My husband went to Sydney in '68. His experience was a little different from yours :) but he also liked Australia very much.
He went there on R & R, when he was serving a tour of duty in Vietnam. He had spent about 10 months in the jungle basically, sleeping outdoors, on mountain tops, dodging bullets and land mines. When he was given a choice of where to go for a week, he chose Australia. They flew him, along with a plane full of other soldiers, from Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam, to Darwin, and then on to Sydney. He said when they arrived in Darwin the airport was closed, but a bar opened just for the soldiers until the plane left.
My husband loved Australia. Stayed for five days (took a long time to fly there and fly back to Vietnam). He remembers taking a bus around the city and staying on a boat overnight with others he knew from Vietnam. He also remembers visiting a pool hall and seeing the inside of bars, a lot of them :))
After his R & R he went back to Cm Ranh Bay, stayed there as an infantry soldier 'till February and then flew home. He always said he would have liked to have gone back to Australia, but that never happened. He also would have liked to visit Vietnam years later, but that never happened either.
That's a while back! Australia was much different then. Perth was just a outpost back then. Even 20 years back it was tiny, like 700k people or so. Most of the recent growth is primarily from mining iron ore and later to some extent by oil & gas from NW shelf.
We go way back, my husband and I. We met less than two years after he got back from Vietnam. Married just three years after he got out. I never knew the other guy, the pre-war guy. I understand he was quite different :))