Newtown yeay! Lots of people love it, it’s good to live here. 
Re: the spider/snake/creepycrawlie thing:
I’m 48 now, and have lived in both urban and rural Australia all of my life, and first saw a red-back spider when I was 6 years old (in my nanna’s woodpile out in the backyard).
Pic here: http://www.micropest.com/photos/red-back-spider.jpg
It’s taken me 42 more years to see my second…found one yesterday nesting under the kitchen-tidy. Poor little bugger got more of a fright than me when I up-ended the bin to give it a wash! 
I’ve only ever seen four snakes in the wild, and that is after years and years of regular camping in the bush as well.
Mozzies and sandflies are your worst enemies. Don’t forget the Aeroguard, and avagoodweegend.
I think we have all eased up on the OP.
Now its time to start on you- what the hell is wrong with Queenslanders? 
The drop bears will thank you for this. They like to have something to use to wipe their chops with, afterwards.
I was born in Sydney, and have lived in Sydney and Newcastle (about 160 km north of Sydney) most of my life, though I now live in the US.
I agree that the US city most like Sydney is San Francisco, except for the climate – which is more like that in southern California. Although Sydneysiders complain about the public transport, it’s not all that bad, and will get you to most parts of the metro area, and even to surrounding cities like the Blue Mountains, Newcastle and Wollongong. And you should spend a bit of time exploring Sydney and its surrounds.
One thing that I do like about Sydney is that it’s been a destination for a lot of recent immigration to Australia, so many of the suburbs have become ethnic enclaves, where you can sample various national cultures.
Another thing to like is that much of the surrounding bush is easily reached by public transport. One railway station just 65 km from Sydney is interesting because it can’t be reached by road – only by train or by boat. I used to travel on that part of the Sydney rail network twice a day, and I never got tired of the spectacular scenery in that part ofthe Hawkesbury River valley.
What about "wherethebloodyhellareya"…??? 
Wow, lots of great additional postings since I last was here. Thanks to all (as well as mhendo for the impassioned defense)!
I think the less said about that debacle, the better.
But Lara Bingle was a wonderful ambassador, what with her excellent erm…
Assets :rolleyes:
She’s not even that attractive, IMHO.
Now that’d be an effective marketing campaign: “You know that chick on the ‘wherethehellareyou?’ campaign? Yeah, we think she’s a total dog. Come here and see what attractive women look like.”
Then, when they step off the plane, we surround them with guns…er, knives… uh, pointy sticks… demand their wallets. (Saves time in trying to prise out their tourist dollars.)
Genius! I’m a genius, I tells ya!
So my wife flies out tonight (for 2 weeks). I’m going to print out a few of the choice posts here for her perusal and consolidate the rest for when I fly out with her in a couple of months. Hopefully, she’ll have a better sense of the city by then (unless she’s swamped by office work) and will report back about some of her To Dos (or Had Dones).
Thanks again!
How’s she finding it so far, ArchiveGuy?
I’ve only been to Australia twice, both times to Melbourne. My mother is from there. The first time I was on R&R from VietNam and simply reveled in meeting relatives and eating home cooked meals. And I also went sailing. The second time I could stay longer and took my mother and my two kids and my niece. One of my uncles rented a nine-passenger van and took us to both the tourist sites and the sites that they also enjoyed. Try to get to see the penguins return: http://www.penguins.org.au/
I have built houses and so was very interested in my relatives’ strange (by American standards) houses built in Melbourne proper which are half the width of an American house. So whenever we stopped the nine passenger van to drop off a cousin I had to get out and inspect their house.
I was in Australia for a couple of weeks in July and had a great time. I spent some time in Cairns, which I don’t think you’ll be doing, but my time in Sydney was also great. I found the city to be beautiful and it is the only large city to date that I don’t want to leave as soon as I get there. The touristy things are fun to do so don’t be afraid of those. I had a good time on the harbor cruse and saw some great scenery. I also found the city itself just fun to be in. I don’t know if you like churches, but I found the cathedral to be very nice and worth a look. I also had the best Cesar salad of my life at a little random steak place that we came across (the steak was pretty good too). I also took about an hour train ride out of Sydney and hiked up to a convent/shrine. (We saw wild kangaroos there!)
