THERE'S he doesn't have the temper or drama their lives had. He's a happily married actor who spends honest time with his chil­dren." Ask Jackman about the biggest risk he has ever taken, and the answer comes instantaneously: "Marriage, the whole family life. It's not so much a risk as a surrender, kind oflike, okay, I'm jump­ing into the rapids." .

He met Deb, an actress and director eight years his senior, on the set of Correlli, an Australian TV series they both appeared in; they were married in 1996 and, after she suffered two miscarriages, adopted their son 'Oscar in 2000 andAva in 2005. Talking about them is when jackrnan seems most genuinely enthusiastic; the movies are nice and all, and the karaoke with Keith Urban on Sting's yacht, that's cool, but this is when he leans in hard, this is when his eyes focus. "What you learn being married to someone is better than any classroom or anything you can study, or any job," he says. "If I didn't have Deb, I don't know ifl would've kept acting. WIth the risks, having someone's unconditional love means you can really fall on your ass and be com­pletely loved, even if the rest of the world chucks tomatoes at you.
"And the same with kids," he says. "Everything is exposed 'with kids. There's no artifice, because they see you for exactly what you are. You can't pretend. Actors can fool people about the kind of person they are. You can wear whatever mask you want to put on. But it doesn't work with kids, you know? If your career is more important than them, you're going to have hell. You see things get out of whack, out of'bal­ance, because they just minor it back to you. To feel at the end of the day that you haven't done every­thing you could for your kids - none of it's worth it.

"It's going to sound like I'm coming back to my work now," he says, "but when the head of the studio saw Australia, he said, 'Mate, when your grandkids ask your kids what you did, this is the movie they'll put in.' But, see? Everything is related to the kids now. Frightening how in love with them you are. It's hard to go away, hard to do things like this. You have those little flashes of them jumping into a road and you stop breathing."  But that, jackman knows, is the risk you take. You have ago, mate. Then you throw everything you've got into it, do whatever it takes to push through to the end. Even ifit means getting punched in the nuts every now and again.

HOW TO SEE THE AUSTRALIA OF "AUSTRALIA"

"It's like playing a board game in the sky," says lan Fargher, 500 feet up, as he banks his Cessna 172 toward a cluster of cattle, then divebombs them. For a brief, shaky moment, Fargher seems as If he might actually clip them - a kamikaze carnivore. But then he pulls up into another loop over the flat. reddish forever of the outback. This is how cattle are mustered in the modern down under: from the air, with Fargher, a blocky, fourth-generation rancher, radioing his brother Ross and nephew Lachlan, who, gunning ATVs, herd the cows to winter paddocks. With 500 head scattered over 200,000 parched acres, the Cessna comes in handy. Decades ago cattle were driven vast distances by drovers on horse­back, as Hugh Jackman does in Australia. Call it a dude ranch, Aussie-style. Fargher's brother Ross (who, along with wife Jane, runs the 12- room Prairie Hotel in a speck of a town called Parachilna, pop. 7) figures moviegoers might want their own dusty taste of outback mustering, so he's linked his hotel to his cattle operation, letting visitors saddle up for a few days of bona fide cattle-herding, then feast on the hotel's "feral cuisine" (wild camel sausage, goat chop, kangaroo fillet, emu). The 1872 Prairie Hotel is a low-slung place on the fringe of Flinders Ranges National Park, a blithe oasis in the middle of outback nowhere. And its bar, where cowboys with handlebar mustaches drink Fargher Lager next to Dutch back packer girls until everyone runs outside to watch the nightly coal train pass, is the perfect place to nurse saddle sores,

How to Cet There: Qantas has nonstop flights from LA. to Sydney and Melbourne on the world's largest aircraft, the new A380, offering everything from private first-class suites to fully flat reclining beds (qantas.com.att). Get to Parachilna through Adelaide; it's a one-hour flight north to nearby Leigh Creek (or a five­hour drive). Rooms range from $105 to $185 a night (prai7iehotel.com.au).