a month
of sundays

JAMES O’LOGHLIN

a month of sundays

how to go travelling without leaving town

First published in 2004

Copyright © James O’Loghlin 2004

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

83 Alexander Street,
Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia
Phone:   (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax:       (61 2) 9906 2218
E-mail:    info@allenandunwin.com
Web:      www.allenandunwin.com

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

O’Loghlin, James.
A Month of Sundays: how to go travelling without leaving town.

ISBN 1 74114 367 5.

1. Sydney (N. S. W. ) - Guidebooks. 2. Sydney (N. S. W. ) -Description and travel. I. Title

919. 44104

Set in 11/14 pt Minion by Midland Typesetters, Maryborough, Victoria Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

In memory of my mother, Gillian,
and to my father Graham.
And to my companions, Lucy and Bibi.

contents

1 The invasion

2 A bad place to busk

3 Two jewels in Legoland

4 The wild man of Manly

5 Powerful Silvers

6 A bit of east in the west

7 Obsession

8 A ferry to Rydalmere

9 Chemicals

10 Loudspeakers in paradise

11 Sticking our necks out

12 Storming The Battlement

13 The dealer’s mum

14 Trimmed sideburns

15 Divided in death

16 Goths in the sun

17 The more you have . . .

18 Empty balconies

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

one
the invasion

At 7 a.m. on Monday 1 September 2003, the day Lucy and I celebrated our eighth not-married-but-together anniversary, we were fast asleep in bed with our ten-month-old daughter Bibi lying chaperone between us when the crash of breaking glass startled us awake. Bibi wailed. I jumped out of bed and crept to our window. Three men were attacking the front of the house next door with sledgehammers and crowbars. They were crashing in windows and bashing through walls.

I sighed. It had begun.

As Lucy tried to comfort Bibi, I lay staring at the ceiling, listening to the racket and getting more depressed. The builders had arrived. It wasn’t a surprise. We’d known they were coming, we just hadn’t known when.

Ten months earlier the house under assault, number eighteen, had sold for the third time in the two and a half years since we had moved into number twenty. It was a roomy, sunny three-bedroom house in good nick, but none of the people who had bought it in that time wanted to live in it until they had knocked it down and built something much, much bigger.

It was a trend.

More and more homes in North Bondi were beginning to look as if they were on steroids, with bits jutting up and out every possible which-way to fit as much house as possible onto the available land. Everyone thought themselves an expert on property and renovating and it was hard to have a neighbourhood conversation without the subject popping up. Everyone who moved in thought a house wasn’t really a house unless you had pulled it apart and put it back together again so that it had polished floorboards, aluminium-framed windows and more bedrooms than there were people living there. The big rich houses also had to have a pool, a home theatre and something called a void, a room-sized piece of nothing that proved you were so rich you could afford to waste space.

This had led to the demise of the front garden. No one ever, ever had any trouble parking outside their home in North Bondi. It’s just far enough away from the beach to put it out of reach of visitors. Yet all over the place people were ripping up their gardens and putting in carports. They obviously thought that the security they got from having their car that extra two metres closer to the house at night and the importance of protecting its roof from rain far outweighed any pleasure you could get from plants, trees and grass.

This meant there were two types of people in our street— those who had a front garden full of car and those who had a front garden full of front garden. The former usually had a front fence that wasn’t actually a fence at all, but was a concrete wall a metre and a half high, while the latter preferred a real fence of the old-style low-slung picket variety.

Those with carports and walls would rarely be seen except through the window of their four-wheel-drive as it pulled in and out of their ex-front garden, whereas those with front gardens spent time in them and so met and talked to each other. We had a little front garden, and whenever I felt like a chat I’d go and sit on the front steps. Sooner or later one of the neighbours who also had a front garden would appear and we’d talk. No pressure, no commitment, just a friendly little chat about nothing in particular that either of us could pull the pin on as soon as we wanted.

Sometimes I would see carport/garage/concrete wall-people squeezing past their car and then sort of milling around outside their wall and I’d wonder what they were doing. After a while I realised that they wanted to get in on the neighbourhood chat too, but it was harder for them because they’d buggered their house up by accidentally turning it into a fortress.

