Brace yourself, Australia

Of course, the details of Oprah's actual itinerary are more closely guarded than a nun's chastity, but we can guess this is what will happen because it is what always happens on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Her subjects are survivors; her subject is transformation.

And what a story Australia can tell, all about overcoming the terrible things in our past to become something wonderful. We are a butterfly nation (those beaches; that hospitality; those forests; that Opera House), emerging from a chrysalis of shameful history (that convict past; that race hate; those stolen generations).

But it is not all about us. While Oprah's interest is flattering to a nation of chippy self-doubters like us, her audience here is small — about 150,000 viewers a day, on average. Back home, it is a different story. Though her peak (12.6 million in 1992) is long behind her, the program still pulls more than 7 million viewers a day, way more than her nearest rivals.

And to those American viewers, Australia is something else again: a dream destination but a nightmare journey. This country is both the perfect product and an intractable problem. Who better to solve it, and to sell it, than Oprah?

OPRAH Winfrey was born poor, in Mississippi in 1954, but exactly how poor has been a matter of debate. She never had dolls or store-bought clothes and she kept cockroaches as pets, or so she told early interviewers. But numerous family members have since disputed those, and many other, claims, including that she was repeatedly sexually abused from the age of nine.

Kitty Kelley's book Oprah: A Biography, released in April, builds a convincing portrait of Oprah as a self-mythologiser, given to conflating elements of her story to make a more fascinating one, or of simply fabricating aspects of her life. Meticulously researched though it is, you might dismiss Kelley's book as muck-raking were it not for the fact Oprah's success has been built so prominently on the foundation of her personal "journey".

Poor girl to billionaire — with a personal fortune of $US2.7 billion ($A2.74 billion) as of September, according to For-bes; runaway street kid to suburban favourite — her audience is predominantly white and middle class; sexual abuse victim to survivor. Oprah is "we shall overcome" made flesh.

Oh, but so much flesh. As Kelley tells it, beneath the veneer of shiny-shiny success that Oprah has long projected there lies a deep layer of self-loathing. "I never was happy when I was fat," Oprah said in 1988, after shedding more than 30 kilograms in a fasting diet. The show on which she revealed her diet secrets remains her highest-rating episode. On it, she famously entered "pulling a little red wagon loaded with 67 pounds of greasy, white animal fat," Kelley writes. "Bending down, she tried to lift the bag of blubber. 'Is this gross or what? It's amazing to me I can't lift it, but I used to carry it around every day.' "

It was an indelible image that would come back to haunt her as the weight piled back on, but while the hubris lost her some fans, her ongoing body image problems did not.

Over the years, Oprah has allowed audiences to feel they know her by virtue of other similarly astonishing acts of self-revelation and sharing. She has invited them along as she turns the trauma of her own past (sexual abuse, drug use, a teenage pregnancy and the death of her baby shortly after birth) into a springboard for discussion, a public de-shaming of previously taboo topics.

Always, she stands front and centre as the shining example of the power to rebuild. "I did it", she seems to say. "So can you."

Important as her success is in this message, what prevents it, to a degree at least, from being mere gloating is that it was preceded by — and, in the case of her ongoing weight battle, interspersed with — failure. As Eva Illouz, author of the book Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery, puts it: "What is being exposed [on her show] are not 'events' that occur in the 'real' world as much as the plots and the subplots of her psychological struggle with herself. The therapeutic biography in turn enables Oprah to capitalise on her failures by recycling them into a narrative of victory and overcoming."

Oprah's Book Club — so powerful a forum, according to Janice Peck, author of The Age of Oprah, that inclusion immediately increases a book's print run by 500,000 copies — has tended to favour selections that mirror her own narrative arc. "Mostly, she chose sad stories written by women about women who survived misery and pain to find redemption," writes Kelley.

