An unabridged, unedited and unexpurgated snapshot of an interminable period of emetic, enforced eavesdropping – a torture befitting the nastier activities of Uzbekistan's chief gonad-crushing goon, President Karimov. If only there had been light and warmth elsewhere in the strange little town.

"Make sure I understand everyting yur sayin' or I'll look like an idiot, innit"

Poor Norman Mailer never knew what hit him, my attention to his words stolen, irremediably wrenched away by the incomparably awful sound of sluttish solecisms. Eyes and mind fallen foul of my ears' inability to deafen themselves.

Emma is in a TV lounge in a Coogee hostel preparing her CV, a true and worthy paean to an absence of ambition. She came to Australia in search of riches and people who didn't know her in the hope that perhaps they, unlike the others, might want to. Things are going surprisingly well on the latter account, making the as-yet abortive attempts to do something about the former ever-more important, lest the poor girl has to truncate her two-months-and-counting trip and return home. This is unfortunate, for both Emma and England alike.

"Are you writing Emma's CV, Gary?", asks Rory, in his deep, dulcit and quasi-indecipherable Oirish tones.

" 'E's bein' a good mate, ain't ya, darlin'?" responds Emma, arms wrapping around her dear tutor's neck, half-strangling him between breasts and bangles.

"Why don't you write it?" inquires Rory.

" 'Cos 'e's better at words than me, innit."

Elsewhere in the now irritatingly intimate room, a pair of camouflage shorts protruding from a gap between table and bench cries out: "Where's me fcukin' Maxim ... Nah, not that bit, the other bit, with just the pictures... Ow. Fcuk." The torso, limbs and head attached to the shorts heretofore tucked under the table – scrabbling around in a slobbering search – have just met the underside of the surface with debatably unfortunate force.

"Don't worry, Mikey mate, 'ave my Zoo instead. Them girls are fcukin' dirty as."

"Fcuking right mate" eeks out of an extra to the scene.

"Give me a pair of big t*** and that's enough for me" says another, sparking a half-hour off-shoot conversation as predictable as it is inane.

Mikey and his page-flicking fellows are all approaching or have already passed 30. Half of them have children. Poor b******s.

Through the door at the front of the room enters Stacey. Stacey has three different bikini-strap burn marks on her back, one for each of the words in her vocabulary. For someone that usually sunbathes topless, this is quite an achievement.

" 'Ello gorgeous"

" 'Ello darlin' "

" 'Ello gorge"

" 'Ello Stace"

"Someone stole my Glamour," Stacey squawks with the strength of Stentor and all the sweet sonority of nails scraping across a blackboard. She is referring, of course, to the magazine, as opposed to her charm and allure, about which one should probably not comment, it being imprudent to speak ill of the dead.

The loss of her glossy girlfriend is, however, quickly forgotten. "Oh! Someone dies innit this week," she chirps upon spotting the background accompaniment of a half-watched, half-spat-upon episode of Desperate Housewives".

"Whatevah you say darlin' " emerges from the universal atmosphere.

"Eugh. That's two blokes and they're bloody snogging each other." That came from Dave. Dave is an Arsenal fan. He's 42, divorced, and is trying to come to terms with his accelerating alopecia. It should be the least of his worries.

The conversation now being into its second hour, Dave's enlightening comment is but one of many lost to the ether. Listening is a chore that needs no longer to be entertained. Interruption is a competitive sport and both stakes and voices are on the way up.

"Fcukin' loads of tax I paid last year and what do I see in return – a bunch of fcukin' mosques... I 'aven't 'ad a proper cup o' tea in... I want a proper cup o' tea, egg and chips and a proper roast dinner. I'm going to... Nah, I nevva... My mate updates his system with that sh!t all the time. Security and sh!t, innit... I ain't fik, I just..."

It's time for the man in the camouflage shorts, finished, for now, with the delights of Zoo, to call home and further cultivate the illusory impression that he's having the time of his life. Hell, he may even be. He wanders outside, on account of the barrage of lies he's about to vomit back to Norfolk. The windows are thinner than he thinks.

"...you should of seen her... only 19 she is. Fcuks like nobody's business, I can tell you. Met 'er at this Irish bar Scruffy Murphy's... great joint..." (the fair maiden he is referring to is our friend Emma of earlier. She speaks to the questionably be-shorted one on an almost daily basis; nothing magnifies intimacy like mid-life insecurity and 12 time zones. The pub, incidentally, is about as cool as haemorrhoids.) "...I fcukin' love this place." And he quite possibly does. Him and his army of nowhere men and women – a confused horde running away from everything yet simultaneously standing still – wandering Australia's East Coast in search of what England and Ireland have failed to provide. Whatever that might be.

But whatever it is, it's good enough reason for me to stay shacked-up in Sydney with friends old and new, enjoying the glories of the sun, sand, surf and seafood and merely looking at pictures of elsewhere in Oz, safe in the knowledge that it's not exactly Brazil.