Paul Thomas: Bright lights over the sea

Sydney in mid-winter: sun streams out of an immaculate sky. By mid-morning jackets are shed and the only wisp of cloud is way out at sea.

The real cloud on the Lucky Country's horizon is more visible - and threatening. It's right there on the front page, in big, bold type. A Muslim bookshop in the suburb of Lakemba is selling jihad literature, some with an explicitly anti-Australia message, and instructional manuals for suicide bombers.

The next day there's a protective police presence outside the shop. On talkback radio the consensus is that the authorities have got it arse about face and the cops should be inside the bookshop throwing their weight around. A tabloid columnist opines that it's exactly this sort of politically correct pussyfooting around the enemy within that facilitated the London bombings.

Cornelia Rau might take some convincing that the Australian authorities are pussycats when it comes to security and immigration matters. She's the Australian resident with a history of mental illness who has just emerged from a stay in hospital necessitated by 10 hellish months of wrongful detention.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister John Howard is in Washington getting the treatment befitting a staunch ally. He goes to church with George W. Bush and afterwards they slap each other's backs like victorious footballers.

While Australia's involvement in Iraq is deeply unpopular with informed metropolitan opinion, it didn't seem to reverberate with the wider public at the recent election.

Like any leader who wins several elections on the trot, Howard has been lucky with his opponents, but a key factor in his success is his ability to distinguish between informed and majority opinion. He knows the numbers are in the suburbs, not the inner-city cafes.

The metropolitan-suburban divide and the metropolitan-rural chasm are on display in Oxford St's fine bookshops. There's a selection of largely sympathetic books about recent Labor Party leaders Paul Keating, Mark Latham and Kim Beazley (whose comeback brings to mind Keating's brilliant jibe at the similarly recycled Andrew Peacock: "Can a souffle rise twice?")

Howard sent Keating and Latham stumbling into retirement and has already defeated Beazley once but admiring portraits of him are conspicuous by their absence.

Denunciations, however, are freely available. Most of these books are written by representatives of what might be called the quality media and read by consumers of said quality media.

One can't help but feel that a self-contained and possibly self-deluding process is at work here. Sydney doesn't do discretion. There are three daily and two Sunday papers employing a gaggle of gossip columnists. But even by Sydney's let-it-all-hang-out standards, John Marsden has never needed to be cajoled into talking about himself. A high-profile lawyer who has never made any secret of his homosexuality, Marsden's already turbulent life got a good deal rockier several years ago when a television current affairs show accused him of paedophilia.

Marsden sued and emerged from the process with millions of dollars and cancer. The medical best guess is that his life expectancy can be measured in months. But this week he was back where he likes to be - on the front page - with his claim that Ivan Milat, the serial killer of young backpackers whom he defended, had a female accomplice.

He wouldn't name her for legal reasons but he needn't have worried; it turned out she'd been dead for two years - she being Milat's sister - but the family had kept it to themselves.

Hiding your light under a bushel doesn't get you anywhere in Sydney and nor does being diffident in money matters. The residents of Finger Wharf (who include "our" Russell Crowe) moor their gleaming pleasure craft outside their multimillion-dollar apartments and in the central business district everything is invested with an acquisitive bustle.

Sydney's other passion is food. The two-bottle, three-course lunch is alive and well and the subterranean food halls extend like catacombs.

Each night Sydney must throw away enough food to feed an African province.

Being a big city in the sun has its downside. Perhaps because Kings Cross is a freak magnet, there seem to be a lot of disturbed people on the streets, a few of them, worryingly, with small children.

The weather is a blessing for those of no fixed abode but when confronted with the sight of a fully-grown human being defecating on the footpath, one feels that outdoor living has been taken a little too far.

Sydney can be brash, vulgar and unforgiving but that goes with the territory.

Britons seeking a change from provincial life can always go up or down to London but New Zealand is a collection of provinces without a metropolis. Our metropolitan experience awaits us across the ditch.