Oprah has looked for the same triumphal march in her health and well-being fixations. Dress for your body, eat yourself fitter, learn to have a better sex life: they've all been part of Oprah's exhortation to her audience to "live your best life", a mission statement that was adopted holus-bolus by New York writer and yoga teacher Robyn Okrant for all of 2008. The exercise produced a sometimes amusing blog, and the realisation that while some of Oprah's advice is great, you're really better off living your own life. Okrant's book Living Oprah has not yet been mentioned on Ms Winfrey's show.

Throughout, Oprah has looked for experts and authors and life stories that support her central message, that the only impediment to you realising your full potential is you. And in The Secret, the 2006 self-help book by one-time Australian TV producer Rhonda Byrne, Oprah found the ur-text she'd long sought. "I took God out of the box," Oprah told her viewers as she introduced the book for the first time in February 2007. Later, she told Larry King: "The message of The Secret is the message that I've been trying to share with the world on my show for the past 21 years."

Her endorsement of the book helped it on its way to global sales of more than 4 million (plus another 2 million on DVD). The Washington Post reported that the week before The Secret made its first appearance on Oprah's show, it had sold 18,000 copies. The next week it sold 101,000, and after a second appearance on the show on February 16, sales reached 190,000 copies.

The message that had so excited Oprah could be distilled to this: you get what you deserve. Give off negative energy, bad things will happen to you. Give off good vibes, you'll get all you wish for.

It was, wrote Peter Birkenhead in online magazine Salon, a message of great "venality".

"Why 'venality'?" he wrote. "Because, with survivors of Auschwitz still alive, Oprah writes . . . 'you create the circumstances of your life with the choices you make every day'. 'Venality' because Oprah, in the age of AIDS, is advertising a book that says, 'You cannot catch anything unless you think you can' . . . 'Venality' because Oprah, from a studio within walking distance of Chicago's notorious Cabrini Green Projects, pitches a book that says, 'The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts'."

Oprah eventually put some distance between herself and Byrne's book, but there is little doubt she clings to the central idea that we can all be everything we want to be, just so long as we want it enough.

It is an empowering message but a toxic one, too, underpinned by both a sense of entitlement and a need for deep pockets. Oprah's audiences are taught to believe they should have the things they want not because they need them or they have earned them but because, like the glamorous stars of those Revlon ads, they deserve them. And, implicitly, because they can afford them.

There is an inevitable link between the path to happiness and fulfilment Oprah-style and the ability to pay the toll. On Oprah's "diet secrets" show, she made frequent reference to the protein supplement that had changed her life (albeit briefly); the company that sold it later claimed there had been a million attempts to get through to the toll-free number that flashed on screen while Oprah spruiked its wares.

Oprah's allure is equal parts inspiration and aspiration. She makes her fabulous life and famous friends seem simultaneously accessible (hey, she's just like us) and impossibly out of reach (how come Tom Cruise never jumped my couch?)

Her frequent gestures of generosity seem both genuine (the leadership school for young women in South Africa on which she has spent $40 million) and calculated to garner maximum media interest ("Everyone gets a car!"; "You're all going to Australia! You and you and you!"). Oprah likes to help but she also likes to help herself.

Now, before we know it, Oprah will be here, along with 300 of her audience members on an all-expenses-paid trip of a lifetime.

There's a price tag, of course — $4 million of taxpayer money — but the rewards could be worth many times that figure. If all goes according to plan, the visitors will have a ball, and they will head back to the US to tell all their friends about how wonderful Australia is.

No doubt their friends will furrow their brows and ask them about the flight, and they will say: "Yeah, the journey's really tough, but in the end it's totally worth it."

And on a couch somewhere, Oprah will smile sweetly, nod her head knowingly and say in that deep voice of hers: "You better believe it."

FURTHER READING

Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery, Eva Illouz, Columbia University Press

Living Oprah, Robyn Okrant, HarperCollins

Oprah, Kitty Kelley, Allen and Unwin

Oprah's World, Nancy Franklin, New Yorker, 2008,

Oprah's Ugly Secret, Peter Birkenhead, Salon, 2007,