A traveller’s travails

I’m starting to think I’m jinxed. Not in a really bad way – I haven’t lost my job or my life savings or my best friend or my health. But I can’t help feeling I’m being put to the test: every time I leave Sydney something goes wrong.

I’ve always thought of myself as a pretty savvy traveller. I’ve visited Cambodia, Zimbabwe and Russia without encountering any calamities. While abroad I’ve never been pickpocketed, mugged, arrested or even ripped off by border guards. I’ve never lost my passport or my money, I’ve never missed a flight and I’ve never slept through my stop. (I’d be grateful if you could all touch some wood on my behalf at this point.) But Australia’s travel gods seem to have it in for me. First there was the Canberra debacle, then I nearly ended up stranded in Adelaide with nothing but the t-shirt and shorts I was wearing (story follows), now Qantas have kindly speeded up the process of replacing my wardrobe by losing my bag.

I have Crystal Palace football club to thank for not being given an unexpected opportunity to enjoy Adelaide’s famous wineries and restaurants at my leisure. I was travelling on the Indian Pacific train service between Sydney and Perth, which stops halfway at Adelaide. As this is the only major city along the route the train usually halts here for three-and-a-half hours, which is apparently just long enough to visit one of the vineyards. We were running late so only had a couple of hours, but my plans were rather less ambitious – I wanted to have a decent cup of tea and wander around the city centre. What could possibly go wrong?

Adelaide won me over very quickly. Given its “city of churches” tag (as a comedian pointed out recently, Rome might have something to say about this), I was expecting a sedate and conservative country town. But the first street I found myself in was packed with funky al fresco cafes, outdoor sports booking agents and hip clothing shops – the main hazard to pedestrians in Adelaide is posed by skateboards, not mobility scooters. Then there are the airy central squares, the wide streets and the attractive historic buildings that line North Terrace. As many proud locals told me, Adelaide is a very “liveable” city.

It was one of these historic buildings that was my undoing. I was walking along the street, wondering what had happened to all of Sydney’s 19th-century architecture and starting to think about finding a taxi. Then I arrived at Adelaide’s spectacular central railway station. After admiring the neoclassical exterior and vaulted interior, I had a bright idea: why not get a train back to the out-of-town railway terminal at Keswick where the Indian Pacific was waiting? I would save time, money and the environment by not getting a cab.

So I bought my ticket and asked a member of station staff which was the next train to Keswick. Assured it was only two stops away, I was confident I would be back onboard the Indian Pacific in plenty of time. The commuter-packed train set off rather slowly. Wondering when we would get to the first stop, I turned around to look out of the window, just in time to see Keswick station go flying past. After pausing for a moment to let this sink in, I got up and found one of the conductors and told him that his train had not stopped where it was supposed to. Given the circumstances, he was surprisingly helpful. He explained that this was an express service that would not stop until Brighton and tried unsuccessfully to phone me a cab.

Brighton is said to have a lovely beach but that wasn’t going to help me catch my train, which was leaving in 20 minutes. After leaving Adelaide, the Indian Pacific was heading west across Australia’s most barren stretch of land and would not stop for eight hours; I was unlikely to get away with putting that taxi trip on expenses. I realised I had left almost everything on board – my clothes, my computer, my passport and the phone numbers of the people organising the trip. Having ruled out hitchhiking, hotwiring and hijacking, I desperately searched my pockets for an unlikely Get Out Of Adelaide Free card. Then I found one.

The previous night I had got chatting to Joe, the reservations manager for Great Southern Railway, the Indian Pacific’s operating company. He turned out to be one of the few Australians who had heard of Dulwich, the south-east London suburb I am proud to call home. (Plenty of people have heard of Dulwich Hill, the inner-west Sydney suburb where the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, grew up.) His family was originally from the area and – more to the point – he was a huge fan of Crystal Palace FC, whose Selhurst Park ground is just a few miles down the road from my flat. Joe was the only person I swapped business cards with that night.

So I called Joe’s mobile and, via his wife, asked in my calmest voice if he could pass the message onto the Indian Pacific crew that Sam had accidentally found himself in Brighton and might possibly be a bit late for the train. I thought this might buy me a couple of minutes while I invented matter teleportation.

Then, as I stood outside Brighton station trying to persuade myself that miracles do happen, a car pulled up and a man bundled me into the back. Happy to be going anywhere, I didn’t protest, and it took me a few moments to realise that Joe had come to rescue me. He had happened to be in the area picking up his mother, a transplanted Londoner, when I called. Because all his family was in the car, the only place where I could fit was in the boot.

