Australia is the ‘more seductive version of California living’. Here’s why it should be on your travel list
It was about this time back in 1988 that I was running a small command centre-cum-travel agency from my bedroom in Toronto. With the clock ticking for the start of the Estonian festival in Melbourne, I was in charge of logistics for the journey across the Pacific with my grandmother – flights, hotels, cars, dinner reservations and everything else required for the month-long tour. We set off from Toronto with a one-night stopover in San Francisco, then touched down in Fiji for a soggy Christmas before heading on to Australia. I hadn’t consumed much in the way of Australian pop-culture, save for a bit of Air Supply in the early 1980s and maybe the odd film, so there was little in the way of elevated expectations.
My grandmother had signed up for a variety of Estonian events ranging from dance performances to school reunions while I was allowed to opt in and out of the global gathering of my extended Baltic family. This was a good thing as it took about half an afternoon wandering the streets of Melbourne to feel that this was going to be an informative and inspiring trip. After a week in the Victorian capital we moved on to Sydney and before long I had managed to arrange a makeshift internship in the Channel Seven newsroom, and was hatching a plan to defer my second year at university. By the time we were packed up and on the Qantas flight back to a chilly Vancouver, I made a silent pact that I’d aim to be back in Australia as quickly as possible – either to complete my studies or find a job in TV.
A job at the BBC the following summer changed all of that and dreams of an apartment in Sydney’s Elizabeth Bay and a job working for Channel Nine went out the window. But Australia somehow lingered in the background – a place where the living was that little bit easier, the food better and there was a quality of life that was far removed from London. It took about five years to get back to Sydney and by then the city’s coffee-and-culinary moment was under way, magazines were being launched, a modernist Aussie architecture was being defined and the country was establishing itself as the more seductive and tastier version of California living. I was smitten.
Throughout the 1990s and much of the early 2000s, work and personal trips to Australia became a constant and Christmases in a funky, 1960s bungalow up at Whale Beach had replaced holidays in St Moritz. Then it all came to a halt. I’m not quite sure what happened but every year Australia seemed to drift further away, the visits moved from annual to every 18 months, the pandemic came along and it fell off the circuit.
All of that changed about four weeks ago when work called and suddenly SYD, Qantas flights and a booking at the Park Hyatt Sydney was back on the agenda. Could it really be happening? I arrived in Sydney exactly a week ago and wow! What a comeback. Friends Nancy and Warwick booked dinner at Margaret in Double Bay, chef Neil Perry swung by to say hello and talk shop, and at every turn there was some new space to tour, cool laneway to wander down and yet another café to sample.
On Tuesday evening, we welcomed about 200 Monocle subscribers to drinks on the just-completed terrace of The International, and the welcome couldn’t have been warmer. I’m now tapping this out in Toronto and thinking about the things I missed in Melbourne, Brisbane and other parts of Sydney. The good news is that Australia will be back on the circuit and I’m looking forward to seeing if I can find a suitable tropical bungalow in March for a late northern hemisphere winter break.
