The international popularity of the gladioli-waving, board-wobbling, knife-wielding caricatures of Barry Humphries, Rolf Harris and Paul Hogan was so great that the efforts of Robert Hughes and Clive James to convince the world Australia punches above its weight in more cerebral pursuits got very little traction for a very long time.

On trips back to Blighty as recently as the 1990s, the question, ‘But isn’t it a bit of a cultural desert?’ was one I was often asked after I’d supplied all the duck-billed platitudes about Australia life which I knew people wanted to hear. But I couldn’t have answered the question honestly because in those long-lunching, joke-telling, skirt-chasing days the only Australian culture I took an active interest in had viti- in front of it. As a result, Poms who came to visit me were as surprised as I’d once been to find that in addition to the opera house on the Ken Done tea towel I’d sent them, the city also has several theatres, a symphony orchestra and a not-quite-royal Shakespeare company.

But being such self-conscious transplants these institutions have a tokenistic quality, and encouraging guests to partake of them sometimes feels like I’m trying a bit too hard to convince them –  and perhaps myself – that my brain is being exercised here as vigorously as my liver and other less vital organs. Let’s be honest; filling a guest itinerary with mind-improving options is challenging in Sydney. While Opera House productions rarely disappoint, the cost of going more than once is prohibitive, and our theatres, while not much cheaper, tend to underwhelm people with West End or Broadway standards.

So for every concert or play I take my guests to, I give them two or three experiences which I know will deliver the kind of unpretentious, hedonistic blast they can’t get at home. A ride on the Manly Ferry, a bodysurf at Bondi, a Swans game, a table at Doyles – even a walk across or (if you want to spend an additional three hours and $200) up the Bridge. Are there better remedies for jet lag anywhere in the world? And all the better if their stay coincides with a uniquely Aussie calendar event. No Kentucky Derby or Grand National office sweepstakes comes close to a Melbourne Cup lunch, no Thames or Times Square NYE show can hold a candle to Sydney’s fireworks, no Macy’s Parade is as mad as the Mardi Gras.

The one cultural institution in Sydney which can be relied on to impress European and American visitors is the Art Gallery of New South Wales. This is because their only preconceptions about Australian art (sorry Rolf, sorry Ken) will involve dots. So don’t waste their valuable time on the much vaunted Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander collection: it won’t be any more accessible to them on their first encounter than it is to you on your hundredth. If they specifically ask to see indigenous art, show them the Albert Namatjira’s. And then, while they’re still expressing surprised delight, show them the Streetons, McCubbins and Roberts and watch their eyes light up. ‘Everyone tells you about the kangaroos and the koalas,’ I remember saying the first time I walked through the Domain at dusk, ‘but nobody tells you about the fruit bats.’ ‘We knew about the dots,’ your guests will tell you as you wait in the Domain for your Uber, ‘but nobody told us about the Impressionists.’

The high quality of much of the AGNSW’s permanent collection throws into sharp relief the low quality of most of the work which competes for Australia’s most lucrative art prize. Chris Allen is right to write the Archibald off as a national embarrassment, and this year I took his advice and went instead to the much better Salon des Refusés show. My appetite for art still not quite sated, I then accepted an invitation to the pre-auction preview of the John Laws Collection. Like many other guests, I suspect, I only really went because I wanted to see inside the fabulous Woolloomooloo apartment where Laws spent his last years. It never occurred to me that someone who’d say pretty much anything if you offered him enough money, would exercise much discernment spending it. How wrong I was. Just the Australian art on display, which included some fine Whiteleys and Olleys, would not look out of place on the walls of our National Gallery in Canberra. But in amongst them I counted four Rodin bronzes, two Renoirs and a Toulouse-Lautrec. All acquired by the same bloke who kept telling you to put Valvoline in your Commodore. Who’d ’a thunk it?