Sport is the most visible way in which Australian-ness seems to be expressed © Getty Images

Does Australia matter? The topic came up over lunch with two Australian journalists in Melbourne at the very start of this trip. To be fair the question barely came up again unless I raised it, so it isn't as if that is such a thing to worry about. But now, as we leave, is as good a time as any to revisit, maybe broaden it.

We were talking of sacred cows in various countries; most nations have a few. One of the journalists said the matter of whether Australia matters to the rest of the world is as close to a sacred cow as you can have here. Australia was a major ally in the war on terror, he said, adding, even if the US President thought it was Austria.

It is worth reflecting upon. The country is so far from much of the world. It is also out of place; its neighbours are vastly different cultures and peoples. Perhaps that's why there is a need not only to be distinct but to be involved and known.

Ads about Australia Day, great over-the-top stereotyping ones, seemed to suggest so. A number of other ads loved to begin with 'Australians love to do this' or 'In Australian homes' or some such (in Tasmania replace with Tasmanians of course). I only caught snippets and bytes of the news during my stay. I looked for Australian links to big, international news; an Australian casualty in the Haiti earthquake, how Australians fared in a TV and films awards show and even something about Australian security after the failed attempt to blow up a plane in the US. But I only did so because a colleague had told me to keep an eye out for it, as he reckoned it was Australia trying hard to be part of the world.

This happens everywhere, though, and it is increasingly the nature of news, to localise it, to make it relevant to its viewers; dog no longer bites man, dog bites you, or an Australian, Pakistani or Indian.

But in no other field or realm of life globally does Australia seem to matter as much as in sports. It is how I first came to know of Australia in early life; squash players, cricketers and hockey stars who mingled with and often beat Pakistani counterparts. Later only did I find out about Rolf Harris and Kylie (I preferred Danni because she was more anti-establishment somehow), Vegemite, 4X, Neighbours, Home and Away but later Heartbreak High. Much later, I learnt a little about how Australia came to be and the story of the Aborigines.

But sport is an opportunity for Australia to be relevant; few sports that they take part in actively are they poor at. Football (soccer) is picking up and it would be no surprise if a decade or so down the line they become more than just competitive. Having not heard much Australian music, or seen much of the country's art, sport is the most visible way in which Australian-ness seems to be expressed. They just know how to do sport, how to play it, structure it, nurture and develop it and respect it. Few countries show the world how important sport is to life.

There is much more to the country than just sport. Life, in all its tastes, seems to be lived well in the bigger cities. Certainly in Sydney the question of whether Australia matters just because it is so much a part of today's world. It is, like the other great, big cities, an overwhelming multicultural experience and there is so much of the rest of the world in it - as well as its own character - that it must matter, to many parts of the globe. Melbourne has become much more cosmopolitan just in the last few years apparently.

But it was in Tasmania, beautiful, lonely and a little spooky Tasmania, where we felt at one remove from the world. The clouds of Hobart were so angry and so alive, so vivid that it often seemed they were conspiring with the city's people as they floated on by, sniggering at some little shared secret or joke outsiders didn't know about. Here, it felt, whether Australia - or Tasmania as may be politically correct - mattered or not didn't really matter at all. The rest of the world didn't seem to matter much to Hobart.

At the plainest level of course, whether a country matters in the way the world goes round doesn't really matter anyway, for the world will go round regardless and the country will too. Living in Pakistan it sometimes seems like it might not actually be a bad thing if people stopped noticing for a while. And certainly it isn't as if the deepest imprint on my mind as I leave is that Australia is obsessed with proving itself. That would be that everyone wears skinny jeans here.

A late discovery: many young kids play tape-ball cricket here in their backyards. Perhaps Pakistan might be able to beat them at that. Perhaps not.

	Boating on the Derwent River © Getty Images

If Hobart were in England, there would be no word for it other than quaint. But quaint seems as misplaced a concept in Australia as not having a nickname.

When we first arrived here a few nights ago, it seemed as if we had walked into Northern Exposure, that early to mid-90s US series about a New York doctor moving to a town in Alaska. Isolation is instantly felt, befitting of a town at one edge of the world, but not that of an underdeveloped one. Hobart is fine and functional. It just moves to its own pace, one similar to other small, port cities.

As a Hollywood actress, Hobart would be Ava Gardner, with its aloof and distant beauty. Hills of a few colours, shapes and textures skirt it.

The Derwent river lurks through it, opening to greater things. The view from the press box at the Bellerive Oval, looking out at the River end, is outstanding and distracting. Hills creep up on either side of the Oval, but are kept apart by the Derwent , which seems to form a lovely crescent around the back-end of the ground from where we sit.

