This weekend marks ten years since I first set foot down under, shortly after the Sydney Olympics and shortly before George Bush was elected President.
(Most of my initial "Ozervations" are documented here so I won't bore you with them now.)
But the landmark did lead me to consider what a different world it suddenly is. We have the first black President in the US, the first female Prime Minister in Australia and a coalition between Tory and Lid-Dem in Britain - all situations frankly unthinkable ten years ago. England won the Rugby World Cup and the Ashes, twice, and Wales won a Grandslam, also twice. All of those were fairly unthinkable ten years ago as well! (England is still rubbish at football but somethings really never change.)
Speaking of unthinkable, today I can map myself to the square yard using my phone to talk to satellites who can find me in seconds. I can go to a gig and publish video of it to thousands of people while I'm there - at the click of a few buttons. I can pause live sport while I'm watching it, and if I can't watch it I can program my TV to record it from anywhere in the world. You can even point your phone at a house and find out how many bedrooms it has and how much it is worth. CIA agents in Langley, Virginia, can use remote control planes to shoot people in Yemen or Pakistan without getting up from their desks.
Six months before I came to Australia, I stood in the lobby of the World Trade Centre in New York, wondering if I could be bothered to queue up to visit the rooftop restaurant or leave it for my next visit. It was quite unthinkable then that those two enormous towers wouldn't even be there anymore.
Ten years ago it was certainly unthinkable I'd still be here ten years later - afteral I only "popped in" for a couple of months to see some people I had met travelling, before flying on to tour South East Asia. I never made it. By tthe end of the first week here I was researching visa options. Sydney really is the most amazing city and I'm glad I'm still living in it. The climate is so perfect you need install neither heating or air conditioning in your house. The landscape is so beautiful and accessible - with stunning National parks to the North, West and South - there's never an excuse for being bored and with more than thirty first rate beaches to chose from - all within an hour's drive of where I live - it often seems a shame to go anywhere else for a holiday!
After 9/11 and as one ill-advised war after another kicked off in the early half of the decade, terrorist threats seemed almost incessant: Jakarta, Bali, Madrid, London. Sydney seemed a great place to come and hide from the world, seek sanctuary from a planet seemingly gone mad - like the book "On the Beach" predicts. Then as the GFC hit in, and Australia miraculously dodged a bullet, it repised its epithet of Safe Harbour. There is always a sense that you're at the bottom of the world down here - but for most of the last ten years, thats been a good thing!
To celebrate the landmark I bought myself a Kayak! I christened it this morning and realised that what it has done is open up the other half of Sydney to me to explore. The half that is water. So much of Sydney is little bays, expansive waterways and pretty little harbour beaches not really accessible by road, or certainly not easily noticeable from the road. So it seemed an appropriate present to buy myself to mark the decade. Who knows if I'll be in here in another ten years, but the formula is still just as good as it was ten years ago!