Visiting a city for the first time is a bit like viewing a house - whether you realise it or not, your mind is probably made up in the first half-hour. That's what it was like for Melbourne and me. In the wee small hours of a slow Sunday, the city's Tullamarine airport wasn't the liveliest, but at immigration, normally a graveyard for welcomes, there were no sieg heil jackboots or Amazonian behemoths into leather; the official was actually smiling as she checked the passports. What's more, she was cracking jokes; not great ones, but let's not be picky. As immigration people go, this was friendliness off the Richter scale. After that, I thought, Melbourne had to be an anti-climax.
It wasn't. This gracious, spacious and, if you're so inclined, dissipatious (more about that later) city is a real charmer, combining warmth and relaxation with a definite buzz. Downtown, in the prosaically titled Central Business District - the natives just call it the CBD - old and new buildings jostle comfortably and handsomely together, simultaneously reminders of the past and evidence of the economic transformation wrought in the past decade.
The area is laid out on a grid system, so downtown navigation is easy; there is also a free tram service continually round the CBD perimeter to help. Shops are good, pubs plentiful, the public transport system works and - wonder of wonders to anyone from a crammed European city - traffic actually moves with comparative ease. Love affairs have begun on less.
But there's more. The climate is seductively benign and, as befits a place where nine of the 16 Aussie Rules football teams are based and the historic MCG or Melbourne Cricket Ground has so often turned Poms' hopes to ashes, there is an outdoor, sporty feel to the city. At Flemington, horses race against a backdrop of the downtown skyline miles away and the Melbourne Cup is a milliner's mecca and a cross-dresser's dream; there the great and good rub shoulders with the hoi polloi in one of the high points of the social calendar every October spring.
With more than three million in an area the size of London, Melbourne not only has space, but also a population large enough to support a considerable variety of arts activities; there is an enormous range of festivals, crowned by late-October's Melbourne Festival, one of the most important on the subcontinent. During the millennium year the city is likely to see such high-profile visitors as Pavarotti and Barbra Streisand - if that's what turns you on.
However, there are more individual pleasures, so to speak, to be found there. Such as the Melbourne Supper Club - and relax, it's not members only. A long, upstairs place by the Princes Theatre on Spring Street, with a semi-circular art deco-ish window that could have come out of a 1940s film noir, it offers an ineffably friendly atmosphere, where you can enjoy good conversation as you gradually succumb to the varieties of whiskeys, beers and Australian chardonnay available in titanic proportions.
Perhaps it wasn't there when Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh played the Princes Theatre in the late 1940s. But it would be easy to imagine them enjoying its convivial ambience and subdued lighting before retiring to the Windsor Hotel, a minute's stagger away, to conduct their personal war in the privacy and comfort of this hotel, one of the oldest and most famous in the city.
A short tram ride, or a manageable walk away is Southgate, a complex of shops and restaurants across the Yarra River, buzzing with life by day and night. Walkers is one of its liveliest eating places, where the seafood is out of this world - and on the way, before you cross the bridge, you can drop in and see Chloe. She's upstairs at Young & Jackson's, or Y&J's, a resolutely shabby but friendly pub as easy as an old overcoat, where she hangs on the wall in her naked, 19th-century splendour.
An early visit to the 830-foot Rialto Towers Observation Deck on Collins Street in the CBD will give wonderful views not only of the whole downtown area, including the colourful Queen Victoria market, but also of the spread of the city and its districts - South Yarra, Prahran and Toorak, among the city's main areas for food and shopping; Williamstown, where weekends turn its normal quiet into a buzz to rival Southgate; the mixed fortunes of Carlton and Fitzroy; and the bohemian attractions of St Kilda, now under pressure from rising property prices, but still with the best value in accommodation. And, incidentally, the provenance of some Aussie Rules football teams should now be clear.
Accommodation in the city covers the whole spectrum. There's the upmarket old, like the Windsor, or the upmarket new, like the Park Hyatt, opened only a few months ago, whose almost sybaritic splendour probably marks it as the city's most elite. But there are infinitely more modest options. A good tip is to try the travellers information service desks at the airport, which offer a free booking service for accommodation, or to go to the Victorian Visitor Information Centre downtown. But you can have trouble finding a room when the Australian Grand Prix is on, or during the Aussie Rules final, for instance.
Outside Melbourne, there's a notable range of outdoor options. If you want to see where all the good chardonnay comes from, the Yarra Valley is the place; personally, I prefer drinking the stuff to watching it grow - and even then, only if there's no whiskey available - but chacun a son gout. However, the Yarra Valley does include Healesville, an animal sanctuary that's clearly a labour of love for all concerned; there you can see the platypus, kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, wombats, crimson rosellas, the fauna unique to Australia.
Hiring a car would be a good idea. It beats walking in a state where you could drop Ireland into a corner and not notice. And it would get you, in this enormous country, to some of Victoria's National Parks, most a tiny hop of 200 miles or so from Melbourne on good roads. Up in the state's high alpine country, for instance, there's winter skiing around Mount Buffalo where, at around 4,500 feet, is the charmingly old-fashioned but comfortable Mount Buffalo Chalet. Lots of arduous outdoor activities can be indulged in, including abseiling and hang-gliding (at 4,500 feet!) under suitable safety conditions - but give me abseiling from the window of the Melbourne Supper Club any night when the chardy, or the whiskey, has dulled the edge of fear.
I did have time to spend a couple of days sampling another of Victoria's charms. This was the rustic, waterborne delights of a gorgeous place called Metung - all dolphins, pelicans, kangaroos and people who have the luck to live there the whole year round, and where southwards there's nothing but hundreds of miles of sea to Tasmania and, after that, a few thousand more to the Antarctic. But that's worth a whole story in itself and I'm saving it just for that.