So here I was crammed into the back of the car, squeezed around a pushchair, keeping my head low so the police wouldn’t stop us, panicking about whether the train would leave without me, having a polite conversation with a charming grandmother about the relative merits of East London and South Australia (South Australia won). It was pretty surreal.

Needless to say, I made the train with five minutes to spare, and the first beer went down pretty quickly. Thank you Joe.

Qantas’s efforts to derail my trip are rather more mundane. Overnight on Friday I flew back from Darwin, where I had been covering the appeal of the man convicted of murdering British backpacker Peter Falconio. The flight landed in Sydney at 6am but my rucksack didn’t. The Qantas baggage staff have been extremely helpful - and polite, even after my 20th phone call - but so far they haven’t managed to trace my bag. So it looks like I’m going to be wearing trainers into work today.

Keeping it rail

This is a (slightly rushed) travel feature about a press trip from Sydney to Perth by rail I went on a couple of weeks ago. It was a lot of fun - I will post some pictures and extra tales if I get time.

Taking Christmas to the outback

A long silver train has halted in the middle of a vast, empty plain that stretches away as far as the eye can see in all directions. There is no station, no platform and the nearest human settlement is a bumpy two hours drive away across the dusty bush. Nonetheless an excited crowd of Aboriginal children and adults has gathered to meet the train. Four young men climb down from one of the carriages, incongruously dressed for the burning 40C heat in smart black shirts, bright red ties and impossibly shiny patent leather shoes. It looks like a visitation from another planet. Then the well-tailored men start singing a cappella, the children join in, and this bleak outback scene is transformed into a heart-warming celebration of togetherness. More than a few of those watching find themselves holding back tears.

This is probably the strangest concert boy band Human Nature have performed since they formed at school in Sydney 17 years ago. The group is here in Watson, a remote South Australian community in the middle of the immense Nullarbor Plain, as guests on this year’s Indian Pacific Christmas train. The annual service, carrying a popular Australian singer or group and an ever-jovial Santa, aims to bring festive cheer to some of the most isolated people living along the rail route. This year Human Nature performed songs from their latest album of Motown covers – hence their snappy dressing, although reasonably enough they left off their suit jackets in Watson.

The Indian Pacific is one of the world’s great railway journeys. Cutting all the way across the continent, between the two oceans that give the service its name, the train offers a means of experiencing Australia’s vastness in comfort. Travelling the 4,352km between Sydney and Perth by rail takes you three-and-a-half days and transports you from bustling city suburbs to eerie ghost towns and wild bush landscapes.

Gazing out of the train window, you get fleeting glimpses of the outback’s tough beauty and austere way of life: lonely farmsteads surrounded by rusting utes and crumbling sheds, sheep grazing on salt lakes, towering mine works, crooked skeletal trees poking out of a land that often looks more dead than alive. This is Australia’s backyard, where much of its national identity was forged. Flying from coastal city to coastal city cuts out the country’s heart; the Indian Pacific is a way of getting from A to B that reminds you about all the forgotten Cs and Ds in between.

Many people worry they will get bored on such a long train journey, but the time passes much quicker than you might expect – it’s worth bringing a good book, but you may not get very far into it. Chatting to fellow passengers in the lounge bar and enjoying the excellent on-board meals whiles away the hours, but the main attraction is the remarkably varied scenery. You can spend hours just watching the soil colour turn from rusty brown to faded orange to burnt red. The land rises and falls, moving from dramatically plunging valleys in the Blue Mountains to the flat monotony of the Nullarbor. If you look carefully you might see kangaroos or the graceful Australian wedge-tail eagle that is the symbol of the Indian Pacific. On bendy stretches of track you can see the train stretching out in front of you like a silver snake sliding its way through the bush. Watching the world go by has never been so mesmerising.

This is not to say that you won’t appreciate the regular stops. After a while staggering down the corridor of a shuddering train carriage becomes second nature, but it is still a relief to get back onto a surface that doesn’t shake under your feet. Many travellers break their journey halfway in Adelaide and spend a couple of days enjoying the city’s mellow atmosphere and outstanding food and wine. The Indian Pacific’s other stops are likely to be places you haven’t visited before. Normal services don’t call at Watson, but they do halt at the once-thriving railway community of Cook (present-day population: two) and the colourful Western Australian mining town of Kalgoorlie, whose seedy-but-charming pubs are an experience in themselves. Tours of several of the towns along the route are available as long as the train is running on time.

