Australia's Great Barrier Reef

Central Melbourne train station	Queen Victoria Market, Melbourne A large market with meat, poultry, seafood, fresh fruit and vegetable and clothing and dry goods merchants spread over several square blocks. Great browsing and people watching.	Melbourne waterfront from St. Kilda	St. Kilda neighborhood Once the principal Jewish neighborhood in Melbourne, it's now a trendy suburb with lots of pastry shops, some remaining Eastern European restaurants, bars and other spots. Great walking area.	Melbourne sunset from the harbor
Fishermen, St. Kilda These men all seemed to be immigrants. Mostly Greeks, but also some Asians and Eastern Europeans. Like jetty fishermen everywhere, they were relaxed, stoic and patient.	Melbourne harbor sunset	Adelaide shopping arcade This was in a historic building. Note the fancy tile floor.	Adelaide shopping district The juxtaposition of this old rococco building and the newer schlock around it was typical of the downtown area.	Canberra A planned city designed as an alternative to picking either Melbourne or Sydney, bitter rivals, viewed from a hilltop outside of the central city.
Darling Harbor, Sydney Patterned after the Harborplace festival marketplace in Baltimore, and developed with participation by an offshoot of the Enterprise Foundation's for profit development group years ago. Home of Sydney's fantastic aquarium and lots of water-themed restaurants, bars and other attractions.	Sydney Harbor Bridge at night	Sydney skyline I took a night-time city ferry harbor tour to see the city from the water. Every little cove along the way was described by the taped narrative as "the finest upscale neighborhood in the city." And you couldn't argue with it from my vantage!	Sydney skyline and Opera House	Brisbane riverfront Brisbane was a surprise gem. It's development of the river as an urban amenity was terrific, and the city-run ferry system enables residents and tourists to travel up and down its length easily. We spent Saturday cruising on one of these, getting off and on as often as we liked, and saw a good deal of the city that way.
Brisbane sunset

Key impressions of Australia, from an admittedly very brief visit:

• While it's easy to think of NZ as a small version of AUS, AUS is way larger and seems to operate on a higher voltage.  The cities are much bigger, of course.  But there's also just a more palpable atmosphere of activity and business in the atmosphere in AUS.
• The Ozzies, as they and others call them down here, seem more assertive than Kiwis.  They swagger  more. 
• Like NZ, AUS is a very young country.  There aren't many places you can go where even American historical places seem genuinely old by comparison, but Oceania is one of them.  I took a "historic walk" in Adelaide and there was nothing on the self-guided tour of the downtown that was much older than mid-1800's.
• Ozzies must love to shop.  Every city I visited was full of stylish shops that were full of people.  Malls upon malls in the cities, in refashioned arcades, pedestrian malls, and plain old 5th Ave. style shopping streets.
• Strong state governments mean I found very different policies and attitudes about housing policy in different places.  Very different than NZ, where the unified federal government dominates all services and policies.
• It's a HUGE country.  The train ride from Brisbane to Cairns, in the very northeast corner of the country but in the same state, takes 36 hours.  I didn't try that, but even the plane ride was several hours.  As the railroad ticket clerk declared when I expressed amazement at the length of the train ride, "Oy, it's a bloody big country, mate."
• Sydney especially is a hugely diverse city.  Walking on the streets was a constant delight with every new precinct shifting from Asian to European to Pacific Island pedestrian and shopping influences.

Meeting with various sectors about housing policy and programs was invigorating and challenging.  It's like visiting a strange parallel universe.  On first glance, it looks the same as the US -- a vigorous private banking system with mortgages being widely advertised, a property boom driving up housing prices, widespread homeownership.  But the closer I looked the more obvious were the differences.  The AUS homeownership rate is declining, while the US is increasing.  Banks control the mortgage system.  There are no 30-year fixed rate mortgages; almost all mortgages are adjustable rate, and those with fixed rates are only for short, limited terms.  Mortgage interest is not deductible; owners struggle to pay off their loans as quickly as possible.  While there's a 30-year U.S. history of broad disclosure of mortgage lending by nearly all mortgage lenders (including, since 1993, Fannie Mae), and the U.S. Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) forces lenders to be accountable for the pattern of their mortgage lending, neither AUS nor NZ has anything similar. 

When I described the U.S. system, people were openly jealous.  When I described Fannie Mae and the products we've developed to expand homeownership, and the initiatives and public commitments we've made, folks were "gobsmacked," Australasian for "flabbergasted."

On the other hand, AUS and NZ both have long histories of deep government involvement in housing, primarily through construction and management of "state housing."  Nearly all this responsibility in AUS is now devolved to the state governments through a multi-year funding arrangement with the Commonwealth.  For more on this topic, which surely only housing wonks like me will want to pursue, see the section in this website on "Housing Down Under."

Wine, Women, and Song

Okay, just wine, and only one woman, Carol, my host.  Really.  While in Adelaide, Carol, her Adelaide colleague Cieran, and I took Saturday morning and travelled into the wine country of South Australia.  This is where many of the wonderful Australian reds that have flooded the U.S. market come from.  The landscape is very much like Northern California.  The vineyards stretch fence post to fence post across rolling hills that stop at the ocean.  There's a tasting circuit through wineries that included some I recognized and many I did not.  We stopped at only a few because of the time, but what we tasted was wonderful.  The same drowsy, rich, and sensuous atmosphere that dominates the Napa and Sonoma Valleys permeates the McLaren Vale.

The coastline is equally impressive.  Miles and miles of beach interspersed with wild rocky shoreline.

North Queensland

Far to the northeast of Brisbane, Queensland's capital, lies rainforest, the Great Barrier Reef, and hundreds of miles of more or less trackless bush.  Cairns (pronounced "Cans" without the "r") is the adventure capital of Australia and the gateway to the rainforest.  At one time rainforest came down the coastal mountains right to the sea.  But European settlement turned most of it into sugar and other plantations.  As late as the 1980's, the government was offering freehold title in the rainforest beyond the Daintree River to anyone who would homestead it.  With the bulldozing of a road at that time, however, environmental opposition flared up in protest.  Some of the leaders of that protest are now the elected government, and they have halted development plans beyond the river and are offering to buy back the titles already claimed.  Current freeholders can stay, but the government will not allow electric power lines to be run into the area, and there is no water system or sewage expansion permitted.  Consequently they have halted further development for now. 

I took an organized tour for a day to visit the rainforest and Cape Tribulation.  It's a really long drive from Cairns, but worth the trip.  We took a cruise on a river to see salt water crocodiles, tramped some on raised wooden walkways built in the rainforest to reduce tourist impact and saw some other native wildlife. 

Daintree River ferry This is the only way across the Daintree River. It takes about 10 minutes. The ferry pulls itself across on a cable. There are times when the river is too high to cross and the land beyond becomes inaccessible.	Daintree River ferry	Foliage along the road
Road to Cape Tribulation	Salt water crocs basking on the shore	Cape Tribulation Nearly as far as it's possible to go without a genuine 4-wheel vehicle.
Rainforest	Rainforest vine	Cassowary crossing the road
Ocean view north of Port Douglas

 

After this day trip I was off on my diving excursion.  Check out the Great Barrier Reef gallery to see more about that.