(CNN) -- On September 11, 2001, the city of Melbourne, Australia evacuated its World Trade Center. This is a modest building on the banks of the Yarra River, a short distance from the city's central business district, a little over 10,000 miles from New York. It used to have a casino. Before that, it briefly hosted an exhibition of waxworks from Madam Tussaud's. If you ran a line from Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan through the center of the Earth, you would exit the planet not so far from here. Indeed, Australia is, simply, a long way from everywhere. A flight to Sydney takes 15 hours from Los Angeles, 21 hours from London, 14 hours from Johannesburg, and 10 hours from Tokyo. There is no stopping off in Australia on the way to somewhere else, unless you're headed to Antarctica. This isolation is at the heart of Australia's identity: It is the reason the country has an aboriginal population that existed undisturbed for 40,000 years, and some of the world's strangest and most inimitable flora and fauna.
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Max Barry: Sydney hostage incident brings home terrorism threat
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But this wasn't Australia's first brush with terrorism, writer says
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Dozens of Australians were killed in Bali bombing in 2002, Barry adds
As I said, on 9/11, terrorists were attacking @placeholder, so Melbourne evacuated hers.
We complain when a car costs $30,000 or a TV show won't hit our screens right away, but it's the distance that has allowed @placeholder to stay Australia in the face of relentless globalization.