I think my favorite part of the trip though was just meeting Australians. I’m fascinated by people and I found the Australians to be, for the most part, a great and friendly people. It was also fun to be the foreigner for a change. I even got to explain that no we do not regularly have shootouts and have things blow up in America and no we don’t get mugged all the time either. Its not like TV.
I know it was kind of rambling, but my point is that the place is a lot of fun and you’ll have a blast. I did even though I was chaperoning a group of teens that sometimes had more desire for independence than sense.
I’m not sure what part of the US you live in, but i grew up in Australia, and i’ve lived the past 8 years in the US, and it’s really something of a stretch to say that Melbourne houses are “half the width of an American house.”
I assume that, in Melbourne, you probably saw Victorian-style terrace houses (here’s an example, from Sydney), or perhaps what Aussies call a semi (for “semi-detached”), which is pretty much a single-story duplex by another name (example).
In my experience, while there are small and large terrace houses, and small and large semis, they are, on average, no smaller than much of the similar housing stock in the United States. The average Australian terrace house is probably no smaller than the average American rowhouse found in north-eastern and mid-Atlantic cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. And the average semi is, in my experience, no smaller than many of the two-bedroom Spanish-style and Craftsman houses that i see every day right here in San Diego.
Sure, those old houses in the center of Melbourne are much less wide than a typical American ranch or McMansion, but in that case you’re not really comparing like with like. Australia has its share of oversized suburban and rural housing as well, and as far as i can tell, inner-city housing is generally not much smaller in Australia than in the US.
I’ll amend my previous post a bit:
A few areas of Sydney and Melbourne have some Victorian workers’ cottages which, as the name suggests, were originally built as low-income housing, often for railway and other government workers. These were often built in row style, but were generally single-story rather than two-story houses. Example
In the 1990s gentrification craze, even these little places started to go for crazy money, mainly due to the fact that they are often very close to downtown and/or convenient to rail and tram lines.
mhendo I have a 1895 era terraced house, you’re exactly right.
Mostly, what they lack in width (mine’s 4 meters wide) they make up for in depth.
Mine’s also (mostly) unrenovated, with a loo stuck on the back as an afterthought. There’s a 15 year plan in place to fix it up, precisely because a.) we wanted to live near the city and b.) we love the suburb and c.) crazy gentrification prices meant we had to buy unrenovated.
Mine’s a two story with 12 foot ceilings and a lace balcony.
Exactly.
Four meters wide is pretty standard, i think, although there are some wider ones, especially in the ritzy areas like Glebe and Paddington.
The row house where i lived in Baltimore was pretty much the same width. It was 14 feet, which is just a little over 4 meters. Baltimore has some wider rowhouses, but it also has some 12-foot ones. The first difference you notice is that, in a 14-foot rowhouse, you walk into a hallway, whereas in a 12-foot rowhouse, you walk straight into the living area.
I feel your pain.
I lived for a while in a single-story terrace in Petersham. It had a long hallway with three bedrooms off it, then opened into a living room, a dining room, and a small study, with the bathroom at the very back. I had the front bedroom, and if i had to pee in the middle of the night, it was about a 50-foot walk to the bathroom.
I’m in a very similar situation - bought a slightly over five-metre-wide, two-storey terrace in Newtown. Completely unrenovated, floors rotting, roof undersized and the sower and dunny’s in a lean-to out the back (yes, external - it’s a mongrel when it rains, once winter arrives I’ll need to make a decision about whether I’m reinstituting the night-time gardey-loo system).
That’s because they didn’t get around to putting the sewer through that part of Sydney until the 1970s.
It’s also got a lot of fascinating 1880 building features such as no cavities in the (double brick) walls, so all the electrical cabling runs along the face of the walls. Or stairs that’d never be permitted under current building standards.
Bought it because I wanted to live in Newtown, in a place with three reasonably-sized bedrooms and a small yard, but I couldn’t afford the $900,000 it’d cost to get one that’s better than student-grade. As a single income, though, my 10-year plan to renovate (what comes first - the indoor bathroom, the floor or the roof? Do I replace the '70s chipboard kitchen or wait until I can afford to rebuild the lean-to?) is actually a 30-year plan and involves paying off mucho mortgago first.