My daughter’s at that stage where if she sees something outlandish, she wants it explained. She, then, didn’t balk at striding up to the man with the straggly hair and mad, staring eyes and demand, “Why have you got so much Coke?”

I reacted like any half-decent father would if their six-year-old was waltzing towards potential danger, reaching out and grabbing her arm and pulling her backwards, all ready to read the ‘don’t talk to strangers’ riot act. This, after all, was surely a madman she was approaching. Sweat glistened off his face and arms, pooling in large wet, stains around his armpits. He was shaking, eyes flitting left and right, a mixture of excitement, fear and anger in his gaze.

In front of him, he pushed a shopping trolley. In it was what had peaked my little girl’s curiosity – it was chock full of cartons of Coca Cola. There must have been a dozen 24 can packs in there. He simply couldn’t have forced any more in. There was nothing else. Just a load of red and white cartons of Coke.

Registering my daughter’s question, he stopped, startled. For a second I saw apprehension flit across his forehead, a worry that perhaps this little girl and her father might be after his treasure, might want to pilfer his pop, carry away his Coke. He stepped in front of the trolley, protectively, and shifted his piercing gaze from my daughter to me.

“It’s on special!” he barked. I looked blankly back at him. “Special!” he repeated and actually giggled, before pointing back behind himself. At that point, the car park of Ocean Keys Shopping Mall in Perth’s northern suburbs suddenly became the final scene of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers.  All around me, coming at me and my child from all directions, were similarly wide-eyed and vacant souls, shuffling quickly along, pushing their own trolleys. Their own trolleys full of cartons of Coca Cola.

The world span for a moment, panic hit me. I wanted to run, but then realised an old man was leaping out from behind his coke trolley towards me, something in his hand. His face came close to mine, the madness in his eyes half glee, half panic, as though his brain had fused. He thrust the piece of paper he was holding into my hand. It was a photocopied, flyer. ‘Buy one carton, get one free’, it said.

“There’s no limit!” the old man shrieked. “No limit, I tells you! You can buy as many as you like! No limit!”

And at that moment, I realised that shopping in Australia isn’t a pastime. It isn’t a national institution. It isn’t a distraction. Shopping is a disease that has taken over the country. And, just as Donald Sutherland eventually found, it’s too late to do anything about it.

Let me explain. Australia is a new country, one that’s still being built. Cranes tower over metropolitan skylines and its cities are expanding at a startling rate. Perth, my home in this dusty land, is now the longest city in the world as well as the most remote, thanks to its trait of growing quickly, but sticking religiously to the coast. And as the expansion continues a pace, new communities are popping up, each bordering the next, each will have a cluster of houses and each will have its own sprawling shopping centre.

Here, the malls are the centre of civilisation. The communities revolve around them. Physically, they are the biggest things in a country that likes big things. Where old cultures will have skylines dominated by cathedral spires, here the building behemoths celebrate consumerism, not deities.

An average mall will boast scores of retailers all pushing their wares in air-conditioned comfort; the big ones will house hundreds of outlets. But all of them will have at their hub at least a couple of the big four – Coles and Woolworths, for groceries, and their department store cousins, K-Mart and Target. Parking is laid on for thousands of cars, many malls will have their own train station. Suckling at the steady supply of customers are the fast food joints – so large are these places that McDonald’s, Hungry Jacks, KFC, Subway et al can happily nestle next to each other, such is the demand for fast food to sate the appetites of the shopping throngs. It’s not unusual to find a cinema on site, but the key to the malls is, and always will be, retail therapy.

And they’re not just large. They are plentiful too. From where I sit tapping this out, I’m within a ten-minute drive from at least a dozen of the things. Yes, they vary in size but two of them would give Lakeside back home a bit of an inferiority complex.

But, while there’s small, regular and large to choose from mall-wise, that’s the only real variation that’s on offer. Each and every one looks and feels the same. An expanse of white concrete, sliding doors, acres of boiling car park, bland, inoffensive art, Wiggles roundabouts for the kiddies. Jesters. Coles. JB Hifi. Big W. Woolworths. Patacake. Nab. Friendlies. You think the British high street is going to pot? That every town centre you left behind looked the same thanks to HMV, Tesco, Waterstone’s and Starbucks? Sorry, but that kind of anonymity pales beside the shopping expanses of Australia. Here they’re all as similar as the Emperor’s clone army. At least back home you’d know whether you were walking past Bath’s WH Smith or Bolton’s. Here, Rooty Hill’s K-Mart is, you’ll quickly work out, the spit of St Kilda’s.

But that similarity, dependability and regularity is the key to the rise of the shopping zombie in Australia – because that similarity, dependability and regularity is how Australians like it. It’s the sheep thing. Diversity doesn’t work here. Shopping may be the primary recreation activity of the populace but they don’t want to think about it. They don’t want to search out little backstreet vinyl stores on the off chance of stumbling across an A&M version of Anarchy in the UK – they want to go to Target and pick the new Pink off the shelves. They don’t want a tailor to measure them for a suit that’ll take a week to put together: they want one for $99 off the rack outside Man to Man.

So with a plethora of almost identical malls offering our nation of shopping zombies a refuge in which to spend their hard-earned cash with the smallest amount of mental effort, inevitably the goods and chattels our consumer junkies end up loading into the back of their utes become almost identical too. The choice is limited, because the shops are limited. You know that if you’ve bought a vase in K-Mart, there’ll be a dozen other sideboards in your suburb sporting the same one. As such, the ‘we are one’-ness of the population blossoms.