By the time the train pulled into East Perth station, my head was full of the wild, strange country that fills the huge spaces between Australia’s cities. After a series of brief encounters with the simple, hard life of the outback, it was a jolt to return to the impatient buzz of urban streets. The Indian Pacific reminds you that travelling is about more than just reaching your destination: my flight from Perth back to Sydney took only three-and-a-half hours, but what it saved in time it took away in experiences.

A Tale of Two Suburbs: Lakemba

Sydney becomes more faded the further west you travel. The paint on the houses is flakier, the cars have more rust spots, even the sunlight seems to lose some of its dazzle. This is where most of the city’s 4.5 million residents live, half a world away from the gleaming skyscrapers and glinting ocean that draw the tourists and the bankers seeking a better life.

Heading southwest from the city centre, you pass through places whose names still evoke the homesickness of the English settlers arriving in this harsh, alien land two centuries ago: Sydenham, Lewisham, Dulwich Hill, Canterbury. The western suburbs blend into one another, and you could easily drive straight through Lakemba without noticing anything unusual about it. Indeed you could spend all day walking around Lakemba without seeing anything out of the ordinary. Yet Lakemba has come to symbolise worrying divisions in modern Australian society: between the Europeans who have been here some time and more recent arrivals from the Middle East and Asia, between Muslims and non-Muslims, between good citizens and those who are dangerously “un-Australian”.

On the face of it this seems unfair. Lakemba is a predominantly Muslim suburb and home to Australia’s most important mosque, but it is hardly a fortress of segregation. Lakemba is not a no-go area but most Australians never go there. Too far west to draw middle class restaurant-goers with its Middle Eastern cuisine, it has largely been left alone. Walking down the wide streets, neatly lined with spacious houses and fragrant eucalyptus trees, you see typical Sydney scenes: children playing cricket, young men bent under the bonnets of souped-up cars, Australian flags hanging limply outside homes. The Islamic presence is also obvious, but not overwhelming. A sign in the window of one shop near the train station makes a declaration of war in English and Arabic, but this is only a “WAR OF PRICE”. A woman wearing a veil that completely covers her face uses English to scold her four small children. The notice board outside the local Anglican church pointedly boasts of “serving a culturally diverse community”.

The flags offer a clue to Lakemba’s anxieties. Many of Australia’s 350,000 Muslims feel their commitment to the nation is in question, that they will never be Australian enough for people like the Prime Minister, John Howard, and his centre-right Liberal Party. For some this gives them something to prove: at a bravery awards ceremony in Sydney I met a young Turkish-Australian Muslim who explained his courageous actions in terms of how immigrants should behave to show their pride for their new home. But others are left feeling isolated and angry.

Lakemba has come to be one of the main battlegrounds for these skirmishes over 21st-century Australia’s identity, and Lakemba Mosque at times resembles a citadel under siege. Despite its huge symbolic importance for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the Lebanese-run mosque itself is rather underwhelming: invisible from the busy main road, its immediate neighbours include a petrol station and a window fitter. But visit on a Friday or an important Islamic festival and the street outside the mosque will be jammed with cars and worshippers – an estimated 20,000 people joined the Eid celebrations at Lakemba in October.

This is why Australian politicians nervous about racial conflict and home-grown terrorists keep a careful eye on Lakemba Mosque. In recent weeks there has been plenty to worry about. In September the nation’s most senior Muslim cleric, Sheikh Taj el-Din al-Hilaly, the ageing but sprightly Mufti of Australia and New Zealand, delivered a lesson at the mosque in which he apparently suggested that women who did not wear the veil were inviting rape. “If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside on the street, or in the garden or in the park, or in the backyard without a cover, and the cats come and eat it... whose fault is it, the cats or the uncovered meat? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab [veil], no problem would have occurred,” he said in the Arabic address, which was obtained and translated by The Australian newspaper.

Sheikh al-Hilaly admitted making the comments, but said their meaning had been distorted and insisted he was a strong supporter of women’s rights. The damage had been done, however. The remarks confirmed prejudices about dangerously out-of-touch Islamic clerics and made headlines around the world. More worryingly, they continued to make headlines in Australia for several weeks as politicians lined up to attack the Mufti and Muslim leaders fretted about whether they should distance themselves from him or show a unified front. Sheikh al-Hilaly did not help matters, repeatedly promising to keep quiet but delivering further provocative comments with a mischievous glee that could be described as very Australian.

