Sydney Harbour Bridge...


... and harnessed tourists walking over the top of it.

Sydney Opera House, seen from the Harbour Bridge.

What am I doing here?

It's always good for a trip to have a goal, however spurious. Obviously I'm primarily in Australia to do a job and learn about another journalistic culture. I also want to see as many members of my family as possible.

But additionally I have a few side-projects to keep me busy when I get bored of swimming, surfing, barbecues and being smug.

1. To see my cousin Angus's punk band, The Disables. Annoyingly they played Sydney a couple of days before I arrived here, but I'm hoping they'll tour again before the end of the year. Asio, the first track on their debut album, is particularly good.

2. To find out more about my late great-uncle George Blaikie, who was for many years a journalist in Sydney and is to the best of my knowledge the only member of my family with a Wikipedia entry. He wrote a number of best-selling books, the best-titled of which is Wild Women of Sydney.

3. To get a ticket for at least one of the days of the Ashes series this summer/winter. Think this is self-explanatory although not necessarily straightforward.

4. To fill in the embarrassing gaps in my knowledge about Australian Aborigines - at the moment it extends only to didgeridoos, Dreamtime and drink problems, and I'm very aware these are not-very-helpful stereotypes. I've flown into a storm of debate in the Australian press about a court decision to grant "native land rights" to the Noongar people over part of the city of Perth. And I've been surprised by how few Aborigines I've seen in Sydney: the first was drunk and begging on the north side of the Harbour Bridge, and the second, third and fourth were playing music on Circular Quay and posing for pictures with white and Asian tourists. I didn't feel very comfortable about either situation. In the finest journalistic tradition, I think the best way of finding out what it is like to be an Aborigine in 2006 is to meet and talk to some of them, and I'm going to try to do this without being too cheesy.

5. To visit as many as possible of the places in Sydney named after areas in London. Top of my list is Dulwich Hill in homage to East Dulwich, the idyllic south-east London suburb I like to call home. Other south London-inspired Sydney districts include Sydenham, Lewisham, Croydon, Greenwich and Woolwich. I've already walked down Oxford Street and got a train from Kings Cross, although I have yet to visit Paddington or Waterloo. Yes, it's slightly childish but it helps me feel at home. Pictures to follow.

Dateline Sydney

And this was where they sent convicts? OK, so the tourist infrastructure has come on leaps and bounds over the past 200 years, you're now rather less likely to die of scurvy en route from Britain, and the absence of enforced labour changes your perspective somewhat. Plus I'm guessing Sydney probably didn't have quite such a good selection of restaurants in the late 18th century. But coming from London, which on a bad day can feel grey, dirty, overcrowded and miserable, Australia scores pretty highly for paradise points.

I arrived in Sydney late on Thursday night and don't start work until Monday, so I have had a few days to look around. Here are a few first thoughts about the city, in no particular order...

I haven't been to any of the beaches yet, but perhaps I should leave it a day or two - two sharks were spotted off Bondi yesterday. Although this doesn't seem to have caused much of a stir locally.

On Friday I walked across Sydney Harbour Bridge and wandered around Circular Quay, from where most of the ferries across the harbour leave. Embedded in the pavement are a series of plaques giving quotations from famous writers who are either Australian or have a strong connection to Australia (Germaine Greer, Clive James, Barry Humphries, Peter Carey, Mark Twain etc). What struck me was just how many of the Australian writers left the country very early on in their careers, most settling down in the UK.

I was in town yesterday evening when my phone buzzed and I got a text message from Transport for London saying most of the Victoria Line was down. Was feeling suitably smug until my own train was delayed a few minutes later. Sydneysiders have a fairly predictable nickname for the local train operator, CityRail, whose services are apparently notoriously unreliable.

Compared to Britain, there's not a huge selection of newspapers here. The first newsagents I walked into had only four - The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Sydney Daily Telegraph and the Australian Financial Review. I reckon an average British newsagent would stock at least ten national newspapers (excluding the Morning Star, Daily Sport, Sportsman, Daily Record and Racing Post, all of which are fairly common) plus locals. Obviously Australia's population is much smaller than Britain's, and it's a much bigger country with distinctly different states with their own laws - hence the dominance of big "local" newspapers, as in the US. Australian papers seem much less aggressive than their British counterparts, but they're even more obsessed with sports - the Oz version of Sky News spent much of Friday morning following up the (long-expected) sacking of a Rugby League manager.

Perhaps relatedly, the Australian journalists I've met have all told me it's amazingly easy to get access to politicans over here. Apparently there's a pretty good chance I'll get an interview with Prime Minister John Howard at some point, and I'll almost definitely get to speak to New South Wales Premier Morris Iemma. The closest I've come to interviewing Tony Blair was sitting in on a meeting between him and a (carefully chosen) "ordinary couple" before this year's local elections. Asking him any political questions was strictly banned. Although the huge number of London-based journalists probably makes it impractical, I can't help feeling that British politicians would be more likely to come across as "real people" if their media appearances were less stage-managed. (In my limited experience David Cameron, an ex-PR man, is an even worse offender here than Tony Blair.)