Mount Wellington - calling it a hill, as I did, can be offensive - overlooks the city with a benign but still stern care. The cap can often get snowy and the weather in the city is as moody as a young, wayward rockstar.

The Tasman Bridge, which connects Hobart to its eastern suburbs and crosses the Derwent, intrigues me the most. A great tragedy visited it in 1975, when a bulk carrier, the Lake Illawarra, crashed into it, causing a section of it to collapse. Four cars fell off it and 12 people died in all.

Three taxi drivers have spoken to me about it, including one who says he was just driving off it when it happened. That kind of disaster leaves a stronger imprint in smaller cities and apparently there was a collective social fallout in the days after the incident.

Somehow, it adds to the sad grace of the city.

The Manganiyar Seduction though, was as much a visual piece as it was aural © WireImage

Last night I saw a kid breakdancing to some Rajasthani folk music. As an image it worked better than I thought it might. The occasion was the opening night of the Sydney Festival, a three-week affair, the first night of which is always free. The festival is a sprawling one, showcasing theatre, art, dance, comedy and much music from all over the world. It reminds me of the Edinburgh Arts Festival, though only if that had been cross-bred with some music festival from the UK summer.

We arrived at Hyde Park with just enough time left in the night for The Manganiyar Seduction to seduce us. They are a group of folk musicians from Rajasthan and the music has all the elements of the desert region. If you were from Pakistan's Sindh, for example, the Sufi strains will come through.

There are traces of Qawwali as well, but as the dhols took over, crescendoing until it seemed they couldn't anymore and going further still, the most overwhelming memory - and music can be so associated with memories and experiences of times, places, smells and people - was of Pappu Saeen and his dhols at the Shah Jamal shrine
on Thursdays in Lahore. A similar frenzy slipped into the air here, unnoticed amid smoke, strange lights and a quiet sky.

Pappu Saeen was also involved briefly with that supreme Lahore percussionist outfit Overload, whose first album a few years back was among the freshest, most compelling to come out of an innovative, energetic local scene. They would've been good here, and appreciated.

The Manganiyar Seduction though, was as much a visual piece as it was aural. The musicians were placed in a box structure with 35 compartments, each housing one, or a group, of the artists. Each compartment was lit up with carnival lights and framed by red curtains, pulled back as each musician joined the piece, inspired by the red light district of Amsterdam. It smelt like Amsterdam as well.

Al Green was also playing somewhere, presumably where the largest crowd was headed to. I've seen him live once, so passing on this was easier. The pathways of Hyde Park were bedecked with lasers and smoke and bad BO. Sydney likes to party. Already we've been here for two in barely over a week.

Trapeze artists soared through the night air and there was wonderful jazz and reggae floating around the park elsewhere. AR Rehman will be around at some point over the festival. Rarely has a dead rubber in Hobart looked as unappetizing as this.

John Howard arrived sans entourage, and mixed freely with the fans © Getty Images

Twice in one day during this Test I saw John Howard, former Prime Minister of Australia, walking around. Once I came across him just outside the press box, as he was making his way to the broadcast booths. I initially couldn’t comprehend him being there so I thought he was a former Australian captain whose name I couldn’t remember. Only after he had gone past me did I realise.

I saw him again a little later in the day coming out of the Bradman stands at the SCG, bantering readily with fans. This is why I had trouble recognising him initially, I thought: he didn’t have an entourage with him of security, sycophants and all other kinds who usually hang around important people. He was just walking around, a man in a suit enjoying a day of cricket.

Kevin Rudd, the incumbent, has also been around. He made some hot dogs for the Jane McGrath Foundation, sat in the commentary box for a while (apparently he even predicted a 37-run win for Australia early in the Test). Earlier in the summer the defence minister was seen sitting in the stands unperturbed, watching Australia and West Indies battle it out. In New Zealand earlier, the Prime Minister spent around half an hour in the commentary box just chatting cricket.

No special arrangements seemed to have been made for Howard. If there was security I didn’t see or feel it. The roads weren’t closed down for Rudd’s arrival and mobile phones not taken in by stadium security. No sniffer dogs were sniffing. The Test started on time, as didn’t a Twenty20 in the Middle East last year because of a late arriving Royal.

I am not used to politicians and ministers, former and present, being so accessible and so unfussed. To talk to or approach the PM in Pakistan would take days and weeks. Here I could’ve asked Howard what he thought of Umar Akmal as he went past and probably Mr Rudd as well. When the head of state attends a match in Pakistan or India – always an ODI or a T20I – we all groan and moan, annoyed in advance at the logistical chaos and pandemonium about to unfold. When he or she does arrive, you spot them as a faraway dot somewhere, amid a sea of security and other important types, waving royally at no one in particular.