The problem for each of the successive buyers of number eighteen was the vertical backyard. It was about 15 metres long and rose steeply from floor level at the rear of the house until, at the back of the block, it was at the same height as the top of the roof. Our house, a semi, had a similarly vertically challenged backyard. We had dug some of it out so that we now had what a real estate agent would describe as a ‘Three Level Multi Function Leisure Area’ and what anyone else would call a hill with three ledges cut into it.

Each time number eighteen had sold, the same thing had happened. A few weeks after the sale the new owner would appear in the vertical backyard with an experty-type person holding a folder. The new owner would outline his dream, pointing and drawing pictures in the air. We’d hear him say words like ‘pool’, ‘level’, ‘landscaped’ and ‘dream home’. Each time the experty person would look down at their folder, shake their head and utter words like ‘cliff ’, ‘joking’, ‘excavation’ and ‘millions’. The hill would smile smugly to itself and soon after the For Sale sign would go up again.

Ivan, the latest owner, was different. It wasn’t the fact that he got rid of the tenants as soon as their lease was up that showed us he meant business, and it wasn’t the fact that we got his proposed plans from council in the mail so soon after he’d bought the place. It wasn’t even that he started to excavate the vertical backyard. What convinced us that Ivan meant business was how he excavated the vertical backyard. He didn’t use a bobcat, a labourer or a shovel. He did it himself and used a milk crate. It was midsummer, temperatures were in the high thirties, he was a thin, pale, bearded man over fifty and he spent days dragging dirt from the top of the backyard to the bottom, using as his sole tool a milk crate. It didn’t work very well. A milk crate is, in fact, a pretty crap tool for large-scale soil excavation. Most of the dirt just fell through the holes—but he kept going.

‘How’s it going, Ivan?’ I’d say whenever I saw him over the back fence.

He’d never reply. He wasn’t being rude, it was just that he was panting so hard he was physically unable to speak. He would just wave weakly, with an expression on his face that suggested death would be a relief.

I’d then offer to call an ambulance, and he’d shake his head and sadly return to the hill in the same way that a torture victim might return to the rack after being given a five-minute breather. Ivan meant business. Even the hill started to look nervous.

Ivan’s plans weren’t good. Actually, that’s not fair. If you wanted to buy a normal house, knock it down and build a mansion, they were good. Perfect, in fact. But they weren’t good for us. They showed a huge, two-storey, five-bedroom plus void house with a garage and big concrete wall 140 centimetres from our house.

The house would block out most of our sun and substitute the pleasant view of rooftops we enjoyed from the top of our vertical backyard for one of just his roof. But what worried me most was the thought of living next to a building site.

The three of us spent a lot of time at home. Some people say that having a baby prevents them going out, but one of the many things Bibi had given us was an excuse. We didn’t go out a lot before she arrived, and once she arrived we didn’t have to give reasons. I took a sort of pride in the fact that I shut down on weekends, lazed about, read books and watched the footy with the sound down and classical music playing. I’d regularly have weekends where I left the house only twice—on Saturday to play touch footy (badly, but with enthusiasm) and on Sunday to go for a walk along the beach (quite well, but it’s not a very hard thing to do). My idea of the perfect weekend was most other people’s idea of the most boring weekend in the world.

I liked being at home. There were no hassles at home. I felt in control. I understood how home worked, I lived in it and, in combination with Lucy and the bank, I owned it. At home I didn’t need to be alert, I rarely got alarmed and I could do what I wanted when I wanted. I could forget about trying to be entertaining and interesting and just be me.

When I was old enough for my parents to start leaving me home alone I used to feel an incredible sense of relief as their car drove off. Not because I didn’t like them—I did—but because I was alone and free. King of the castle. The desire to lock the world out for a day or two a week remained strong.

Lucy wasn’t like that. She liked to get out and do things, and usually did. But I’d often find excuses to duck her suggestions that on weekends we drive to Palm Beach or Cronulla or even nearby Bronte because, quite frankly, I couldn’t be bothered.

