If it hadn't been for the Olympic Games, we wouldn't have heard a word or read a line about Sydney in the past month or so. Sydney is so far away and takes so long to get to that, when you finally arrive, jetlagged and bleary-eyed, you feel you're in some sort of parallel universe. Suddenly you're in a fully functioning modern city, with a population of four million, great restaurants, good public transport, legendary beaches and one of the finest harbours in the world.
But there are some things about it that are a bit spooky, as Dame Edna Everage, of Moony Ponds, Melbourne, would say. Like the odd familiarity of chemist's shops or the layout of turn-of-the-century houses. Even the quintessential Sydney house, with its veranda and cast-iron balcony, is like a dressed-up version of a Dublin artisan's dwelling.
Outside the Queen Victoria Building, once an indoor market and now a smart shopping centre, there is a strangely familiar statue of the dumpy old queen. Why, of course, it's the one that used to stand in front of Leinster House and was last spotted in the courtyard of the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham, before we gave it away in 1988.
And yet Sydney is a city about which, to paraphrase Neville Chamberlain, we know very little. Sure, before going down there, I had a clear image in my head of the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge as well as a hazy impression of the city's high-rise skyline. But I didn't expect that Bondi beach would be just as built-up as, say, Bangor or Bray.
The names of streets and areas are also familiar. There is a King's Cross and a Paddington as well as a George Street, an Oxford Street and a Castlereagh Street. But what are all these Wild West canopies stretching out over the footpaths, festooned with garish signs? They provide shade from the sun and shelter from torrential showers.
Sydney is a city of amazing diversity and dynamism. Whether it was the party atmosphere generated by the Olympics or whether it happens all the time, the canyon-like streets of the central business district were full of young revellers in the early hours of one Sunday morning in mid-September. A bit like Dublin's Dame Street, without the piss and puke.
Surveyed from Embarkation Park on Pott's Point, the city's skyline is dazzling, especially at night. Dozens of soaring office towers compete with each other for attention, not least with their roof profiles and corporate names spelled out in different hues of neon. It takes a while to spot the Catholic cathedral, St Mary's, nestling among them.
The cathedral's twin spires are new, erected earlier this year to complete the original design from 1866. The edifice is one of numerous examples of the public realm being upgraded to celebrate Sydney's role on the world stage, an effort that began with the Australian Bicentennial in 1988.
And there's the rub. By the time Sydney was founded by a motley crew of fusiliers and felons in 1788, most of Georgian Dublin was already built. As a comparatively new city, Sydney has not had to concern itself overmuch with conservation, which is why so many of its surviving historic buildings are dwarfed by more recent additions.
The Rocks, lurking beneath the elevated road that leads to the Harbour Bridge, is the only enclave of old buildings that has been preserved more or less intact. Once the stomping ground for hard-drinking sailors and harlots, it is now almost as twee as New York's South Street Seaport, its streets lined with respectable taverns and tourist trinket shops.
It wasn't until 1962, 30 years after the hanger-like Harbour Bridge was opened, that Sydney acquired its first major high-rise building - the 28-storey AMP office block on Circular Quay, hub of all the harbour ferries. This now looks very modest compared to what followed in what seems to have been a headlong rush to create a Chicago-style skyline.
AMP, Australia's largest insurance company, was also responsible for Centrepoint, which claims to have the highest observation deck in the Southern Hemisphere. Essentially a crow's nest mounted on a reinforced concrete shaft, held in place by 56 steel cables, it is the tallest structure in Sydney, with an overall height of 305 metres (1,000 feet).
The massed ranks of office towers and, more recently, apartment blocks in the central business district make a lasting impression, particularly when viewed from vantage points in the city's incomparable harbour. Day or night, the skyline conjures up a kind of high-rise heaven, which left certain Dublin property developers at the Olympics drooling.
They were also drooling over the discovery that the harbour contains at least 250 kilometres of waterfront property, much of it developed fairly densely for housing, and that the tall buildings apparently scattered at random throughout the metropolitan area got the green light because they were located in the vicinity of major commuter rail stations.
The City of Sydney, as such, consists of an area three kilometres square on the south side of the harbour, spreading out from the site of the original colonial settlement. With the rest of the greater Sydney area in the hands of some 40 separate local authorities, it occupies a position analogous to the City of London, from which it differs little in size.