The Presidential spokesman in Pakistan has appealed for calm and patience after Pakistan’s 36-run Sydney loss. Perhaps the advice should’ve been given to the batsmen as they began their chase.

	"Leave those flies alone!" © Getty Images

There are fewer flies in Sydney than there are in Melbourne. And in Melbourne there are more flies than I care to acquaint myself with. The subcontinent clearly isn’t fly-less. But Australian flies are what we in Urdu call dheet: they are stubborn and persistent and they know it, which makes it worse. On the many walks in that city, my companions were mostly flies, having a word in my ear, giving me a kiss, counting the number of eyelashes I have left.

Lesser men than I have had similarly famous troubles of course. Some Englishman called Douglas Jardine spent most of a trip to this country in 1932-33 swatting away flies in some little ground somewhere in the back of beyond. A watching spectator, an enlightened by the name of Yabba, politely told him to stop annoying the flies. “Leave those flies alone, they’re the only friends you have here.”

These kinds of friends I can do without. Sydney, more humid as it is, should have more, but this being such a big city perhaps, they are busy doing the other things that you do in a big city, like working 9 to 5 and, to quote a local, pilates and yoga and coffee and things.

Sydney is a far greater proposition than Melbourne. You can get lost here far quicker, amid the skyscrapers, the many side streets and old terraced houses. The pace of life is quicker for sure, and the city is home to many more cultures. It might be worth delving its dynamic with smaller, sedate Melbourne; such city rivalries, like Karachi-Lahore, are as fascinating as they are revealing about a nation and people.

	Fireworks over Sydney © Getty Images

To write about the fireworks display in Sydney on New Year’s Eve is nearly futile. Really it just has to be seen. We were right at the harbor in North Sydney for it, a piece of good fortune at par with being dropped on 99 when a maiden Test hundred beckons.

But for 15 minutes, to celebrate the end of the decade, the night sky exploded with colour and shape and hope. The Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House stood proud in the backdrop though possibly bored for having seen it before. At times it was like being at those 3-D movies; sparklers bloomed out of the sky, right at you, coming closer and closer and yet not coming close at all. What anyone on hallucinogens might make of it I only wonder. The night might change their heads forever. It’s difficult not to feel good about any year that begins like this.

But almost as impressive was the aftermath.

I’m not sure how many people were out on the streets last night, but from where we were, it felt like some latter-day wave of immigration onto the shores of Australia: come one, come all and come build this country.

An eminent local remarked when the night was young that Australia is probably over-regulated, a nanny state. When we got into the harbor the sentiment felt right. Crowd control security felt brusque and officious. People were trying to have a good time and nobody likes checks on a good time; many barricades were up and many people couldn’t get to the harbour.

But as we made our way home when the night was older, a happy flipside emerged. With so many people drunk, the queues at the nearest train station were still orderly. A security MC (a fine title for a rapper) kept the crowd informed, with good humour, of the train times. Many were
drunk, many were more and yet a broad order remained. There was no stampede as the station doors opened, no riots.

Security or control staff were stationed along the way to help anyone and everyone find a way back and probably even talk to anyone who told them they loved them and they never loved anyone more and that this year, really, was the year things were going to change and did they tell them that they loved them?

To maintain order on this kind of night, to prevent any major catastrophe when the mix is so volatile takes some doing. We got back safe as I imagine the vast, vast majority of people did. Maybe over-regulation is not such a bad thing. The flipside is chaos and attractive as that is, it
is also exhausting.

	The cricketers are not the only ones bearing the brunt of the harsh Australian summer © Getty Images

What heat came upon us in Melbourne. Having been a resident, at various times in my life, of Libya, Saudi Arabia and now Karachi, logic dictates I should be used to this. After all, I’ve played school football in the midday heat of Jeddah and Riyadh, apart from cricket in the summers. On summer vacations, we played tennis on outdoor courts in Karachi. Heat is the one thing I should be used to.

But as I went out for an early evening walk by the Yarra river yesterday – and it’s not a long walk from where we are – I had to turn back barely 300 metres into it. The sun is brutal here, absolutely brutal: Ashes to Ashes, dust to dust, if Lillee doesn’t get you then the sun must? It is at you all the time, with absolutely no respite, much like the best Australian fast bowlers I guess. It was the kind of day on which to exult in the very ineptness that prevented you from becoming a cricketer, for otherwise imagine playing in this heat.

In my defense, it is a dry heat and I am used to stickier, more humid conditions. And it probably wouldn’t have been such a shock to the system had it not been such a steep jump in temperature from previous days. The temperature rose 13 degrees in one day, to 38 degrees and that was at seven in the evening.

