in the "British Guantanamo", HMP Belmarsh pending extradition, Assange has effectively been a political prisoner since seeking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy 10 years ago.

Last year the UN special rapporteur on torture reported overwhelming evidence Assange was subjected to psychological torture and 60 Australian doctors petitioned Marize Payne, Australian Minister of Foreign Affairs, to evacuate Assange to an Australian hospital. Their request was declined.

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison was not about to forgive Julian Assange for breaching Five Eyes intelligence and Donald Trump wants Wikileaks closed down.