Sunshine and sophistication

The famous Sydney Opera House.

The pelican balances delicately on the Sydney street light, 5m above the sun-crusted populace bottled in their cars and chugging down the motorway.

Its tail bulges over the lamp's plastic protection as it scratches its belly haughtily. It overlooks several lanes of asphalt and some miserable greenery. It is king - at least of what it can see.

It's a reminder that Australia is essentially a desert country where the cities are a blotchy sprawl over dusty grasses and humans share space with pugnacious wildlife.

In Sydney the possums scamper around the central city parks, and the caw! caw! of the carrawong outbellows the traffic.

The unique wildlife signals to me that I'm back in the city where I lived 10 years ago as a 19-year-old, newly minted journalist pulling pints at the Coogee Bay Hotel.

In those days the hotel was a favourite musical haunt of Hunters & Collectors, with a nightclub called Selina's and a sports bar where blokes got pissed on cheap beer and threw random punches. Back then an All Black test would be accompanied by a Victoria Bitter in the sports bar and an impromptu haka from the hometown blokes.

Quite a contrast to my latest visit, staying at one of the city's flashest hotels, the Sydney Intercontinental, 21 floors up, wooed with free champagne and uninterrupted views across the harbour.

Nice. But hotels hold only limited appeal. I was off to soak up the city. One which I loved 10 years ago and which has changed only for the better.

I have vivid memories from that previous stay: of walking past St Vincent's Hospital wearing a white linen top, feeling the heat burn through the cloth and on to my back; ordering a panini and finding its heat too much to bear so opting for an ice-cream instead; stumbling down gay-pride dominated Oxford St at 4am on a Saturday before getting booted out of a bar for being straight.

This time it's winter and the tans are lighter but the sun remains a forceful presence.

A Sydney-based girlfriend and I meet at a waterfront Woolloomooloo bar and we yabber under the shadows of the swooping cockatoos.

Jackie, my friend, whose iwi affiliations are Ngati Porou and Tuhoe, is intrigued with race relations news from New Zealand. The dialogue is so loud in New Zealand, while in Australia it is barely a whisper.

Jackie pines for discussion around New Zealand's cultural introspection, its seemingly endless search into its soul. There is little of such commentary in Australia, it is disregarded in favour of brash confidence.

But today the sunshine dominates: eventually we are seduced into mindless gossip by the heat and a bottle of Australian riesling.

The bustling Woolloomooloo wharf is quite a spot for a Sydney weekend with its moneyed locals, superyachts and the occasional superstar.

Sydney is the country's wealth capital, where the wages are high but real estate is exorbitant. During my visit the daily paper did a splash on money, how the rich made their cash and how much they love it.

At the end of the wharf where we sit is the fishbowl apartment Russell Crowe bought for A$14 million ($15.14 million) last year, breaking real estate records.

Auckland's inner-city apartment boom pales in comparison to Sydney's, where glass-fronted high-rises loom over every available space.

To get to the bar we'd wandered over the roofs of apartments, sunk into the ground beside the waterfront and linked with bridges. And across the bridge Luna Park's edges have been eaten away by gradually encroaching apartment blocks. I'd been told the historic funpark's 70-year history was interrupted after the inner-city sanctuaries were infiltrated by screams from dodgem riders. Luna Park was forced to close down and adapt.

The next day I wander up to Oxford St and see little has changed. There's still sexual innuendo in the shop signs. On one block the signs' humour is like a sledgehammer: "Get Frocked!" (a clothes store); "we look after you inside and out" (a chemist with a blow-up doll in the window); "come in for a quickie" (a cafe).

At Colombia Hotel it's midday but the night hasn't yet stopped, with a squashed barful of patrons jigging with a desperate energy over their lattes and beer.

The windows are wide open, and their bobbing makes me laugh as I pass by.

Australia is also a country which fell madly, truly in love with reality television. We visit the house in Manly where The Block was filmed - "Oh! it's so little!" squawks an Australian friend - and find others posing in front of the gate for a photo.

It's just a house, but no matter, it's THE house.

Smile! And snap! Wow. And that's where they put in the blinds? Oh doesn't it look good! And on the conversations go.

The Block even makes its way into The Lion King, the long-running and hugely popular musical featuring New Zealander Jay Laga'aia. As in a sarcastic bleat from Zazu the Pelican about a prop: "They look like shower curtains from The Block!"

The love affair with reality telly is just now beginning to abate, hurried along perhaps by the "Shocking!" behaviour of the divinely monikered Big Brother contestant Merlin Luck, who protested Australia's refugee policy on live television. That prompted a flood of letters to the editor and uncharacteristic navel-gazing.

Is there a place for such politicking in pop television? Absolutely not. That, in the words of host Gretel, "is a bit aggressive". In a true Australian touch, Luck's protest was mimicked later by an Aussie Rules piss-take.

While differences between New Zealand and Australia are well-documented, I pick the teenage-like infighting of previous years has faded. Back in '95 I would roll my eyes at the hassles New Zealanders were subjected to from Australians. Then, the relationship was fed on good-natured ribbing. These days there is quiet respect.

I gathered titbits of evidence for my theory: Glamour retail outlet David Jones' advertising claimed local lasses Trelise Cooper and Tanya Carlson as Australia's own - then slyly admitted its indiscretion in brackets.

The Honolulu Cafe, Manly Beach sells Allpress coffee - direct from Auckland - and proudly advertises the fact. And the background music, as far as I could hear through the cafe fuzz, certainly sounded like New Zealand talent ... was it a release from Wellington label Loop? I couldn't quite tell.

Australians talked of their many New Zealand friends, the ones they had met in Melbourne, the ones from Dunedin they bonded with while in London, and wanted to meet again in New Zealand. Maybe I'd grown up, maybe it was the city, maybe both. It didn't matter; the atmosphere had changed, and it felt good.

* Irene Chapple travelled to Sydney courtesy of Tourism Sydney and the InterContinental Hotel.