SYDNEY, Australia – October 26th, 2010

There was something different about this lovely city and its inhabitants that I noticed during my first walk through the area of town known as The Rocks (more about this later). Large glass towers loomed, punctuated by Sydney sandstone Victorian buildings left intact from when they were erected mostly in the late 1800s during what I presume were the boom years for Sydney. Well dressed business men and women bustled about, just as in New York. With just 4.8% unemployment, thanks to China’s lust for Australian natural resources, Sydney is awash in fully let stores, high-end coffee shops, and active happy residents. Then it hit me…nary a Blackberry in sight, or a cigarette for that matter. And later, in the gym, I learned that Australia only has seven television stations! Three public, two government-owned, and two private. TV wasn’t introduced to Australia until much later than in the US, and then you had to have a permit and pay a fee for each set you owned – not a bad idea in retrospect. But before you conclude that Australia shelters its citizens from the influences of mass media entirely, I did notice bus shelters advertizing Dexter, albeit the last season.

There’s a wonderfully laid back atmosphere here. Not California laid-back but more anachronistic in its balance between work and leisure. None of the franticness exists that one sees in America. It’s really nice, the way I imagine America in the 1950s might have been. Thinking about why this might be, two possibilities come to mind: space and youth. Space in the sense that Sydney is 4,689 SM with 4.2M inhabitants and greater NYC is 468 SM with 18M inhabitants. Suffice it to say, you don’t bump into people on the street. The entire country of Australia could fit 32 UKs or 26 Italys within its borders, with a total population of only 22M. I refer to youth not as the age of the population but of the civilization. The first European settlers came in 1788 when, following the American Revolution, the American colonies refused to take any more British convicts. So the country as we know it (I’m not forgetting the Aborigines here) is barely more than 200 years old. There seems to be little evidence of interracial mixing in Sydney, which was explained to me that the Sydney Aborigines were virtually wiped out by European diseases and the few survivors fled west. Also, Sydney has an unusually large Jewish population. A plaque we stumbled upon detailed immigration between 1947 – 1951. The vast majority of immigrants came from Eastern Europe during those years, over a third from Poland, from which one might deduce Australia welcomed refugees of the war.

Visually, Sydney seems a cross between San Francisco and Vancouver. The CBD is about 15 minutes from the airport. Sydney harbor is gorgeous and the City is surrounded by water, from the South Pacific Ocean to bays, inlets, and rivers. There are 42 beaches in and around the metropolitan area and the Manly Beach has a crescent shaped walk that resembles the one in Cannes. One out of seven Australians owns a boat, which on average gets used 8 hours per year. In this last detail, the Australians seem to resemble Americas after all!

A bit of trivia…Sydney was named after Lord Sydney who organized the first fleet to come to Australia, so one would assume there was a Lord Manly for whom the great beach was named. Not so! The English women thought the Aborigine men were muscular and well-build, hunks in modern parlance, but in the vernacular common at the time they were “Manly,” giving name to the beach where they were often found.

Until tomorrow…