Central to the idea of home as a place to lock out, and find relief from, the world was that by shutting the door you could effectively say goodbye to it. But construction work happening six days a week for goodness knows how long—similar jobs in the area (and there were plenty of them) seemed to drag on forever—threatened that whole idea.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d worked normal hours. Usually if there’s a builder next door, they work when you work, but my job was hosting an evening radio show on the ABC, which meant I had my leisure time at the start of the day.

This suited me. There was plenty of time to hang out with Bibi, and because there’s nothing good on television at that time of the day there was no risk of spending my free hours staring at the box. People would express sympathy for me because of my hours, saying that it must be terrible not to be free at nights. I’d nod solemnly, and keep to myself the joys of sleeping in and lazing around in the morning.

I wouldn’t call it challenging, but it was certainly pleasant. We’d often talk about making more use of the time, but never really did. Sleeping in, brekky, playing with Bibi, then off to work became the routine.

But when you have the sound of Johnno screaming at Bazza to ‘Grab some more of the fucking four inches!’ mixed in with some electrical drilly thing, set against the background of loud, loud, loud mobile phone ads broken up by non-stop blocks of whatever it is they play now on Triple M (provided by the radio in the truck parked right outside the front of our bedroom) it’s very hard to feel like you’re king of the castle. You feel like the castle is being invaded.

By 9 a.m. the dust from the demolition was drifting through our windows and Bibi was rubbing her eyes. We decided there was only one thing to do. Run away. Or at least walk. We went down to the beach and had breakfast in a café. We talked about renting, we talked about selling, we talked about house-minding, we talked about buying a giant mansion-sized soundproof box and asking them to work inside it.

‘We could sleep in the car,’ I said. ‘We could drive to a park and sleep there under the stars and if it rains get in the car and then at least we won’t get woken up at seven by jackhammers. I mean, I never get to sleep before one because you just can’t come home from work and go straight to sleep and I’m going to get overtired and grumpy and fall asleep at the wheel and have a car crash and . . .’

‘Calm down,’ said Lucy.

She was right. I was losing it. But it felt good.

‘What if we bought something even louder than the drills and the smashing and the Triple M combined, something like . . . a Concorde, but a stationary one, and we turned that on? Maybe then they’d hate it so much they’d leave.’

This time she just looked at me. So did Bibi.

‘We can either move out or we can stay,’ Lucy said. Totally ridiculous. Or was it? I looked at her through narrowed eyes. She seemed remarkably together, but then again I was only comparing her to me.

‘We can’t stay. How can we stay?’ I said quickly. Too quickly, but I couldn’t help it.

‘We could stay,’ she said extra calmly, which was good. If she’d let the panic I was feeling get to her too, we’d have been doomed. One of us had to stay calm, and I was glad it was her. It meant I could go on running down the road to hysteria.

‘How can we stay? We can’t stay, because if we stay it’ll all be bad and worse and everything and . . .’

‘We could stay,’ she repeated firmly and slowly, ‘and we could go as well.’

‘Huh?’

‘We don’t need to be in the house when they’re there.’

‘But it’ll be from dawn to dusk five days a week. Six! They’ll work Saturdays.’

‘We can go and do things. In the morning. All the things we don’t usually do.’

I was suspicious. ‘What “things”?’

‘Go to the park. Go to the zoo. The aquarium. Explore Sydney. I’ve lived here for 34 years, you for . . . how many?’

‘Eighteen. I moved here in 1985.’

‘And Bibi one. Between us, that’s, um . . .’

‘Fifty-three years.’

‘Exactly. Think of all the things we haven’t done or seen. We could go to Lakemba.’

‘What’s at Lakemba?’

‘Exactly. We won’t know unless we go.’

‘Um . . .’ I was playing for time. This felt like a threat to the way I did things. ‘Aren’t your parents going away to Turkey? Maybe we could go and stay at their place.’ It was just up the road at Bondi Junction.

‘We could, but they’re not going until October.’

‘So we’ve got a month till then.’

‘A month. A month to do things and see things, the things that most people can only do on weekends,’ said Lucy. ‘We’ve got a month of Sundays.’