It is the commercial heart of city and country, the place where New South Wales - and much of Australia - does its business. Old Sydney, with its overwhelmingly maritime focus, could never have been preserved in aspic. Much of it had to go to make way for insurance companies, banks and other elements of the financial services industry.
But not everything from the past is gone. Great care has been taken to preserve colonial buildings dating from the city's earliest decades, particularly along Macquarie Street, and there are also significant incentives available to conserve a total of 400 listed "heritage buildings" throughout the city's relatively small administrative area.
The juiciest incentive by far involves a trade-off with the high-rise lobby. Anyone who restores a heritage building and agrees to maintain it in perpetuity becomes entitled to sell off its "air rights" - the notional floorspace that might have been built on the site had the building been cleared away - to developers seeking to build a tower block elsewhere.
In the case of a four-storey mid-Victorian building with, say, 4,000 square metres of floorspace, the registered owner could flog the equivalent in air rights for up to A$2,000 per square metre, netting a tidy A$8 million (£3.9 million). Thus, there is a real incentive to restore and maintain listed buildings, even if such deals may compromise their setting.
John Kass, the City of Sydney's mild-mannered planning director, agrees that many heritage buildings have been reduced to little more than remnants in the urban landscape. But he can also point to outstanding successes, such as the incorporation of Sydney's old GPO into the new Westin Hotel, with an atrium between the old and new.
The incentive to restore heritage buildings through the sale of their air rights "has become a very useful and productive planning tool and perhaps even a model for other cities to follow", he says. And because developers aren't allowed to gross up their plot ratios without purchasing "heritage floorspace", there is a ready market for it.
Normally, the planners will permit a plot ratio (gross floorspace divided by the site area) of 8.5 to 1. But they are prepared to increase this to a very generous 12.5 to 1 providing that the developers can make it up by buying air rights from the owners of listed buildings and having an architectural competition for the design of their proposed tower.
From the 1960s to the 1980s, Kass admits, there was not much of a reward for aesthetics in the design of tower blocks in Sydney. "But we've raised the bar with a new set of planning rules that require a competitive process," he says.
Indeed, it is clear that many of the more recent additions to the skyline have been consciously composed on a high note.
The most elegant is Aurora Place, a mixed office and residential scheme designed by Renzo Piano and built on the site of an ugly state office block from the 1960s. With its sweeping curves and sharp edges, it has certainly "raised the bar" - and not just architecturally. The residential penthouse overlooking Hyde Park sold for the equivalent of £3 million.
As in Dublin, there has been an influx of residents into the centre of Sydney, trebling its population to 25,000 since 1991. Achieving such a critical mass has been one of the principal goals of Frank Sartor, the city's long-serving Lord Mayor, because of its positive benefits; even outdated office blocks are now being converted into luxury flats.
There are three stages in this process, as Sartor sees it. First, you get cafes and restaurants opening up at all hours of the day and night in areas where previously you couldn't get a decent cup of coffee. Then, the convenience stores spring up to cater for the needs of new residents and, finally, there are people out walking their dogs. The living city.
"We don't expect every new building in the city to be an icon - that would be impossible," says John Kass. "But we do want to raise the level of architecture considerably."
Piano has set a new standard for lesser architects to emulate and, no doubt, another cool office tower, designed by Norman Foster but not yet built, will also make its mark.
What is certain is that the skyline will keep changing, particularly in the city centre, to meet the needs of commerce on the Pacific Rim. Its progress is plotted out on a scale model of the central area, which is housed in the planning department. Thus, the visual impact of proposed new buildings can judged. Several more towers are on the stocks.
Worse damage has been done to Sydney by the construction of elevated roads such as the Cahill Expressway, which have the effect of cutting off chunks of the city from the waterfront. The showpiece Darling Harbour, with its convention and exhibition centres, hotels, restaurants and casinos, has been one of the prime casualties of this trend.
In the future, just as in Boston, the money might be found to put the roads underground and restore a more coherent relationship between Sydney and its harbour. The policy of urban consolidation, opposed by groups such as Save Our Suburbs, should help to contain the sprawl of housing that eats into forests on the periphery of the city.
Sydney covered itself in glory in staging the Olympics. God knows what it will look like in, say, 20 years' time. But if the city retains its essential vitality - and there's no reason why it shouldn't - it will remain as beguiling as ever to Europeans itching for a new, more relaxed life in a sunny Mediterranean climate some 14,000 miles away from home.