Australian odyssey

I must admit that the first arts event in which I participated on arriving in Australia was entirely by chance. Sitting in the sun on the restaurant terrace of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, looking at the ferries bustling in and out of Circular Quay, I picked up a small printed notice that had been placed on my table. It told me that, as part of the current city-wide contemporary art show, the chair in which I would normally have been sitting had been swapped with one from a café in Hanoi. As I pondered on this and gazed across the water, the arm of a crane swung into view and dropped an enormous rock on to a red car that had been parked at the bottom of the steps leading up to the Opera House. That turned out to be a part of the same show.

Sydney has some terrific museums.