How do I vote for the ‘Barty Party’?

She also understands that fortune plays a part. Not every losing shot is your fault, and neither is every winner to your credit – centimetres can separate either and frequently do.

This merges with courage. This is not a wisdom for the faint-hearted, as it involves grappling with yourself and your human weaknesses.

To play this way you cannot hide from the truth either. You have to learn the lessons that each shot tells you about yourself and your opponent; discard what is not working and hold on to that which is.

And finally moderation, which Barty has in spades. It was great to see her smile as she held the trophy aloft or had an onscreen beer in a bit of product placement. It’s more than serenity, or not leaning too much one way or the other. Rather it is the thing that pulls you back from what the Greeks called ‘hubris’, a pride in yourself that some might call ‘self-belief’.

Barty’s style is the opposite of self-belief. In the best of her moments she appears to be in a state of almost ‘not-being’. She’s not self-aware, so much as just being in the moment.

Isn’t this the epitome of what we used to think of as the Australian character? Simpson and his donkey at Gallipoli, the boys who held the Japanese back going over the Kokoda trail. The woman left to run the farm while her husband was away droving. The volunteers who put their lives on the line, like surf lifesavers, SES volunteers, Rural Fire Brigades, and so many more, like the images on our paper currency.

Not big noters, but achievers. So modest that their exploits are almost unremarked, so that Donald Horne could get away with libelling that Australian culture in his The Lucky Country as ‘second rate’. They were first rate they just didn’t boast about it.

There used to be plenty of it in Australian tennis – think Yvonne Goolagong Cawley, Margaret Court, Rocket Rod Laver, and John Newcombe. It’s a much rarer commodity these days, which brings me to Nick Kyrgios.

Kyrgios is the best illustration I know of Calvin Coolidge’s dictum that ‘nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent’. He’s a representative of the narcissistic culture which is enveloping Australia and challenging the culture that Barty represents.

He’s got talent, but like every other influencer, he measures success by how many people look at him. When interviewed after his doubles victory he boasted that he had brought the crowds out, and even Ash Barty’s dad had congratulated him on that.

Except that Ash and Danielle Collins – two girls – had TV ratings of 4.261 million while he and three other boys had only 3.154 million, which is 26 per cent less on audience, and 63 per cent measured on the basis of productivity per ‘performer’.