journalism

There is no place quite like Sydney, a city ablaze with colour during the annual Vivid Festival.

I got back from Sydney a short while ago and I am writing this in the evil grip of jet lag. My eyes are throbbing and I am having hot flushes. It is necessary to focus incredibly hard to hit the right keys. The Qantas Airbus that brought me home could not have been more comfortable. And my suitcase was the fifth one to appear on the carousel. But I am a wreck. So far, these words have taken me over three hours to write. I fell asleep between two of them. Was it all worth it?

The answer is a resounding yes. Sydney is the most beautiful, exciting city in the world and the only thing wrong with it is that it is 10,554 miles away from London. Actually, that’s not a downside. The very fact that it is so far away is what makes it special. After all, when Neil Armstrong stepped on to the moon, there can’t have been that much to see. Just getting there must have added quite a bit to the sense of achievement.

^{The Vivid Festival sees Sydney lit in multi-faceted tones (Photo: AP)}

I was there for the Sydney Writers’ Festival, a very different kettle of fish from the Auckland Writers Festival described in my last column. The AWF was intimate and laid-back. Sydney, with its 400 participants and 350 events, was much more of a challenge. It was formidably well organised but as I got out of the chauffeur-driven car that had greeted me and stood underneath the Harbour Bridge – which is not just huge, but impossibly massive – I felt quite lost, as if I had arrived in London for the first time after a childhood and adolescence in Wales.

I was put up at the Pier One hotel which looks out over the water, close to the harbour. It was a friendly and lively place with great service and large rooms and the surrounding wharves were full of cafés, bars and restaurants and, indeed, writers, as this was where most of the festival took place Sydney Opera Housewas just around the corner and as ever I could only gaze in wonder at the triple whammy: the bridge, the opera house, the botanical gardens, all of which came to life in a way I had never seen before.

For this was the week of the Vivid Festival, an event that has to be seen to be believed. In essence, the entire city goes quite spectacularly mad with very sophisticated, computer-generated light displays projected on to major landmarks. The opera house catches fire, shimmers, flickers and explodes. Green tendrils snake out of the windows of Customs House before the entire building disintegrates into a thousand butterflies and blossoms. The new Museum of Contemporary Art – worth a visit in itself – becomes electrified. The streets are filled with giant pigs, molecules, mazes, brilliantly illuminated trees. There were even spotlights underneath the water. As I joined the thousands of people in the cold night air, I was struck by the cheerfulness of it all, the sense of childish wonderment. It could only happen in Australia.

^{Sydney is a city undergoing rapid development (Photo: AP)}

Let me sound one warning about Sydney. This was my sixth visit and I was struck by the pace of change and indeed by the change of pace, not all of it necessarily to be welcomed. This is suddenly a city in a hurry. There seem to be far more shops around, certainly more than I remembered. Walking up George Street, I found not just malls but malls within malls. You can pass from one mall to another without even coming to the surface and the sense of consumerism running rampant is only heightened by the astonishing amount of redevelopment that’s currently in progress.

Does Sydney really need another casino when there are 2.5 million Australians (13.9 per cent) living below the internationally accepted poverty line? And yet it’s at the heart of the AU$6 billion (£2.9 billion) Barangaroo development sprouting up at the heart of the city. The Aboriginal community have already called it “cursed” following the death of a worker. Looking at the multiple cranes and the new concrete towers around Darling Harbour, I have to say I wondered.

As in London, soaring prices are forcing ordinary Sydneysiders out. Just as David Cameron has promised to sell off housing association stock, the battle is on at Miller’s Point, just above The Rocks, where working-class residents are fighting to save their homes from what they see as a rapacious government. It’s none of my business but as I strolled around the neighbourhood and sipped a beer on the roof of The Glenmore, a nearby pub with amazing views, I had to ask myself where all this is going. “I have a strong suspicion it’s all going to get very ugly very soon,” one Australian writer told me. I hope she’s not right.

At any event, it was a relief to return to the Sydney I remembered. To stroll through Hyde Park and to spend an hour in the sunshine beside the very beautiful Archibald Fountain (Apollo, it is said, holds out his hand as a sign of protection against those who would harm the city), to revisit the glorious Botanical Gardens and to laze on the grass beneath enormous fig trees.

^{Archibald Fountain: It is thought Apollo stretches out his arm to protect against those who seek to harm Sydney. (Photo: Alamy)}

During one of my book signings, I met an old school friend, someone I hadn’t seen for 45 years, and together we headed off to Manly from Circular Quay. For me, it was a journey back into my childhood but also something you must experience if you happen to be in Sydney. After so much cloud and rain, the sun was shining and I loved cruising past the opera house, the little penal island of Fort Denison, Sirius Cove and Taronga Zoo. They say that you even hear the roar of lions if the wind is in the right direction.

Much of the coastline is unchanged, the beaches inviting, the land covered in dense bush forest. Looking out to the gap between North Head and South Head, you can imagine what the settlers must have thought when they first arrived after their long journey across the oceans and what a treasure they were about to find.

We had lunch together, oysters and fried fish at the 16-Footer Club in Manly, my old friend and I. Then we strolled across to the beach to watch the surfers tackling the waves, a vast colony of them, like seals in their black Neoprene wetsuits. In that hour I was as happy as it is possible to be – and that is what Sydney will always represent for me. Happiness. There really is nowhere quite like it.