About Australia and Australians, my preconceived ideas were rather vague: I knew their summer corresponds to our winter, I imagined their buildings to be even more modern than those of America, I had read that men outnumber women and that, when they decide to settle down, some of them consult matrimonial ads in German newspapers. I knew the names of a few tennis champions and I had heard that the beaches were shark-infested. And of course I shared the widely-held view that Australia would be the best place to avoid the fall-out of nuclear war.

My first surprise came on seeing the same rows of little Victorian terraced houses as you find in English suburbs. The small hotel where I'm staying is also very British, what with its wallpaper and fake fireplace where a lightbulb covered in red plastic does service for a flame. In the hallway I come across old ladies in flowery print dresses straight out of a South Kensington B&B. The hoardings read "Players", "Guinness", "Woolworth" like on Oxford Street or in Brighton. From a distance, I make out a few skyscrapers in the city-centre, but these buildings don't set the style of the city.

So here at their antipodes, the English found a land as green as their own, that could be grazed by the same sheep, that was subject to the same unpredictable weather, the same wet winters and the same muggy summers. And here they built the same interminable suburbs, designed to give each family its very own red-brick home with its little garden full of roses.

Except that Australians don't have time to grow roses. Nor for that matter to chase after money like Americans do: five working days a week strike them as excessive, and they have managed to reduce them to four, from Monday afternoon to Friday morning. They have no time for politics either and hardly ever discuss it, still less for culture. I don't know if they keep any time free for love but, whether they do or don't, they don't show it in public. To listen to them, you'd think the only way to pass the time without wasting it is to spend the day at the beach.

When you see the beaches of Sydney, you understand. The city gives onto the sea on every side and has a network of fjords and peninsulas linked by great metal bridges and ferry-boats. The most impressive beaches are those which face the Pacific. There are about 30 of them, each with its own amusement park, club, team of volunteer lifeguards: each is a community in its own right composed of a particular social group.

Part of the charm of these beaches is the way one leads onto the next, suddenly opening up between two rocky promontories encircled by forests of eucalyptus and curly-needled pine trees, very different from our own. The beauty of the landscape finds an echo in the athletic bodies of the bathers-both men and women-who are clearly determined to perfect these gifts of nature by means of body-building (except that their physical attractions don't seem to prompt them to take more of an interest in each other, which strikes the foreigner in me as bizarre).

However, the ocean is what is most arrestingly beautiful. Here, the water is not just a liquid in which the bather immerses himself, but a beast in ceaseless renewal which throws itself upon him again and again; he escapes narrowly by diving beneath just as it breaks over him or, better still, he masters its power by straddling it. In any case, you don't talk about the sea here, nor about the ocean, but about surf.

Surf is the great Pacific wave which breaks against the sand, falling back like a reversed comma, and often weighing several tons. The quality of surf varies according to the beach, the time and the wind, that it to say the waves have to be more or less powerful and regular. Surfing is the sport which consists in moving out to sea and then letting yourself be carried towards the beach astride a wave, either by leaning your body on its crest or by using boards of different forms and dimensions, or even in a group atop vessels conceived for this purpose. In Sydney alone, surfers form hundreds of clubs and sustain three specialized magazines.

The flip side to these attractions is that Australian beaches are extremely dangerous. Just the weight of one big wave falling on an inexperienced bather can knock him out and drown him. The configuration of the current-the rip- changes from day to day, and its speed may go up to seven knots, more than what's necessary to drag the most able swimmer out to sea. Sheltered pools have been built by the water's edge for children and less experienced swimmers. Even so, children occasionally get washed away by an unusually powerful wave. And then of course there are sharks. One evening, when all the bathers and lifeguards had come back in, I saw a man on his own in completely calm water up to his thighs. A lifeguard threw himself upon him and dragged him to shore. When I expressed surprise, he replied that swimming unsupervised was always madness: sharks approach even at low tide, to the point where they sometimes beach themselves on the sand.
The beaches of the Northern suburbs are the most renowned, and the most beautiful is Palm Beach, 25 miles from the city-centre. A peninsula ending in a rocky promontory marks the limit of a bay where sailing boats manoeuvre in calmer waters. There is surfing on the ocean side and underwater fishing between the rocks. The heights of the bay are studded with villas and parks where half-wild little koala bears wander about the flowers.

