The Underratedness of Australian Content

So I was trawling the aisles of a sprawling music shop, searching for my friend with a healthy stack of CDs in my hand, when I strolled past the 'World Music' section.  It's not my usual haunt- I'm more often than not hovering around the 'Alternative' section, squealing intermittently in an unhinged manner- but I decided to check out what was on offer.  The albums were categorised by country, there were Jamaican, Italian, Irish titles...  And then, to the left-hand side, I saw something that still haunts me to this day.
A category.
In the World.  Music.  Section.
Labelled 'Australia'.
As in, the country in which we live.  I find this rather ridiculous.  Why is it that Australian content is segregated, and why to the 'World Music' section, of all places?  I know I'm being a bit petty here, but I struggle to fathom why our music has its own section.  It's not as if the UK has its own sections for British music.  Music coming out of Australia should just be 'music'.  It's ours, it's not international and it should always be among the rest of the titles according to genre.
Perhaps I'm exaggerating the situation.  I mean, Aussie albums can be found pretty much throughout the other genres.  I'm sure there's some Kylie filed under 'Pop', there's more Aussie material in the 'Alternative/Indie' section than any other, and the 'Heavy Metal' section probably has small doses of Parkway Drive and Dead Letter Circus.  But the 'Australia' category under 'World Music' housed material by the likes of Indigenous artist Gurrumul, John Williamson, and- God forbid- Angus & Julia Stone, that little brother-and-sister duo that hit #1 on the Triple J Hottest 100 2010 with 'Big Jet Plane', a song that was even played regularly on commercial radio.
Okay, so admittedly, it's possible that this dreaded 'Australia' category was a little sparse because the remaining Aussie content was hidden in the rest of the genre sections, but when I say that Aussie music should be among the rest of the titles according to genre, I mean all of it.
It's as simple as this: this is Australia, so why shouldn't Australia's music be regarded as ours?  Well, it's because we're more inclined to pick something from America because of its material and artists having had ridiculous amounts of pervading reinforcement over the decades.  We're too influenced by American material for my liking, and it's a sad fact that the most part of America's music-listeners probably wouldn't touch music or any kind of mainstream entertainment from somewhere different with a ten-foot pole, yet music listeners over here clamour for American content.  America is somewhere different.
I'm not bagging all the American content in existence, because Americans are capable of producing some damn fine art (think Sofia Coppola's films, Jodi Picoult's novels, and the music of Nirvana, Gossip, The White Stripes and Vampire Weekend), but I loathe what their unfortunately large number of heinously atrocious artists have done to the music we consume over here in Oz.  And the films- at our cinemas, more people flock to get tickets to the latest special-effects-dependent Hollywood epic than even think to go and see an Australian film that could be potentially thought-provoking, tear-jerking, uplifting or all of the above.  Our films are often quite profound, and I sense that people are almost repelled by the thought of seeing something with a bit of meaning, and subsequently go for the predictable films with the pretty pictures, exhausted plot-lines and the primarily rubbish actors.  Surely these people are slowly turning into illiterate piles of mush.
And I do recognise that Australia is also capable of spitting out talent-lacking ninnies who call themselves 'artists'.  At present there's a gap-toothed teenager with a rat's tail and the faintest skerrick of what could be a singing voice.  His one single so far is blared on commercial radio at the approximate rate of every third song, which equates to more than too many times over the course of one day.  I'm not going to name this mystery flop, but I'll just say I'm appalled to think that he might be the only notion people from my generation have of Australian music.
On a lighter note, this is one of the many reasons I adore the theatre.  There seems to be no blatant preference for a certain demographic of performers or performance styles.  Most theatre-goers attend an eclectic mix of performances, probably due to the thrill induced by seeing a story unfold in the flesh before one's eyes, regardless of the story being told or the manner in which the performers go about expressing it.
So basically the long and short of it is that I think we should become a teensy bit more acquainted with the wonderful material that comes out of this country.  If it doesn't resonate, then that's fine.  I just think that a lot of us would do well to venture further than Hugh Jackman films when contemplating Aussie content.
I don't care how sweet his abs are.


*I genuinely have nothing against Hugh.  Or his abs.  I'm merely addressing that he's one of the more widely renowned Aussie screen actors, and that others do exist (*cough*MELISSAGEORGE*cough*).