WE have a new Miss Australia and she's nothing like the stereotype you're expecting.
Flinders University medical experts and animation company MonkeyStack believe they have created a computer avatar, named Nurse Cora, that represents Australia's "universal woman". 
"She got dark hair, brown eyes, olive skin, is a healthy size 12 - apart from, say, Icelandic or Norwegian she has a universal look," Flinders Professor of Nursing Robyn Clark said.
"She easily could be Spanish, Thai, Indian ... you could not really tell. We wanted to go for a generic look.
"We live in such a wonderful multicultural society and wanted a look that people could identify with." English-speaking Nurse Cora is part of a trial at Flinders Medical Centre where heart attack patients can take her home on a loan tablet to play games with her aimed at improving their knowledge of heart attacks symptoms.
Nurse Cora may be the "universal woman" in looks but her slender frame - chosen as a healthy size - is a light weight compared to the genuine Ms Average who weighs 71.1kg and stands at 161.8cm, according to the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics data. It also reports more than 300 ancestries were separately identified in the 2011 Census.
"The most commonly reported were English (36 per cent) and Australian (35 per cent).
A further six of the leading ten ancestries reflected the European heritage in Australia with the two remaining ancestries being Chinese (4 per cent) and Indian (2 per cent)," it states. But this avatar is a world away from the Na'vi princess Neytiri of Avatar movie fame or athletic warrior Lara Croft from the gaming world.
Nurse Cora's mission, in an app developed by cardiovascular experts, is to school people in recognising the symptoms of a heart attack.After the trial, the free app is expected to revert to the style of other games where people can choose their own multilingual avatar, including males and blondes, although the focus remains on medical education.