That is, of course, Melbourne. The weather changes can be as sudden as the fall of Tiger Woods. Today, for example, it has been hot again but windy, where it was absolutely still yesterday; the sea breeze of Karachi, it can never be said enough, is God’s gift to the city. Tonight, on New Year’s Eve, Melbourne awaits rain. It’ll probably snow tomorrow.

But the sun does bestow upon the city, and its many-faceted architecture, a great seaside charm. There is great casualness around, in the flip-flops, the shorts and the vests, and it creeps up on you the more time you spend in it. We spent time walking around Lygon Street, which essentially would be what we call a food street in Pakistan. There is none of the loudness of Lahore’s late, much-lamented Gawalmandi or the smells and colours. But there is worldlier cuisine and good order even if some of the restaurateurs hawk their wares in ways not so different to their Lahori counterparts.

Gawalmandi and Koh Samui’s Chaweng are perhaps bastard, mutant children of Lygon.

We’re missing Melbourne for New Year’s Eve, though Sydney is some compensation. I’ve never been the first to witness the New Year.

	Cricket has a fixed place in the Australian calendar © Getty Images

There is something so revitalising in the way Australia goes about Test cricket, and not just on the field. They care deeply about it and it is as woven into the country's social fabric as it is in India and Pakistan - though in a very different way.

The Boxing Day Test is an instructive experience. To call it an institution might be doing it a disservice, only because institutions in some parts of the world also imply a monolithic staleness, rigidity and heaps of red tape. This is more a vibrant, moving event, and people of all ages and colour give it a real hum. It is a date for the social diary. Breakfasts and lunches are organised around and during the Test, spectators make a real day of it, and it is a day for family, a day for friends, and probably a day for love also. It's in the papers, on TV, floating around on the net. It could even be Glastonbury for the life it brings, but without the drugs and maybe more suits.

Part of it, as one MCC member put it, is because cricket has a fixed place in the Australian calendar; things can easily be built around it, or organised towards it. At the hotel I'm staying in, people are already trying to book in accommodation for next summer's Ashes Test. Indeed, it is a constant gripe about the subcontinent that their calendars are in no way fixed; there is no equivalent to the Boxing Day Test or the Lord's Test in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka or Bangladesh. It is not entirely a problem of their own making, of course, but it isn't as if there are no solutions to it.

Crowds have been good so far, surprisingly so. Nearly 60,000 came on Boxing Day, almost 40,000 the day after, and even on the third day there were over 35,000 people. Outside of Faisalabad and Multan, Test centres in urban Pakistan might struggle to generate those numbers over two or three years of Tests.

	Festive cheer: a home on the outskirts of Melbourne is lit up for Christmas © Getty Images

It's taken three days to do a diary, and it's not that Melbourne is dull – far from it, in fact. But what can you really write about a beautiful city with a bright and humble skyline, naturally built for walking, home to more cultures than is generally thought, where everything seems to work, the queues are orderly, the people mostly polite, the electricity on, and water can be had from the tap? Only the weather is tempestuous.

There was a certain drunken weekend boorishness to proceedings in the city centre over Christmas and that can be intimidating if you're not drunk yourself, or new. I'm told it's harmless, and I think most of it might be good-natured, but there is a fine line to these things. And as I walked down the spookiest bridge I've ever walked down, late one night, with a man of no hair and much drink jogging to nowhere in particular along the same path for much of my journey, I shivered and scuttled a little. Newspaper headlines about attacks on Indian students here.

The William Barak footbridge improves the link between the MCG and the Rod Laver arena to the heart of Melbourne CBD (Central Business District). Barak was an early, influential aboriginal advocate for social justice, and also an artist; the 525m bridge named after him is actually is as pleasant as things of concrete can be.

But the sound installation project Proximities, conceived as "a sonic corridor of human voices" for the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games, as you walk across gives it a different feel. There are 56 speakers in all, each with different voices, sounds and music, literally culled from around the world; Africa, Asia, Europe, the Caribbean, indigenous sounds from within Australia and New Zealand. But the thing is, at night, if there's no one else on the bridge, the mesh of sounds is disorienting and worrying, especially if your ears are not attuned to some of the sounds. Noble it is, but spooky it can be.

Drink and public behavior are issues du jour. Launched at the MCG yesterday was the "Know When to Declare" campaign, a bid to get people to control their drinking during the cricket. It'll take a little time if the woman who lurched into an MCG lift, loudly and screechingly convinced that Hollywood actor Jack Black was in it, is anything to go by. A local spectator said generally drinking among younger folk has increased and is a problem. Perhaps, says another voice, it just gets more media attention now.

Is an echo to be found in the public worry over the Australian team's poor behavior on the field and in recent years?