I suppose it was one way of looking at it.

two
a bad place to busk

Our plan was to do all those things that you were supposed to do on Sundays, but which we never got around to doing. The sort of things we used to do on Sundays when we were kids. Both Lucy and I had memories of Sundays being about packing the car and going somewhere new. For me in Canberra, it was often into the bush for a walk, or a picnic near a river. I would always take a book to read on the way there, but never quite get around to opening it because I wanted to see what was around the next corner. Then there was the anticipation of arriving and exploring, poking about down the river or seeing where a bush track led. My favourite places were those where there was no one else in sight, and I would imagine we were discovering the place for the first time. That, in the old days, was a Sunday.

That sense of discovery was what we wanted to recapture, but how could we in a city we had both lived in for so long? The answer was to start thinking like tourists. Whenever I visited somewhere new, whether it was Paris or Parkes, I’d spend a couple of hours wandering about trying to get a feel for the place. But I never did that in Sydney. Everywhere I went was for a purpose. I’d go, do what I had to do, then come home. If I went to a friend’s house in a part of town I’d never been to before, I’d go straight there and come straight back. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that there were all sorts of places within a hour’s drive of home that I had no idea about.

Sitting on the train on the way to work that day, I realised that the pattern of my life had become entirely predictable. I woke up, I hung out, I went to work, I came home and I went to sleep again. Sometimes I’d go to the movies or to one of six parks or three beaches, or to visit one or two of a couple of dozen friends.

My life wasn’t boring. I liked most of it and it was all pretty comfortable, but I clung to my patterns. Pretty much all my life occurred at home or at work, or at a few other places within 10 kilometres of where I lived. If anyone ever wanted to assassinate me it’d be easy. They’d know exactly where I was going to be pretty much any time, any day.

And the day after I got assassinated, when I was having my exit interview and it was put to me that for years and years I had spent week after week after week doing pretty much exactly the same thing and following pretty much exactly the same not-all-that-challenging routine, how would I feel?

Slightly embarrassed, I think.

So this was my chance to break those patterns, to go places I had never been before and explore them, like Marco Polo and Vasco da Gama and Captain Cook had before me. Well, not quite like them, because they went places that no one had ever been before, whereas we were just going to go to places that we hadn’t been before and, okay,maybe exploring different areas of the city in which we’d lived for many years wasn’t quite as exciting as travelling halfway around the world and discovering new continents and civilisations and bringing back gunpowder and beef and black bean sauce and whatever else Marco Polo brought back, but the point was that we would be exploring— seeing new things, breaking patterns and, most importantly, getting away from those loud bastards with their drills and their radios.

And the other important point was that in accepting this idea I had stopped panicking about the builders and the impact they were going to have on my life and now had at least an illusion of control. That was very important.

That night we made a list of places to go. We agreed that we should ease into it. Or at least I insisted. Whereas we planned to normally only go to places neither of us had been to before or knew much about, our first destination was familiar. Bronte Park.

The next morning the demolition continued so we had no trouble motivating ourselves to get going. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for property developers, but there must be an anxious period when the first thing you do after buying a very expensive asset is destroy it. After just one day the nice family home Ivan had bought looked like something out of a war zone. In real estate talk, ‘A Little Bit of Beirut in the East.’

Bronte Park is at Bronte Beach. Unlike most beachside parks, which are merely strips of grass that separate road and sand, it’s a huge green expanse that eventually thins into a tree-lined gorge and runs deep back into the suburb. At the south end of the park—and the beach—are what used to be the Bronte shops and are now the Bronte cafés. Ten years ago there was the normal variety of suburban shops, newsagent, greengrocer, mini-mart, etc. One by one they all became cafés. There are eight in a row, with a fish and chippery at the end thrown in for variety. It’s an indication that Bronte—like all Sydney’s eastern suburbs beaches—is now primarily for visitors.

I couldn’t help feeling for the locals. The only way to buy milk at the Bronte shops now is to order a cold flat white without the coffee, and if you need some bread you have to either order a goat’s cheese, asparagus and prosciutto focaccia without the goat’s cheese, asparagus and prosciutto, or nick half a slice of sourdough from someone who hasn’t quite finished their scrambled eggs with the lot.

