I'm not sure which city you are leaving from, but Sydney Airport has a surprisingly good range of small gifts. For example, one of the shops has contemporary Aboriginal art fridge magnets, notebooks, luggage labels, tea-towels etc. They had a quite beautiful, brilliantly coloured stubby holder. (I'm not sure if that mode of cooling beer has taken anywhere else but maybe someone could use it as a pencil holder instead?

Again in Sydney, the Australian Museum has a very good range of gifts for children: native animals (complete with sound effects), books. You could take Austraian children's classics like: Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, the Muddle-Headed Wombat, The Magic Pudding.

Museum of Sydney has a good range of Australian-themed items that are nicely designed: coasters for example.

I wouldn't take anyone in Europe either tim-tams (I find them far too sweet) or Vegemite.

Susan -

I don't know about Europe, but stubby holders are well entrenched in the US - we call them koozies.

What is a tschotke? How do you say it?

Kay

Koozies, that's a great name for them, Melnq8.

I took one recently to Germany for a friend who had studied in Australia, partly as a joke, but he really liked it.