That’s why the role of Matron Grace Wilson in Anzac Girls - starting tonight on ABC - represents a career leap for Caroline Craig. “I often get cast as really tough characters,” she says. “Women who are … I don’t want to say ballbreakers, but well, some of them are ballbreakers.

“I don’t think anyone imagined me in this series.  Once you’ve played enough policewomen, people see you as a policewoman. I asked to audition, because I heard about the series and I knew that Felicity Packard was writing it, and I knew she was a great writer.

“This is the first time I’ve played a matron, and such a gentle character. I actually really struggled with that. In the audition I remember having to be pulled back a bit because women didn’t really speak to men in the same way that they do now. Women had a different role in those days, so they expressed themselves differently. That doesn’t mean they weren’t as tough – in a lot of ways they were tougher – but they couldn’t be as direct as men.”

But Craig disputes my proposition that Matron Wilson would never have sung in a punk band, which was Craig’s first job out of Melbourne University in the 1990s. “I think Grace would have loved Vinyl Discharge. That was one of the greatest things about the character, I think, that she had this real Aussie dry sense of humour. That’s something that the Australian Nurses Federation told me.

“She wasn’t afraid to cry or laugh or bend the rules a little bit to keep the nurses’ spirits up. She was very wry, but never disrespectful, about the military and the way the hierarchy, all the blokes, treated the nurses. The army didn’t want the nurses there, they felt [they] were in danger and they should have been protected. War is no place for the weaker sex, they thought, and she and her nurses really disproved that.

“She had to learn how to charm these guys, how to get them onside. She says towards the end: ‘We nurses have been fighting a battle – not just the enemy, but also the army.’”

Craig, now living in New York with a newborn baby, admits to missing her life as a rock chick. “Vinyl Discharge started as a joke … but we won a few competitions, Battle of the Bands, we did quite a few gigs around Melbourne. It was poppy, kitsch kind of music, a little bit punk. I was the lead singer, wore cute op-shop dresses, fake fur, a lot of glitter. It was really really fun. I’d like to sing again – definitely, any opportunity.”

But Craig says Anzac Girls is her favourite project, ahead of any role she’s ever done, even including Vinyl Discharge. “I think it’s a very important story. I feel lucky to be part of that. I was drawn to the character because she is tough and vulnerable at the same time. She’s not wielding a gun, which was a great relief.”

Anzac Girls starts Sunday, August 10, at 8.30pm on ABC.

The evil American

Josh Lawson is best known in Australia for playing sweet, innocent guys in such series as The Librarians, Sea Patrol, Blue Heelers, Home and Away and Thank God You’re Here. At first sight, his character in the US series House of Lies, which resumes next week on Foxtel, seems to be in that same tradition – the only likeable individual among a gang of sleazy manipulators. But Lawson warns that Doug Guggenheim is about to change.

“In this third season of House of Lies, you start to see Doug is the one to watch,” Lawson told me from Los Angeles during the week. “Without question, Doug’s the smartest. The others had better beware that he doesn’t develop cynicism. The moment he does, he becomes their biggest competition. The only thing holding him back is that he’s a sycophant, a follower. The second he gets the taste of leadership, we see that Doug is actually not as nice as he claims to be.

"There’s a little baby shark inside of Doug. If he eats enough fish, they’ll find the evil lurking within.”

Because Lawson is also a writer and director (his movie The Little Death opens around Australia on September 25), he has been able to flesh out the character, who was described only as “obnoxious” and “superior” before the show started.

“This sometimes happens in an audition, where you go, ‘I’m going to make a really bold decision and it’s either going to make me sink or swim.’ I came in and made Doug a lot more low-status. Instead of Doug being the alpha male, as he kind of came across on the page - really intelligent, really arrogant - I made him awkward, so the arrogance didn’t quite fit.

"You see him being arrogant but at the same time he’s so pathetic, the arrogance becomes really funny. After I got the job, the show’s creator, Matt Carnahan, and I were able to refine that a little bit and make sure we had a three-dimensional character.”

Does Lawson have any trouble maintaining his American accent? “Nah, nah mate, that’s one thing I pride myself on. I’m too militant about it. I literally live with that accent. I’ve been here [in the US] for seven years now. Once I start shooting, from day one until we wrap 12 episodes, I’m American all the time on set. A lot of the crew have never heard my Australian accent.

“I pick up on lots of Australians when they slip. I don’t want to sound arrogant but I’ve never had to do a second take because of the accent.  I’m pretty bang on with that. I have a lot of flaws as an actor, but the American accent is not one of them.”

House of Lies resumes on August 20 at 8.30pm on the Foxtel channel FX.

A sporting neologism

Now that Channel Seven has secured the rights to show the next two Olympic Games, we’re going to have to get used to a new word: Olympism. Seven announced last week that its contract with the International Olympic Committee included a guarantee that for the next 10 years it would “promote Olympism”.

We’ve heard of racism and sexism, so what might Olympism mean? Surely not prejudice against athletes. You might find some assistance in this definition of the suffix “-ism” from the Merriam Webster Dictionary:

“1 act, practice, process (criticism, plagiarism); manner of action or behaviour characteristic of a (specified) person or thing (animalism); prejudice or discrimination on the basis of a (specified) attribute  (racism, sexism).

“2 state, condition, property (barbarianism); abnormal state or condition resulting from excess of a (specified) thing (alcoholism) or marked by resemblance to (such) a person or thing (giantism).

“3 doctrine, theory, religion (Buddhism); adherence to a system or a class of principles (stoicism).

“4 characteristic or peculiar feature or trait (colloquialism).”

We can safely conclude that the word Olympism was constructed in the same way as alcoholism. We will soon experience the symptoms of Seven’s addiction.

For a daily update, go to smh.com.au/entertainment/blog/the-tribal-mind.