Aussies tend to be the biggest critics of their own accent. It's because the 'cliched' Aussie accent is the rural accent, whereas 98% of us are coast-hugging city-dwellers. Folks from Perth/Fremantle (urban Western Australia - really it's one city, but for the Fremantle folks it's kind of like calling French Canada, well, Canada
), in particular, are regularly mistaken for English when we travel overseas.
A lot of Australian cultural studies have been devoted to the concept of 'cultural cringe' - the self-depreciating element in Australian culture where until about 10 years ago, we tended to downplay the cultural credentials of anything Australian. I.e. to be 'Australian' was to be a working class, good at sport, blokey type - to have any credibility as an artist or a writer, an intellectual, a film-maker, or a band in Australia you had to be from Britain or the USA. I.e. we associated our own accent with stupidity, and so you had this weird phenomenon where Australians had to 'de-nationalise' themselves by succeeding in Britain or the US before they could get any recognition back home (and on top of that there'd be lots of authors, directors and musicians who were successful indie artists overseas, but ignored in Australia because of the impression BY Aussies that Aussies can't do art - Nick Cave, Philip Noyce, Ed Kueper, Patrick White and Germaine Greer all fell into that category during the 80s (where Australia seemed to be the last place in the world to discover them, despite them all starting off there).
Now the kids today haven't experienced that, because there was a very deliberate tailoring of the education system during the mid-90s to overcome the cultural cringe. But the after-effect is still there, in that in Australia we use the 'cliched' or 'broad' Australian accent as a send-up, sort of similar to the way that the folks in the US would use an exagerated southern accent. It can actually be quite jarring when you travel to North Queensland and other places that have the broad accent, because we're so used to associating it with 'comic stupidity' that we keep on having to do a double-take to remind ourselves that we're actually talking to a smart person who happens to have a broad accent
.
As a result, when Australians travel (which we do a lot - it's almost a standard right of passage these days to take a year off during or after uni to backpack around Europe or Asia), it often takes a while to realise that other countries don't tend to associate 'broad Aussie' with 'redneck' in the same way we do at home. In fact, you tend to get the opposite effect - people cotton on to the fact that other backpackers of the opposite gender are often interested in people with different accents, and the broad aussie accent has kind of a masculine image overseas, so you get all the Aussies going around talking in these ultra-broad accents, when at home they'd only ever speak like that if they were joking about rednecks.