What makes Bronte so beautiful is the way the park and beach connect. At Bondi there is a beautiful park and a beautiful beach, which are for some reason separated by an ugly carpark. To get from the grass and the playground to the sand you have to look to your left, look to your right, then look to your left again. Not having to do that ups the relaxation factor considerably. There is plenty of parking at Bronte but it’s tucked out of the way.

While the visitor population is high on weekends, locals do exist and this morning one particular variety was in abundance— the sixty-something newly retired ocker male. There were a couple of dozen of them spread around, none wearing anything other than Speedos, and all with those impossible beer guts that are attached to otherwise fit-looking bodies and seeming as if they have no right to be there. They appear affixed in the same way as a grass catcher is to a lawnmower, and it would be no surprise to see someone whip his off and empty the contents (presumably 15 litres of VB) into the bin.

They lie in groups in the sun and all talk a bit louder than necessary, as people who reckon they own the joint do. Even though we had just emerged from winter, they were already ridiculously brown, with skin the colour and texture of desert boots.

One was talking to a similarly aged German woman whose English wasn’t all that good.

‘WE CALL THEM THONGS,’ he shouted, pointing to his footwear. ‘NOT FLIP-FLOPS. NONOEY. YES. THONGS. GOOD FOR THE SHOWER. YES?’

The woman looked nervous. I wondered if I should go over and explain that his shouting wasn’t meant to be aggressive, just slightly patronising. But she probably wouldn’t understand me either, and I’d end up shouting too. Then she’d be doubly nervous.

‘THANK YOU FOR SUCH KIND OFFER,’ she replied, just as loudly, ‘BUT I HAVE SHOWER AT HOME. I WILL HAVE SHOWER ALONE. NOT WITH YOU. THANK YOU.’

‘NO. I DIDN’T MEAN . . . AHHH!’ and with that frustrated sound he threw his arms up, turned on his heel and strode off with a peculiar legs-tied-together-with-an-invisible-rope-so-can-only-take-very-small-steps gait.

We picked a spot in the grass under a tree on a bank, just high enough that we could see the sea. Bibi explored the vicinity. A guy played guitar under another tree. At first it seemed idyllic, but then I noticed he kept looking around and I worried he might be the world’s worst-located busker. There’s not much passing traffic in a big fat park on a Tuesday morning.

Up the north end of the park near the swings and playgrounds were the mums and bubs. They hunt in packs, the mums, up to fifteen clustered tight in picnic circles, with three-wheeled racing prams strategically placed covered-wagon-style around the outside in case of attack. Around lunchtime a couple of dads arrived from the office, one going so far as to remove his tie for 23 minutes of quality time before the free enterprise system claimed him back.

Bibi and I escorted Lucy to the seawater pool, which looked inviting but felt freezing. After dipping her toe in, then pulling it out very quickly, Lucy would have changed her mind—but luckily, when in the car she had recklessly declared she was going to go for a swim, I had had the foresight to cement her bold declaration into a 50-cent bet. She was trapped.

In the time it took her to descend three steps to be waist deep, a local had stripped off, got in and swum five laps at the sort of pace that would have had him being overtaken by a floating twig. When Lucy was rib deep he was onto lap eight.

‘Look, Beeb, there’s Mummy shivering.’

‘Shut up.’

‘It’s easier if you just jump straight in, you know.’

‘It might also be easier if you jammed one of my sandals into your mouth.’

‘Hey, it’s only 50 cents.’

But she hadn’t heard. As if I had become Laurie Lawrence, my words had motivated action beyond normal human capabilities. She had dived in. I looked at the old local, now halfway down lap nine. He had a big start, but Luce was fired up. She’d catch him in minutes. She’d zoom up and down and . . .

‘Okay. Pay up.’

Lucy was beside me, shaking and covered in towel. She had virtually teleported onto the edge of the pool, so fast had she got out.

When she stopped shaking, we wandered back up the park past the little train that ran round a 100-metre track in the park. It was packed away this day in a little train-shaped house. We sat down and I lay back and thought how brilliantly clever I had been to escape the builders. All right, how brilliantly clever we had been. Okay, Lucy had been. But I’d agreed.