Most politicians, including Mr Howard, said Sheikh al-Hilaly should be removed from his post, claiming he did not represent the majority of Australia’s law-abiding, well-integrated Muslims. Ordinary Australians were bemused, and in some cases amused: one playful entrepreneur has started selling “Uncovered meat” t-shirts and g-strings featuring a cartoon cat; among the hate mail sent to the mosque was a suspicious package that turned out to contain a can of cat food. Promising to maintain a low profile, at least for now, the Mufti has left Australia on a pilgrimage to Mecca. But he has also insisted he is not going to resign.

A calm has now returned to Lakemba. The bored TV camera crews, photographers and reporters camped outside the mosque have moved on, as have the tough-looking young Middle Eastern men keeping a suspicious watch on them. Despite the hate mail, which came from Muslims and non-Muslims alike, there has been no widespread backlash against Australia’s Islamic communities since Sheikh al-Hilaly’s comments were reported. The president of the mosque’s governing body, the Lebanese Muslim Association, an eloquent lawyer and councillor for Mr Howard’s Liberal Party called Tom Zreika, has steered a careful course between rebuking the Mufti for his remarks and recognising his popularity as a spiritual leader. The only person I met who was outright offensive about Sheikh al-Hilaly – describing him as “that facking fag with his dirty religion” – turned out to be a Lebanese Christian immigrant with more than a few grudges.

But the deceptively still surface does not mean there are no longer any dangerous undercurrents. The authorities realise this: police cars regularly patrol past Lakemba Mosque, on the look out for white thugs rather than Muslim extremists. And journalists realise this: Lakemba continues to feature regularly in front page stories, usually as the home of terrorism suspects or their families.

Sheikh al-Hilaly could be a metaphor for what is wrong with relations between Australia’s Muslims and its Anglo-Saxon majority. Despite living in the country for over 20 years, the Mufti speaks only broken English, albeit punctuated frequently with the word “mate”, and delivers his serious thoughts in Arabic to an audience of Middle Eastern origin. Most Australians feel no need to understand him, and he makes few efforts to explain himself until things come to a head. Lakemba is no ghetto, but it will become one if this failure of talking and listening continues.

Escape from Canberra

Today started rather earlier than I’d planned – at 3am, to be precise. I wasn’t due to start work until 9am, but then I woke up in Canberra, a good 290km from the office.

This wasn’t exactly the plan. After spending all weekend listening to senior Australian Labor MPs insisting that the party leadership wasn’t under threat – all strangely familiar stuff – I had Tuesday and Wednesday off. Given that there was no cricket to watch, I decided to pay a visit to Canberra, Australia’s capital and home to most of its national museums and art collections. Canberra looks pretty close to Sydney on the map and initially I thought I might be able to get there and back in a day. But this would have given me something like six minutes to see all the sights, so I decided to stay overnight and make an early start on Wednesday.

Unfortunately my body wasn’t quite up with the timetable at 6.30am on Wednesday morning. While my still-dreaming mind pictured a graceful gazelle-like leap from the (rather high) top bunk in the youth hostel where I was staying, my sleep-addled carcass performed what can only be described as a splat onto the floor. I escaped lightly: grazes on my left knee, a rather sinister-looking scar on my neck where it made contact with a carelessly-placed table, and painful bruising in my right thumb. I was a bit worried about my thumb, which I need for writing shorthand and giving people the thumbs up, but otherwise felt relieved that the only person who’d seen my gymnastic display was an early-rising Belgian.

I hired a bike and had a great day in Canberra. (An aside: I’d forgotten how difficult it often is to find somewhere to leave your bike. Fortunately Australian Federal Police officers are pretty laid-back about these things, and told me I could leave it anywhere as long as they couldn’t see it.) Canberra’s a funny city. It barely existed 100 years ago, and you could argue that it barely exists now. While Sydney, Perth and Melbourne developed in the places where the European settlers wanted to live – i.e. by the sea – Canberra’s location on a hillside in the middle of wild bushland was chosen as a compromise, based on its being neither Sydney nor Melbourne. But the main problem is that there just don’t seem to be enough people in Canberra. The whole city feels like a museum, or perhaps a giant film set filled with confused bit-part actors. The heavily planned street layout gives Canberra a spacious, airy feel, but it also means the city has no real heart and the attractions are a long way from each other. Still, although I wanted to dislike Canberra, I found myself enjoying its tranquillity and openness.

