Saying Judith Durham had the 'voice of an angel' doesn't come close

Yet that well-meant and kindly cliché gives angels too much credit and gives our Judith far too little.

Angels only ever trill, prettily, but Judith's voice had complex qualities, occasionally suggestive in power and timbre of ships' foghorns or of brass musical instruments (now a trumpet, now a hunting horn, now a euphonium, now a trombone).

I'm not being unkind to her (I loved her) in saying her voice had foghorn and trumpet qualities.

These are qualities reverent musicologists have noticed in some of the greatest singers of classical music.

The supernaturally lovely contralto Kathleen Ferrier had sacred foghorns in her voice and the Heaven-sent Swedish tenor Jussi Bjorling was famously equipped with a trumpeting voice.

Readers, you all know Pavarotti's plucky attempt at Nessun dorma but if you want to hear it being sublimely sung and being trumpeted at the same time (all by just one voice) let Google/YouTube take you to Jussi Bjorling's Nessun dorma.

Modest Judith's voice was far more grand, far more blessed with instrumental sounds, than she understood and appreciated.

I interviewed her lateish in her career and (politely and not harping on it) asked her if she ever wished she had used so wonderful a voice to sing bigger and deeper and less sugary things.

I asked because it seemed to me (although I didn't say this to her in as many impolite words) that The Seekers' own songs had mostly been quite awful. Georgy Girl is surely one of the 10 most banal popular songs ever written. Then on top of that misfortune she and The Seekers and then she in her solo career usually chose to sing and to add extra layers of icing sugar to the already-sugary-enough worst of others' music.

But, bless her, she was an unpretentious soul and seemed bewildered by my pretentious question.

But, since her death and going to YouTube and to her greatest hits (and with only my soul-of-discretion dog on hand to catch me sobbing), I hear sonic glimpses of an imposing and tragically underemployed wondervoice.

The Australian media's gloating, masturbatorially nationalistic reporting of Australians' medal harvesting at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham is another reminder of how obscenity comes in many forms.

Lots of the things commonly labelled as "obscene" barely knot my broad-minded knickers but I have found the triumphalism over our medal winnings in Birmingham knickerknottingly obscene. Medals porn.

ABC Radio National has been especially awful, with ABC Sport's reporters in Birmingham gloating over First World Australians' medals winnings, mostly at the expense of the athletes of the smaller, poorer nations of the smell-of-an-oily-rag world.

So many of those we beat to get the aquamedals come from Commonwealth lands too poor to install Olympic pools let alone to waste scarce water on filling swimming pools with it.

A feature of this gloatmongering, Australia-is-the-centre-of-the-universe reporting on the ABC was that competing nations at Birmingham seldom got a mention.

It was only when one went to international sources like Wikipedia one found that Australia wasn't the only nation competing in Birmingham. Why, there were 71 others!

Another, related, similarly sensational Wikipedia disclosure was that as well as Australia's overreported (by Australian media) team of 433 there were 4621 other folk of other lands taking part and competing their little hearts out! Who were these foreigners, these, our polyglot, multicultural brothers and sisters? Why did our media never introduce us to any of them?

Sporting nationalism is a fine thing when Australia plays against similarly sleek, capitalism-blessed nations, for example against the Poms at cricket.

But when we trounce and outperform poor nations, when we excel at trivial sports (like synchronised springboard diving!) no battling people in battling lands would ever find the time and money and reason for, it all seems a tawdry and insubstantial source of any national pride. Not a thing to gloat about.

The final medal tally, as I write here beside me on a screen on a device, is a pornographic thing in its own right (at the peak, swaggering first world Australia a'glitter with 180 medals of gold and silver and bronze, in the cellar battling atolls like Nauru and Vanuatu with one bronze medal each) somehow testifying to the world's terrible inequalities while at the same time rejoicing over them.