Everyone who comes here gets a photo which looks something like this...



So the big Sydney Opera House Challenge is to try and get something a bit more angular and experimental.

Here are my attempts...









Marks out of 10 please.

Essential Opera House (Possibly) Facts:

• The architect who designed the iconic outside was removed from the project and didn't design the inside. As a result, it's fairly ordinary inside. I read that on Wikipedia, so it might not be true.
  
• The roof tiles are self-cleaning.
  
• They are still fairly dirty - they don't look white when you get close up.
  
• You can actually touch the roof...

It was a slightly different cultural experience in the evening.

As I have mentioned, Melbourne is a very civilised city - the entertainment on offer is of the highest order. Just while we have been here, Paul Weller and Brian McFadden have been here recycling their back catalogues. Although what back catalogue Brian McFadden has I'd be interested to know. (Actually, I wouldn't.)

They weren't appearing together, I hasten to add. Tony Hadley (ex of Spandau Ballet) and Paul Young are around sometime next week and they are appearing on the same bill, this time recycling and reliving the 80s. I bill Tony Hadley (ex of Spandau Ballet) as ex of Spandau Ballet, not because I think you won't know who he is, but because that's how he is billed on the poster, just in case no-one else does. I notice Paul Young isn't billed as "ex Streetband, who did Toast, you know, a little bit of TOAST..."

Oh, and we just missed Sinead O'Connor. One can be thankful for small mercies.

In the musical theatre genre, they were holding casting sessions for Billy Elliot and the previously mentioned Shane Warne - The Musical opens soon. (Thanks to Tina and Chris who suggested its fictional similarity to "Shayne Ward - The Musical" which I guess, if it existed, would tell the embellished story of poor northern boy made X-Factor-Good. And would still be more entertaining than Brian McFadden.)

So we went to see Wicked...



...which was excellent on Broadway and was excellent here too.

In addition, here (because they're not Broadway, and the alternative was Brian McFadden) they had "Wickeded-up" the whole street with spectral green lighting in all the trees. Best of all was the "Ozmopolitan" - a sort of fluorescent green alcoholic slush puppie in a light-up plastic glass.

Of course I had one! I'm on holiday!

It was now about 4pm and I may have given up listening to the iPod by now, but I imagine it had reached something along the lines of "The Wreck of the Sloop John B".

For this was Shipwreck Coast (®) and there are three major things to see here. For now, anyway. This is because the coastline is as it is because of massive erosion of the sandstone by the relentless Southern Ocean on a big exposed bit that doesn't have the luck to be protected by Tasmania.

And so you get these massive stack formations where bit of land have been left as the cliff had tumbled into the sea around them.

The most famous is The Twelve Apostles...



...and you can guess what's coming - there are now only eleven because one of them had the temerity to fall into the sea. But hey, they only changed the name from "The Sow and her Piglets" a few years ago so that they didn't have a tourist attraction named after farm animals and now they've had the sings done, the maps printed, the helicopters painted...

It can only be a matter of time before another huge chunk of cliff disappears, probably taking a few hundred tourists with it, and they can have twelve again...

Next westward is Loch Ard Gorge...



...two inlets, one of which is protected by this (near to collapse, I should guess) lump of red rock. Apparently it looks like a question mark from the air. There are two ways to check this. One is to pay $$$ and make Jeff another small percentage by going on the ludicrously short helicopter flight. And the other is Google Maps...



Handily, the Google Maps high resolution photography extends just shy of the question mark in question, so it's either the helicopter of take Jeff's word for it... It's the bit where the shipwreck was anyway. The most famous one anyway - there were 85 over something like 60 years. (It was definitely that way round 'cos he said "that's more than one a year...") This one had a Titanic style rich boy/poor girl/other way round possibly love story attached to it where one saved the other and wanted to get married but the other one went back to Ireland and they never saw each other again. I'm inclined not to believe some of the stories told by tour guides.

Finally, and the most south and west I'm going in Australia, is London Bridge - another rock formation which looks like this:



However, prior to 1990, it looked like this...



A couple had just walked over onto the right hand bit when the first arch collapsed. Someone telephoned the police to say that "London Bridge had fallen down" and understandably, the police thought they were hoaxers and took ages getting there. In the meantime, the TV network helicopters had picked up the information on short wave radio and there was a big race to get out there. Several arrived to get the first interview, but none of them could rescue them because they wouldn't have been covered for insurance purposes - the married couple had to wait for the official rescue helicopter.

Unfortunately, it transpired that the married couple weren't actually married to each other. They were away on a little illicit getaway - and they had also pulled sickies from work. Not good when you have the helicopters from several TV networks hovering above you...

This was Jeff's story, so it could have had embellishment, although he did say that several weeks earlier, BMW had hired the land and their new range was lined up along London Bridge and shot from the air for a new advertising campaign. Trucks and cars and support vehicles had been driven over, parked, driven back again. Three weeks later, the arch collapsed...

As you head up into the trees, it's a quick stop to see where the koala (not bears) are causing environmental havoc by killing all of them. Apparently there are 537 types of Eucalyptus tree but koalas only eat three of them. (Or something like that, Jeff and Norm argued the point earlier...)

We saw plenty of koalas, but most of them had the good sense to keep just far enough back from the track so that tourists had to use the dodgy zoom feature of their digital cameras. Which is why what you see below might actually be a koala and might actually be a cuddly toy which someone put on a branch to fool Americans...



No, it seriously is a real life living koala and you can see more of my portfolio collection for the BBC HD Natural History Unit on flickr.

They had kookaburras and parrots too, but nobody was much bothered by them...



Back in the bus, we learned that for tourism and branding purposes, the Great Ocean Road is divided into three parts:

• Surf Coast
  
• Green Coast and
  
• Shipwreck Coast

By the time the iPod had reached "Weather with You", the rain had started on cue to remind us that we were high up in the rainforest. It was at this point that Jeff turned into one of those enthusiastic people off "Lost Land of the Jaguar" - sort of a cross between Steve Irwin (in fleece'n'shorts appearance...) and Scrappy Doo (in relentless enthusiasm...)

So, down the track at Mait's Rest...



Lots of ferns and unidentified noises, sunlight peering through high trees and things dripping on you. A babbling stream threaded its way downhill, unseen under the undergrowth. Many of the trees are 700 years old and the rainforest in this gully has only survived because a major forest fire jumped the gully many years ago.

It's like The Eden Project...



...but real.

First stop on the Great Ocean Road tour was before we even got onto the Great Ocean Road, near the very industrial city of Geelong.

The Narana Creations Cultural Centre is a shop by any other name. Yes, you can have a demo of a digeridoo. Ditto Boomerang and spears and emu callers. Then you get ushered through the shop and it's heavily suggested that you might take any/all of these things back home as souvenirs.



The fact that there's probably some percentage deal going on between the shop and the tour company to process a certain number of customers per day doesn't make me want to buy anything. Although didn't feel as pressurised as in the jewellery factory in HK. You could get Norm's CD if you wanted...



His obvious talent with the instrument cannot disguise the fact that there is no tune...