“With his audaciously titled epic ‘Australia,’ Baz Luhrmann has delivered a shamelessly melodramatic, often eccentric spectacle with true-blue blockbuster potential,” writes

my former reviewing colleague at The Post, Megan Lehmann, a native Aussie, out of Sydney for The Hollywood Reporter. “The most expensive Australian film ever made is rousing and passionate. Despite some cringe-making Harlequin Romance moments between homegrown Hollywood stars Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, the 1940s-set ‘Australia’ defies all but the most cynical not to get carried away by the force of its grandiose imagery and storytelling. And, yes, there are kangaroos…” And from The Times of London’s Sydney stringer, Anne Barrowclough: this four star (out of five) review

: “It has every Australian cliché you could hope for, from kangaroos and Nicole Kidman to aborigines going walkabout and, yep, Waltzing Matilda…But Baz Luhrmann’s long-awaited, and over-budget epic Australia manages, against the odds, to avoid turning into one big sunburnt stereotype about Godzone country. Instead, in what turns out to be a multi-layered story it describes an Australia of the 1940s that is at once compellingly, beautiful and breathtakingly cruel. Described as a cross between ‘Gone with the Wind’ and ‘Out of Africa’ it bears, in fact, little resemblance to either movie – apart from a similarly spectacular landscape as ‘Out of Africa’ and a plot line that loosely resembles that of ‘Gone with the Wind.’ ” Us Northern Hemisphere types will get a look tomorrow.