Choosing my executioners examiners

I've been having examiner issues. The Australian system is different from the USA, and our university is slightly different again from other Australian places, so I should give a little background. There is usually no defense for PhD students. (We are defenseless; don't hurt us!). But the dissertation itself is examined by two or three external examiners. They are officially selected by a student's committee, but in practise, students themselves provide a shortlist, and the committee usually uses people from that.

There are a lot of considerations when it comes to choosing examiners. For one thing, they can't be dead.

You might scoff, but that rules out a large number of people in my bibliography.

They should be senior. And powerful. And preferably someone you might come in contact with on the job market, since that way they'll be familiar with your work. They can't be anyone you have been in contact with while writing the dissertation.

Legend has it that Americans make the cushiest examiners, because they are used to a PhD thesis being only a part of grad school, rather than the be-all-and-end-all of it, and our dissertations, which are, after all, all we have been doing for the entire time, usually compare favourably in terms of thoroughness, and in the size of the question(s) addressed.

It is also said that the more elderly the examiner, the more allowances they make for us poor ignorant younglings. It's the just-tenured you have to watch out for, as they see themselves as gatekeepers of the field. And anyone who hasn't examined a thesis before apparently feels pressure to do an exceptionally "thorough" job. And we doesn't like thoroughness, does we, my precious?

Then there's the consideration that, the more they know about your topic, the pickier they will be; but on the other hand, the better the final document will be after you incorporate their suggested revisions. Ideally you want someone who is generous enough that they won't fail you, but fussy enough to force you to revise to the best of your ability.

Finally, a financial consideration. While it is expected that at least one examiner should be from outside Australia, having three overseas examiners is frowned upon, since any one of them is allowed to request an oral defense, and then the university has to foot the bill to fly them halfway across the world. (This happens more rarely than you might think, given that all they have to do is tick a box and they get an all-expenses-paid trip to Australia.)

Anyway, I've finally picked out four names of non-threatening yet relatively famous non-dead (undead?) people—one in Australia, two in the USA, and one in Europe—and my committee gets to narrow it down to two of them.

Now to go back to the places in the dissertation where I have discussed their work, and make sure it's free of unnecessary snark...