In the third of his Australian diaries Michael White gets caught in some unseasonal weather in the land where the sun almost always shines. Read parts one and two here
The Twelve Apostles on the Great Ocean Road. Photograph: Getty
The first thing I did on New Year's Day was to plunge into the warm Pacific surf on Australia's Gold Coast down the road from Brisbane. This was a great improvement on Christmas Day when we awoke in Melbourne to find it was so cold that the central heating had come on during the night.
I had been dimly aware that something called the ''cool change'' happens in South Australia when the wind suddenly comes in from the southern ocean and temperatures can drop from 40°C to 8°C (100-plus to below 50 Farenheit) in 24 hours or so. But I hadn't banked on it in high summer. We shivered under the duvet listening to the rain.
We had got off the Ghan railway from Darwin to Adelaide, picked up a rental car and gone to stay with friends in the dry-as-tinder suburbs before setting out on a two-day drive along the Great Ocean Road to Melbourne. Adelaide is charming, but not a place to detain the tourist.
Much of the state of South Australia and neighbouring Victoria have endured a drought for the best part of a decade, by now the worst in a century. The land is still quite green near the coast but forest fires raged to the north and any rain is welcome to the long-suffering locals. We encountered our fair share.
Our plan was to drive to Melbourne, take a plane to Sydney, spend three days in a hotel on Bondi Beach then drive north through the Blue Mountains of New South Wales to the Gold Coast.
That may have been a mistake. The coast road south from Adelaide to Mount Gambier runs through salt flats, dull to all but bird-watchers. We even found the Great Ocean Road something of a letdown. There are dramatic set-piece views from the high cliffs, such as the Twelve Apostles and the now-collapsed arch known as London Bridge, but for much of the 240km (150 miles) journey you know the sea is close to hand, but cannot actually see it. Coast roads on the Mediterranean or in California offer much more.
We arrived in Melbourne at dusk at the start of a tremendous downpour, something the city had barely seen in months. They were thrilled, we weren't. Melbourne is a fine city, well appointed in every way, with galleries and museums - mostly shut for Christmas - as well as a shopping centre throbbing with customers.
The cold, wet spell was, unfortunately, not enough to ruin the third Ashes test but just enough to put us off our stride. So when we woke on Christmas morning to find the weather still overcast, cold and damp we were not sorry to catch our flight to bright and sunny Sydney.
