Australia, it’s good to be back.

It’s good to be in spitting distance of the beach, a run along its pristine arc a knee-jerkingly stunning way to start the morning.  A single look at Bondi beach enough, each and every day, to make me congratulate my wise judgement.

It’s good to be surrounded by beautiful men and women – catering to a very niche aesthetic, of course –

It’s good to take a full five seconds to have my ticket read by a clunky, ink-filled machine on the bus. No Go, Oyster or Metro cards here. It’s good to find myself in transport blind spots, dead to trains, tubes, buses, taxis and hard to negotiate on foot.

It’s good to admit to needing a car.

It’s good to pay $10 for two coffees, to switch on the radio and hear a political mandarin declaring ‘fair dinkum’.

To navigate Bunnings with a sausage sizzle construction in tow – the unzipped, flattened hot dogs a contender for the national dish, surely – among browsing hi-vis shirts.

Tattoos on tubby bellies, lazily flopping thonged feet, acres of hose-down chrome and veneer floors in pubs: they’re all good.

Hell, it’s great to be drawn to a standstill by a boyband with artfully haystack-like hair and teeth like sugar cubes. To be frighteningly interested in a group of teens from a small island 12,000 miles away – a monarchy that still has a bizarre grip over life in the sun-drenched land.

It’s even good to hear the empty, bellicose arguments over boat people and the dogmatic gerrymandering of ideas in attempts to justify coal-seam gas expeditions. Fracking, freaking, fuckin’…

It’s good to be home.

Image: Morning dip at Bronte rock pool