I’m a clean shaven young man, a conscientious traveller aware of my international responsibilities. So what this butch, heavily moustached customs officer saw in me I’ll never know. Perhaps it was my London-in-December suntan. Admittedly that involves a complexion normally associated with years of Class A drug abuse, but hey, I pay taxes, I have a bank account, and I even voted in the last election. I'm clean.  “Place your baggage on the white line, and take two steps backwards please sir,” he grunted, casting a suspicious eye over my clothing. Naturally I complied. I had no secrets to hide.

But this was no matter of guilt or innocence. No siree. In this man’s eyes, all travellers are suspects, and as he and a particularly ferocious dog (the kind English people fear will make it through the Channel Tunnel one day) mauled my luggage in search of contraband, I feared the worst for my short stay in this country. Welcome to Australia.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m no whinging Pom. No way was I going to let a power-crazed public servant spoil my trip to “the lucky country”. I had five long hot weeks to spend in Western Australia, and no one was going to stop me from enjoying it. I’d heard what they’d said about the place. Perfect climate, wonderful food, great standard of living. The middle of nowhere yes, but for a Londoner, that adds to the appeal.

Best of all I had a brother (long since converted to the Antipodean way of life) only too keen, as all West Australians are, to show off his home.

It was only a matter of time before he whisked me through Perth’s leafy suburbs to a cool, fan-swept bar in the beachside district of Cottesloe for an initiation in that sacred ritual of Australian culture — beer drinking. Boy was I up for it.Until I saw the size of the glass.

Like the bodybuilder that flatters to deceive, Australia swaggers to the front of the queue in international drinking prestige, only to be found embarrassingly wanting in the department where size really counts. Staring blankly at little more than a thimble of palid fizzy pop (a “midi”, they call it), I consoled myself with the fact that beer is marginally cheaper in Perth, and that I really could use the exercise of visiting the bar a dozen times more than should be necessary to fill my glass.

Outside the bar tall lean beach-goers strutted along the street, parading every kind of skin colour from dark olive to strawberry pink (obviously I wasn’t the only English traveller in town).

Although without the international reputation of Bondi, Bells, or Kira beaches, Perth’s Cottesloe beach attracts the regular array of summer stereotypes; dreadlocked surfies (the kind of people customs officers should really be pursuing), muscle-bound macho men (what did I say earlier about size being deceptive?), over-sunned pensioners (the similarities with dried prunes really are remarkable), finely toned young women (at least I think there were, I wasn’t really looking) and out of shape, sunburnt blobs (me). There’s absolutely no excuse for getting sunburnt in West Australia (nor Victoria apparently, though for different reasons). Adverts appear in all the media advising you to “slip…slop…slap” (I thought that sort of thing was illegal), and creams are cheap courtesy of state subsidies.

All of which made me feel particularly stupid the day I was invited to go crabbing in Mandurah, a short trip down the coast from Perth. Crabbing is a weekend institution. Pack the esky, knock up some “sangers” and jump in the boat. So busy was I salivating at the prospect of sweet-smelling barbecues stacked high with freshly caught seafood that I forgot the precautions which are instinctive for most Australians.

Who wants to mess around with creams when you could be luring big juicy crustaceans into nets with one hand and swigging on a beer with the other? After two hours floating in a dinghy under the midday sun, I began to realise my mistake. To this day my neck bears a hue normally associated with under-cooked pork.

Mandurah dispels the myth that Perth is just a country town. Though it does only have one daily newspaper (and a shocking one), the city’s population is well over the one-million mark, and sprawls into the hills and down the coast. The hour-long drive now features little else but low-rise cheap accommodation.

The city itself is little short of beautiful. The snaking Swan River frames an affluent central business district founded on money from this massive state’s abundant mining resources. The river is the city’s lifeblood. Not only does its estuary form the harbour for the ever-expanding port of Fremantle, but it seems almost everyone takes to the water at some stage in their daily routine. Wealthy inhabitants of the suburbs of Peppermint Grove and Mosman Park can be seen quaffing Chardonnay in the evening sun by the river, while in the day jet-skis rip up and down Melville Water, much to the consternation of local inhabitants.

It all makes for a very healthy lifestyle — no good for me then. Faced with average temperatures in excess of 35°C I left my fun until the evenings. I’d heard plenty about the Burswood Resort Casino (Vegas meets Hong Kong circa 1985), and after a night of Jack Daniels and misguided roulette gambling, I never wanted to hear of the place again.

Inner-city Northbridge provides much of Perth’s night entertainment — late night bars, late night restaurants and early morning clubs. Following an argument with my brother, in which I alleged Perth was nothing more than a glorified country town (if you value your looks, be careful who you say that to), he took me to a club on James Street to prove that “London didn’t have a monopoly on novel nights out”. Ten beers, $50 and three approaches from a pink PVC-clad transvestite later, I was inclined to agree.  And that wasn’t the end of it. Western Australia, I was told, could not be experienced to the full until a trip into the outback had been made. So, the next day I was packed off in a coach to a relative’s farm on the south coast. I always knew Australia was big, but 10 hours in a bus bouncing along roads straighter than the creases in John Major’s Y-fronts made me fully appreciate the country’s size.

The final destination was Esperance, a coastal town known for very little other than the fragments of an out-of-control Russian satellite which fell out of the sky there, capturing the imagination of the world for, ooh, half-an-hour, back in the seventies.

One look around the place, however, and you realise this anonymity is a good thing. The town is set amid vast stretches of beautiful sandy coastline (one such stretch is called 80-Mile Beach, so we're talking vast here), and with a population of around 12,000, it means the residents of Esperance are truly spoilt.

When I wasn’t taking advantage of the beaches, I received various introductions to Australian farming techniques, chief of which was sheep drenching (I know what you’re thinking, so stop right now), which involved the dispensing of dietary and medicinal supplements into the mouths of sheep via a hand-held pistol. Strange kind of job really. Sheep aren’t famous for their sweet-smelling breath, and pommy journalists aren’t renowned for their deftness with animals. Time to head back to Perth, I think.

For fear that sheep might represent my only encounter with the Australian animal world, I set off for the much vaunted Monkey Mia, a beach north of Perth where dolphins regularly swim into the shoreline to frolic with onlookers. Belonging to the bottlenose family, these affectionate mammals have been befriending humans since the 1960’s, and have been known to flock to the beach in large numbers. Tactile, healthy, intelligent and playful — I got on with the female tour guide for the trip very well. Our return leg incorporated a visit to the Pinnacles Desert, a lunar-like landscape featuring curious columns of stone akin to a petrified forest. Eerie yes, but very very beautiful, and surrounded by some of the most awesome sand dunes you’re likely to see.

My last week in Western Australia was memorable. Australians everywhere expressed their sincerest sympathies that I should be returning to London in the middle of January (they didn’t understand when I told them the FA Cup third round beckoned), and spent most of their efforts trying to make me violently ill through too much alcohol. Needless to say they failed, though the final evening, which involved absurd quantities of Zambucca, took me right to the limit. The fact I could barely keep my eyes open the next day probably went some way towards explaining why customs officials once again took an interest in my suitcase as I prepared to catch a plane home. I thought they were only interested in people bringing things into the country, but I was wrong. They had a far more important mission, to quell the rise of a sinister international crime — illegal duty free purchases.

Just as long as they keep that scary dog away from me.