Conscious that I had to get back to Sydney on Wednesday night, I made sure I was at the bus station in plenty of time. Or at least I would have been if I hadn’t made a mistake about the time of my bus. Greyhound Australia said I should be able to get on the later 7.30pm bus back to Sydney, forgetting to mention that this bus didn’t exist. A helpful woman informed me that there were no more trains or flights that night: I was trapped in Canberra. So after waiting for an hour – I found it strangely reassuring that the attention to detail that went into creating Canberra extends to having drug addicts in its bus station – I made the depressing trudge back to the youth hostel.

After a pretty good night’s sleep I caught the 4.15am bus to Sydney. The service was diverted off the main highway because of bushfires in southern New South Wales, and was about half an hour late getting into Sydney. First stop was the international airport. I decided to get off here and catch a taxi back to Erskineville so I could get changed out of my sweaty t-shirt and shorts. The taxi driver swore when I told him where I wanted to go – Erskineville is only a $20 fare, and he’d been waiting at the airport for 50 minutes – but he was OK about it after I apologised (and tipped him). After a speedy clothes change – worthy I would say of my journalistic hero, Clark Kent – I jumped on a train and managed to get into work just 15 minutes late.

Work was good. I was covering an inquest, but the Coroner put a publication banning order on the whole day’s proceedings so I couldn’t write anything about it. And the family of the poor young woman whose murder was the subject of the inquest offered to buy me a beer at lunchtime. I turned them down: I’d been up since 3am.

Up my street

This is the outside of the apartment in Erskineville, in Sydney's inner west, where I'm staying. I'm about an hour's walk from the city centre and a bit further than that from Coogee beach. Just up the road is Newtown, which is a studenty area full of people with green hair and multiple piercings who tend to wear black. There are also lots of great cheap restaurants, pubs, second hand bookshops and (allegedly) the best coffee shop in the world, although I have yet to find it. Newtown's a lot of fun.



The station is just a few minutes up the road. Along the way you pass these houses, which are pretty typical of Sydney's inner suburbs: cast iron railings, balconies, blinds and flaky paint. They don't look wholly British to me - a lot of them still have almost a frontier town feel.



Trains from Erkskineville Station go to the city in about 15 minutes. The woman who works in the station office in the mornings is amazingly friendly - she told me I wasn't wrapped up warm enough when I bought a ticket to the Blue Mountains - and takes a real interest in the thousands of strangers who pass her window every day. This kind of attitude isn't at all unusual in Australia, but it's very rare in Britain these days.



This house is just up the road from the station, on the way to Newtown. Sydney's local councils have just "declared war" on graffiti artists, but nobody seems to be very bothered about all the graffiti in Newtown - Sydney's respectable mainstream and more colourful subculture generally exist side by side very happily.

Ashes to Ashes

At times it can be a bit intimidating being British in Australia. Mostly when there’s an important sports match between the two nations coming up.

The Ashes definitely falls into this category. The Daily Telegraph, Sydney’s tabloid newspaper, started a “pommie sledging” blog on its website for its readers to submit their favourite terms of abuse for Brits. The current TV adverts for Weet-bix, the Australian equivalent of Weetabix, are accompanied by a song whose lyrics are all about “smashing the poms”. At least two of the papers used the headline ‘FIRST BLOOD’ when Australia’s cricketers beat England in India in the ICC Champions Trophy last week. And the sports pages here probably have more about England’s injury woes than the British ones do. I didn’t have to think twice when I was asked if I wanted to join the work cricket team – as well as being congenitally incapable of batting, bowling or catching the ball (in itself something of a disadvantage), I figured that the second the opposing team heard my accent, the bowling would turn nasty.

It’s nothing personal, mind. The Aussies just like getting behind their team, and they’re rarely sore losers (although admittedly this doesn’t get tested very often).

So I was surprised that there were relatively few people at the Museum of Sydney to see the Ashes urn when I visited on Monday. The urn has been loaned to Australia by the Marylebone Cricket Club in the run-up to the Ashes. Starting in Sydney, it will tour the country in the coming weeks before being returned to the MCC for safe keeping. The accompanying exhibition went through all the well-known legends about the origins of the Ashes series. It reproduced the tongue-in-cheek notice published in the Sporting Times after Australia won at the Oval in 1882 announcing the death of English cricket and saying the body would be cremated and taken to Australia.