I visited the Palm Beach Life Savers' Club. Its members are all unpaid-and sometimes worse than unpaid as they chip in for the costs of life-saving equipment and for the fees of the professional lifeguards who work on weekdays. They can afford the expense because they all belong to the commercial bourgeoisie. My world tour does not impress them in the least since the journey they most commonly make is the "trip back" to Great Britain via Singapore on the way out, coming back by Los Angeles (or vice-versa).

Andy Davies, secretary of the Club, had been expecting my visit. But as I emerged from my taxi, I found him agitated and out of breath: "You should have been here half an hour ago, you could have photographed a 15 year-old boy being saved, he'd been dragged off 300 yards from the beach by the rip. I nearly drowned myself because my colleagues miscalculated the angle between my rope and the wave and they pulled too hard. Instead of pulling me to shore, the rope was dragging me underwater. And I couldn't signal to them without letting go of the boy. Luckily one of them twigged in time. If they'd been a few seconds slower, we'd both have drowned."
Since their foundation in 1918, the different Life Savers' Clubs have rescued more than 100,000 bathers. But those rescued don't usually manifest much gratitude-Andy Davies was even a little surprised by my question. Then he remembered the father who'd been rescued along with his two children and who left £ 25 to the club, but it was an exceptional case. For an Australian, risking your life for someone in danger comes naturally, just as another would naturally risk his neck for you: confronting danger is the best way for each to put himself to the test.

This predilection for personal challenge is what struck me most in this continent which, in other ways, I found devoid of human contact, devoid of tension, devoid of culture and above all devoid of sensuality: Australians like challenge for the sake of it, with the sole aim of proving their mettle. On the beach, this manifests itself in surfing and life-saving. In the rather more dramatic circumstances of the two World Wars, Australian soldiers were all volunteers and their legendary courage led them to be regarded as the elite troops of the Empire.

This inclination also shows itself in the day-to-day: for instance, the natural way they accept (and even provoke) criticism about their society, or their lack of prejudice about Greek and Italian immigrants, who are transforming the appearance of their towns. "We will see," they seem to say, "if our national character is strong enough to assimilate them."
Their sartorial nonchalance can be interpreted in the same way: on the beach, athletes walk about with towels wrapped round their waists and their noses white with suncream as if to say, "I'll bet body building is enough to make me attractive…"

But it's also their weak point: apart from body-building, lifesavers' parades with banners and military marches, sporting exploits and undeniable proofs of courage, Australian men don't seem very comfortable in their role. You rarely see couples. Picking up girls on the beach is frowned upon and Australians have a slang word for it which is very descriptive: pigging. (Nor did I see many men doing it…) Coming as I did from so far away, I was initially fascinated by the splendid bodies of some of the young women. But I ended up not paying any attention to them: there's no flirtatiousness in the air and they reacted to my admiring glances with polite surprise, as if to say that they were not there to be looked at.

This could change with the new generation. Adolescent surfies aren't attached to beach clubs or social classes: depending on where the best surf is, they migrate from one beach to the next with their surf-boards strapped to the roofs of their second-hand cars. You can spot them from a distance by the bleached hair of the boys. Their elders, the life-savers from the clubs, have little respect for them because they use the supervised beaches without bothering to make a contribution. But above all, they disapprove of their apparently easy ways with the girls.

Until the younger generation matures, Australian men and women will continue having difficulty in meeting each another. It's because of this, rather than for statistical reasons, that men resort to matrimonial ads in German papers. And it's perhaps for the same reason that, despite the dream beaches, the ease of immigration and the relative security in the event of nuclear war, this continent remains under-populated.