I thought about the importance of peace and quiet for mental health, how necessary it was to . . . WWWWAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!! WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?

An engine.

A really loud engine.

So loud you had to shout your thoughts to hear them inside your head.

What, had they followed us here? Was the demolishing of number eighteen merely a cover to hide their real aim of driving us mad? I looked up. No planes. Then around. No tractors, no cars, no lawnmowers. There! A leafblower. A guy from the council with a leafblower. A really loud leafblower. And he knew it was loud too. That’s why he had earmuffs on.

The train of thoughts flowing through my mind was instantly replaced by the repeating loop of This leafblower is really loud, I hope it stops soon, I wonder if, after he does this path, he’s going to do that other path. This leafblower is really loud, I hope it stops soon, I wonder if, after he does this path, he’s going to do that other path. This leafblower is . . .

The quiet was gone. The peace was gone. I wondered why no one had been able to invent something that did what a leafblower did but was quiet. Then I realised they had. It’s called a broom and it’s not only quieter but cheaper, easier to carry and environmentally friendlier. And brooms don’t break down. But they do take just a little bit of effort to operate and that, obviously, disqualifies them as suitable council equipment.

‘Owwwhhhh,’ I said.

Lucy was strangely unperplexed.

‘Don’t worry, he’s just cleaning the paths.’

‘But it’s so loud.’ I got out my phone. ‘I’m going to ring the council and complain.’

‘Don’t ring the council.’

‘The council are supposed to be making our lives better, not worse. If he had a broom, he could do exactly the same thing, except it’d be quiet and he’d be getting some exercise which would be good for him. I’m ringing them.’

I started dialling.

‘They’ll think you’re a nut.’

I stopped dialling. She was right. I didn’t want to be that crazy guy who hates leafblowers. Leafblowers are probably part of world’s best practice. Perhaps there’s an occupational health and safety regulation prohibiting brooms as being needlessly wearing to backs and shoulders.

I sighed.

‘Do you reckon this is some sort of conspiracy?’ I said.

three
two jewels in legoland

That night when I got home, number eighteen was nearly completely gone. It had deteriorated from a little bit of Beirut in the east to a ruin you could use as a setting for the battle scenes in Saving Private Ryan 2: Return to France. It must be the fun part, demolishing. I’d paid 50 cents once at a school fete for 60 seconds in which I could do whatever I wanted to an old car with a sledgehammer. Even though all the good bits such as the windscreen, dashboard and engine had already been thoroughly smashed in and all I managed was to bash fairly unspectacularly at a door, denting it slightly, it was still fun. And next door they were getting paid for it. I should have volunteered.

I wondered if demolishers ever got the wrong address.

‘Oh, that’s a five. Yes, I see now. Sorry, it sort of looked like a seven, see. Um, we’ll get that front wall of your house back up as soon as we can. Although we’ve got a bit on at the moment.’

On day two at 9 a.m. we arrived at Darling Harbour. Darling Harbour is a mass of walkways, harbour strolls, parks, restaurants, bars, playgrounds, movie theatres and spaces built around a harbour. It was created as a leisure, culture and business area in the 1980s by the New South Wales state government on the site of the old Sydney wharves. Everything is bright, colourful, shiny and new. All the bits fit together properly and everything works. You can walk in the sun near the water, there’s a playground for the kids, a park to have lunch in and lots of quick places to have a bite or a drink. It’s got everything except character.

Darling Harbour looks as if it has been assembled from an Ikea kit. It’s what would happen if Starbucks went into harbourside recreation areas. It has all the individuality and local character of a McDonald’s and you can’t help but suspect that there are hundreds of identical Darling Harbours spread around the world.

The fact that it just sprang up from a demolition site means that it is primarily a place of commerce, not life. No one lives there. No one has been going there for years. There are no regulars, except a few who drift down from the city during corporate lunchtime. In its many cafés, restaurants and shops you can be assured of efficient service, but don’t expect to get chatting to any of the staff. They’re there to do a job. So is Darling Harbour.

So we weren’t going to visit Darling Harbour. We were going to walk through it to reach the two jewels that lie within.