But there was also a lot that was new to me. I didn’t know the Sporting Times obituary reflected a contemporary debate in England about the merits of cremation over burial. Or that the tiny, battered terracotta Ashes urn started life as a joke by a group of upper-class Australian women. When England came to Australia in 1882-3 for a return series, the women presented captain Ivo Bligh with the urn, in which they placed some ashes, probably from the burning of one of the wickets used in a just finished game. The story doesn’t end there: Bligh fell in love with one of the women, a music teacher called Florence Morphy, and brought her – and the urn – back to England with him. The urn became a treasured family possession as a reminder of their courtship. When Florence bequeathed the urn to the MCC after Bligh’s death in 1927, almost nobody in English cricket knew about its existence.

Most interesting, though, was a display on the first Australian cricket team to tour England, in 1868. Astonishingly, they were Aborigines. The players’ story is in some ways very sad: just decades before the team was formed, their homelands in modern-day Victoria were ravaged by the coming of European settlers, and they were given pretty racist-sounding English names like Jim Crow, Dick-a-Dick and Tarpot. But it sounds like the tour of England was a big success, financially, culturally and sportingly. They played 47 matches, winning 14, losing 14 and drawing 19. The three star players took a total of 607 wickets and scored more than 1,000 runs each. Another of the players, Twopenny, achieved the impressive average of 9-9 off ten overs in East Hampshire. Perhaps inevitably, the team did not attract crowds for their sporting prowess alone – they performed tribal dances and spear and boomerang throwing displays during breaks in play, and in the official pictures more of them are holding boomerangs than cricket bats.

Access all areas

I’ve been working as a journalist in Britain for about four years. In that time I have interviewed opposition leader David Cameron twice, reported on a visit by Prime Minister Tony Blair once, and attended one speech by Chancellor Gordon Brown.

I’ve been working as a journalist in Australia for about four weeks. In that time I have interviewed Prime Minister John Howard, federal Treasurer Peter Costello and New South Wales opposition leader Peter Debnam, and attended a speech by New South Wales premier Morris Iemma.

(I should stress that by interview, I mean an informal session involving a number of reporters freely firing out questions – I’m nowhere near important enough to get one-on-one sit-down interviews with senior politicians.)

The comparison illustrates just how different Australia’s media and political culture is from Britain’s. Here political leaders make themselves available for questions from all journalists on any subject almost every day, and John Howard seems to do a sit-down radio or TV interview every day. In Britain politicians and their aides attempt to shape the daily news agenda by using announcements, initiatives, speeches, leaks, exclusive interviews and press calls where it is made clear the Minister will not answer questions on any subject other than the one in hand. The classic cycle would be a leak about a new policy to a Sunday newspaper, followed up with speculation on the Sunday morning TV and radio political shows, then coverage of the expected announcement in Monday’s papers, reports of the announcement itself on Monday’s TV news bulletins, and finishing with full accounts of what was actually said in Tuesday’s papers. It doesn’t always go to plan – someone from the Home Office recently told me The Sun had “completely f***ed up” a planned announcement by breaking the story early – but when it does the Minister can get three days of favourable front pages.

I am probably understating the extent to which this management/spin/ manipulation (delete according to vehemence of feelings) also goes on in Australia. But senior politicians here are definitely more accessible and less shielded by layers of advisers and media handlers. I think this makes for a less frustrated relationship between Ministers and journalists – none of the papers here is as bitterly opposed to the government as The Daily Mail in Britain. Although it does also seem to lead to rather over-cosy links with the establishment in some cases – I’m not sure I approve of journalists using politicians’ first names professionally.

Another factor, of course, is the national security situation. Recently there has been a run of stories about shortcomings in the protection of the Australian Prime Minister – a high school student was able to hug John Howard to wish him a happy birthday (this in itself says a lot about Australian politics) while holding a screwdriver he had been using to fix his boat; a film maker was dropped off at the wrong quay in Sydney harbour and found himself at the PM’s residence, but was able to climb over a fence to get out without being challenged by security; an intruder walked into the PM’s Sydney offices and wandered around etc etc. But nonetheless when I went to John Howard’s Sydney residence, Kirribilli House, yesterday, I was allowed through the gates and onto the lawn without having my ID or rucksack checked by any of the federal police protection officers wearing the classic ill-fitting black suit and sunglasses combination also favoured by the British Special Branch. This contrasts with the procedure for getting into Downing Street these days, which involves having your press card checked and all your bags put through an x-ray machine. And you don’t even get close to the PM or the Chancellor. (Incidentally, Kirribilli House, which is located at the end of a leafy, breezy, tranquil side street north of the Harbour Bridge and overlooks the harbour, must be the nicest prime minister’s residence in the world.)

