Trevor,
I'm going to be on the road for a couple of days. Here is an article on Merleau-Ponty. it shows how he overcame empiricism, which lies at the heart of Australian materialism:

"For the empiricist, sensations are simple "raw feels" or "qualia"... which are individuated by their intrinsic character....They lack meaning or intentionality, or anything like the structure of a concept or general type ...They are individual bits of unstructured data. But for Merleau-Ponty, even the most basic and primitive data given to consciousness are intentional/directed; following Husserl and Sartre, he thinks that "all consciousness is consciousness of something".... The most "elementary event is already invested with meaning", and carries with it a kind of gestalt -- a differentiation of structure into figure and ground..."

"Not having recourse to pre-structured, intentional perceptual states, the empiricist is, Merleau-Ponty's view, forced into the position of having to make everything other than basic sensation into judgement. ....Anything that goes beyond what's immediately given in the stimulus/basic sensation (like, say, that what I see has a backside, or is a human being) must be seen as some kind of inference, hypothesis, or drawing of conclusions in the mind which take sensation as premises. This transforms the world that we actually live in and care about -- that of human action, the social world of everyday life -- from a reality perceived and acted on to a mere artifact of associations...The empiricist comes up with what it is that the mind "adds" to sensation by "building up from it" by a kind of formula: By subtracting what's actually "in" the proximal stimulus from what's "in" the structured perceptual information, we're left with what it is that the mind "adds" to the stimulus."