There is, however, a snag for your average shopping zombie. The things they are driven to buy cost money, and money, even in this lucky country, doesn’t grow on trees. Like every good junkie, then, there are times when their desire to feed their addiction is thwarted by the lack of the basic staple of their malaise. Your crackhead will run out of crack, your shopping zombie will sometimes not have enough money to get the plasma TV, blu-ray and box set of Are You Being Served DVDs he truly desires.

Fear not, though, because like all good suppliers the powers that be behind the retail industry know how to keep the proles spending. They have two basic tacks. First up, is preying on the average Australian’s slavering elation at the thought of getting a bargain. It was this ploy that ensured that after that surreal Saturday afternoon in Ocean Keys, hundreds of families across its surrounding suburbs woke up on Sunday determined not to question why the garage was full of cartons of Coke. It may have been that they didn’t even like Coke that much, but the key was that they had got a bargain – and in this instance a big one. Retailers here, you see, aren’t as generous as back home. Buy one get one free may be par for the course in Tesco and Sainsbury, but you’re lucky to get five for the price of four in Woolies or Coles.

A more intricate way of promoting the bargain myth is with the Australian approach to selling petrol. With memories of paying two quid a litre for unleaded back home still painfully fresh, it’s hard to complain about fuel prices here but the way they go about determining how much you hand over is just weird. They call it the fuel cycle, which means the cost is never the same from one day to the next. And it doesn’t just go up, it goes down as well. In a nutshell, then, you can be paying $1.20 a litre on Tuesday, then drive past the same servo on Thursday and see it being sold at $1.07. No one seems to be able to explain exactly why this to-ing and fro-ing goes on, but it does – and it’s inspired a bizarre culture among bargain-hunting motorists. Newspapers and TV news bulletins report daily the price of petrol in various locations, prompting convoys of Falcons and Camrys to zip up and down the freeway on the promise of buck-a-litre in Leederville or diesel for one-twenty in Yanchep. I’m not going to be the one to point out the amount of petrol they use price-chasing negates the saving of a few cents, but I can say just how annoying it is when your local garage is selling the cheapest in the city and you’re faced with a twenty-minute wait for a pump to become free.

Moving on, sometimes even saving money on something you don’t actually need isn’t enough to keep the punters parting with their cash. When that happens, the retailers turn to the devil’s own device – interest free credit.

As you wander through the football-field sized expanses of white goods and ‘home entertainment’ or amble aimlessly along surrounded as far as the eye can see by sofas, sideboards and reclining TV chairs, the brightly worded signs will whisper their evil spell. Six-months’ interest free, they’ll say. Buy now, pay nothing till 2012, they’ll say. Then the subtext will hit you – you can afford this 48-inch HD-ready plasma TV, even if you only have 48 bucks in your bank account. And not just that…you deserve it.

And again and again, we all fall for it. I say we, because, yes, I needed a new washing machine, so got one on interest free terms. I bought it when we first landed. They gave me a card with a credit limit on it which was way more than the price of my new white goods. So I bought a few other bits and pieces, maxed it out. The few other bits and pieces weren’t interest free. The interest-free period on the washing machine ran out after six months and, bang, two years later and I’m still paying for the stuff I bought that week – and 29 per cent interest per annum on what I owe them.

OK, the credit card plague is worldwide – there’s no shortage of £20k-a-year wage slaves back home struggling under the weight of debts spiralling into six figures – but the push to take on credit here somehow seems greater. When we bought our dishwasher, for instance, the man behind the counter seemed quite upset when we refused to be deterred from our desire to pay cash.

So, the shopping epidemic in Australia is officially out of control, thanks to the overlords of consumerism duping the masses into buying things they don’t need under the illusion of saving a few cents and lending them money they’ll never have to keep up with the latest in games console technology. And yet, somehow, the big, red land sits smugly outside the effects of the global economic meltdown. Put simply, the economy’s still strong despite a nation of retail junkies buying anything that isn’t nailed down. Or, perhaps that should be, the economy’s still strong thanks to a nation of retail junkies buying anything that isn’t nailed down.

I’m no economist, so it’s difficult for me to explain why in this spend, spend, spend culture – the same culture that brought Britain to its knees and really spoilt the party for Barack and his chums when they took over at the White House – doesn’t dent the prosperity of my new homeland, but I’m going to hazard a guess and say it’s simply because a lot of the dazed and confused zombies who throng around the malls day in day out are actually very well off.

Here in Australia getting cashed up isn’t difficult. Thanks to the resources industries, the outback is metaphorically – and occasionally literally – paved with gold. Digging things up involves people and those people are paid well because the bosses have to fight to get the staff. The least qualified of prospective employees, then, can drive a train full of iron ore – which urban mythology says involves pressing a big green go button and then falling asleep for 12 hours while a computer does the rest – and earn the same per year as Gordon Brown. If you’re willing to kip for four weeks out of six in a mobile home in the outback, you can earn the kind of riches that’d make a surgeon blush back home.

The result then is a hell of a lot of people with loads of cash and precious little to do with it. What options do they have other than fishing or watching an AFL game? Not much, to be honest, which is why every weekend the malls will again teem with people who surely could have bought what ever they needed at some other time in the week.

The sad truth is, then, that like poor Mr Sutherland, there’s nothing we can do about the shopping epidemic in Australia. The only solution is to lay down and let the change take us, and join our new brothers in consumer hell, surrounded by home theatre systems, personalised numberplates, spa baths and shoes that once belonged to some bloke who played three times for Geelong tastelessly framed and hung on the wall. It’s not all that bad, I promise – after all, they’re doing three for the price of two on spaghetti hoops at Coles this week.