You also have to consider the relatively small number of media outlets in Australia, which means even a press call with the PM is unlikely to involve more than four TV crews, four radio reporters and four print journalists – there don’t seem to be anywhere near as many photographers fighting for pictures over here. And the extra importance of talk radio stations – in Sydney at least – probably necessitates more frequent press calls.

Whatever the reason, it’s refreshing to have the chance to ask politicians whether they’re lying rather than just assuming that they are.

Big Britain?

Sydney’s beaches were packed over the weekend as the city sweltered in unseasonably early summer weather. The temperature reached 38C in the western suburbs and a shade under 37C in the city itself, something like 14C hotter than the normal average for October. Unfortunately I was working all weekend, so was stuck in the office writing about people having a good time in the sun. (This is quite normal for journalists, so I got over it pretty quickly.)

I was off on Monday so I decided to make up for missing out on the weekend fun by making my first pilgrimage to that Sydney icon, Bondi beach. The weather had taken a turn for the worse – relatively speaking – and it was fairly overcast with a slight chill in the air: jeans and t-shirt weather rather than swimming trunks and sunscreen weather. The train doesn’t quite go all the way to the beach, which puts Bondi nicely on Sydney’s fringes and makes getting there enough of an effort that it feels like a mini-vacation. The nearest station, Bondi Junction, is surrounded by a web of roads and a huge, maze-like shopping centre with the atmosphere of a suburban London town centre like Uxbridge or Acton. It’s not very gnarly. But as you get closer to the sea, a 20-minute walk away, backpackers’ lodges and internet cafes start replacing TV repair shops, the and you start hearing more British accents. The beach was almost abandoned when I visited: there were no swimmers and only a brace of hardy surfers in the water. I took this as a hint that probably it wasn’t a good day for a Brit with nothing but his 100m swimming badge for protection to take to the water.

After sitting for 20 minutes or so, mesmerised by the big waves wrapping themselves around the little surfers, I set off on the beautiful coastal path that runs down to Coogee beach. Along the way it goes past various smaller beaches, including Tamarama. Also known as Glamourama, this has a reputation for being the place where the beautiful people hang out. On Monday it was deserted, apart from a man in a fluorescent yellow vest shovelling sand in a JCB (he was probably a body builder underneath), and the only hint to its normal state of affairs was a sign saying ‘No dogs’. The sea was a lot calmer here and I thought about diving in for a dip, but decided it would be embarrassing when the bored-looking lifeguard had to save me.

I was impressed that the council had built lots of small playgrounds alongside the path to keep young children amused. Until I realised that they were actually workout benches – each to exercise a different muscle – for the many joggers who were steaming past me. Australians take keeping fit pretty seriously – apart, that is, from the ones responsible for the “obesity crisis” that is currently provoking endless national soul-searching and buck-passing.

Along the way sweet-looking little girls tried to sell me chocolate muffins, and the path passed through a huge cliff top graveyard full of family vaults from the mid-19th century. I’m not sure which was eerier.

The walk got me thinking. Many of the names that I came across – Clovelly, Eastbourne, Waverley, Bronte – were more British than Britain. (For the record, Bronte is a beach, Waverley was the name of the cemetery, I walked along Eastbourne Road, and the president of Clovelly golf club almost ran me over.) And Bondi feels a lot like a British seaside resort – or at least it did on the grey, windy day that I visited. The beach is also a similar shape to Fistral beach in Newquay, albeit much longer and with rather larger waves . Brits fit into Sydney so naturally – hardly anybody ever comments on my accent, other than fellow foreigners – that it sometimes feels like a bigger version of Britain. There are three British newspapers – the Guardian Weekly, the Weekly Telegraph and the International Express – at most newsagents, and the top British football results make it onto the evening news. Most of the people I’ve met so far have some close connection – a parent, a grandparent – to Britain. But then you walk a bit further down Oxford Street or a bit deeper into Hyde Park, an odd-looking bird flies out at you, the scent of eucalyptus comes from nowhere, and the wild strangeness of the land hits you again.