The first is the Chinese Gardens. I had walked past the gardens a hundred times and never thought of going in. On Wednesday 3 September, we went in.

‘Why pay four bucks to walk through a garden, Chinese or otherwise?’ I commented.

‘We’ll see when we get in,’ replied Lucy.

‘Gardens are everywhere. There’s one outside our back door. And if that’s not big enough, what about the Botanic Gardens? They’re free. And they’ve got a harbour view.’

‘I don’t think you’re entering into the spirit of this properly.’

So we went. We paid our money and stepped inside and within minutes I realised four bucks was a bargain.

Officially it is the Chinese Garden of Friendship, brought to us by Sydney’s Chinese sister city, Guangzhou. Paths wind around a lake, through trees to elegant Chinese pavilions, places perfect for sitting and not thinking about anything at all. Waterfalls cascade over rocks into lagoons. Somehow each pond, each bridge, each willow tree, each lotus plant is in exactly the right spot. None dominate, all combine to create tranquillity. It is like being in a float tank with a view.

We sat and watched the lake for a while, then explored the many paths that led around corners and past rocks to hidden pavilions or nooks. The gardens slope upwards at the back and paths wind their way through clumps of trees to emerge at the top next to a waterfall overlooking the lake.

At the top of the garden I was reminded by an incongruous glimpse of skyscraper between trees that we were in the middle of a city, but its hustle and bustle seemed a million miles away.

The gardens are so well set out that even with lots of visitors, there’s plenty of room to find your own little sitting space. There’s a display of bonsai trees, which made even Bibi feel tall. Or would have if the peace of the place hadn’t persuaded her to sleep within a few minutes. Lucy and I had been having an argument as we arrived but we forgot what it was about. I still can’t remember. All I know is that I was right.

Some of the visitors were obviously tourists, but others looked as though they had come in just to sit and read a book for a bit. Or just sit. I know someone who worked in the money market, doing a highly paid job I don’t understand, who said he had to factor in a one-hour massage each day as part of his work routine to cope with stress. The Chinese Gardens would have been cheaper and just as effective.

The whole picture created a sense of safety and harmony. Doctors and bosses who detect signs of insecurity or paranoia in patients or staff should write out a prescription for the Chinese Gardens. If you’re sick of being alert and alarmed, go.

You can even dress up in traditional Chinese dress for a photo. I know that sounds tacky, but the nine-year-olds love it and somehow it doesn’t look tacky, just sweet. I don’t know if Sydney has returned the favour to Guangzhou and designed an ‘Aussie Gardens’ there, but if we have I’d love to see the Chinese nine-year-olds dressed in stubbies, tank tops and cork hats.

The paths eventually converge on the Chinese teahouse. It’s a welcome contrast to other Darling Harbour eating spots. It doesn’t gleam but it’s clean, it fits into its environment and those who work there don’t look like unemployed models or have attitude to match. And the pork buns are good.

We emerged as you might from the surf, refreshed and ready for whatever was next, which happened to be the other jewel within Darling Harbour, Sydney Aquarium. Entertainment fun-complex thingys such as aquariums, fun parks, and places that have ‘world’ as the last part of their name (‘Dream . . .’, ‘Sea . . .’, ‘Movie . . .’) are always a gamble. They cost a CD to get into and you can’t tell before you pay whether they are going to contain a day’s worth of pleasure or just a lot of long queues for things that aren’t really worth the wait. Unlike in shops, you don’t get to see the goods before you buy. And we’re hoodwinked by memory into thinking they’re fantastic. I remember from childhood the thrilling big dipper, the amazing wildcat ride and the rush of fun and fear as the fabulous river jet tipped over the edge and flew me down a near-vertical waterfall. But I’ve forgotten how long I had to wait to get a go on them, and whether I left Luna Park, the Easter Show or Sea World thinking that I’d had a fantastic time or that there had been seven seconds of thrilling fun interrupting a day that was otherwise hot, crowded and boring.

Like the Chinese Gardens, the aquarium doesn’t impress from the outside. There’s no smiling giant octopus beckoning you in. It’s a plain white rectangular warehouse that looks as if it might be full of shipping containers.