Federation Square tour, Ian Potter building of NGV, walk along the Yarra and see Rod Laver Arena, pub dinner.

David runs as instructed down Bayview to the water where he turns right and jogs on a path along the shoreline, which is a marine reserve with a small arboretum filled with well marked samples of the flora that originally covered the land. A salt marsh with craggy volcanic basalt rocks and white mangrove bushes stretches along the shore. Three large tankers sit way out on the bay. The sun rises behind a point of houses, streaking the sky as he jogs back to Jim and Jenny’s house where lorikeets chatter in a tree in their backyard.

After breakfast, Cynthia and David metro to the Flinders Street Station, right at Federation Square, where we begin a tour of the area by a white-haired octogenarian with mineral blue eyes. The tour begins in a corner of the square at a small old stone structure that was the city morgue back in 1861. We shuffle around and through several buildings, learning their names and some brief history.

Then, after a quick lunch, and after a good deal of confusion from the staff at the Art Gallery of Victoria, we are given a wonderful tour of the museum’s indigenous art by Diane Hobart, a very stylish lady who reminds David of his aunt Margaret. Vivacious, with-it, cultured and curious herself, she explains the thinking behind several pieces of art created by modern Australian artists — to name some of the many: Julie Gough (soap sculptures of aboriginal faces on a red British flag), Julie Dowling (10 works in a series featuring her relatives and the Mabo court case (first Aborigine to sue and win return of ancestral land)), and Yvonne Koolmatrie (sedge weaving of child being taken from mother to be given to white parents).

We stop in a room where aboriginal shields and spears and tools are piled in the shapes of outback hills in a large rectangle in the middle of the room. A movie plays on the far wall of a camo-dressed white archer with a high-tech bow shooting metal arrows at aboriginal shields on raised poles. Unable to pierce the shields from a distance, he draws closer and his arrows slam through, one after another.

The museum has many other kinds of art — several rooms of it donated by Ian Potter, a financier who, like Barnes in Philadelphia, was a prolific collector of eclectic taste (some of it kitsch but much beautiful and revealing) — and we wander through it for a few hours. Outside, the day is hot, the sky almost cloudless and we walk along the Yarra so David can worship Rod Laver Arena from afar. It looks exactly like it does on TV during the Aussie Open. Surrounded by numerous courts painted blue and separated by tall fences with fluttering nylon wind breaks, you can feel the powers of the sun and strong gusts of wind that can inflict themselves on even the strongest players.

We return to Jim and Jenny’s, have a quick cocktail and drive to the Prince Albert, a nice pub with good food not too far from their house. Cynthia gets some fresh and crisp fish and chips that have been a bucket-list item unfulfilled in quality elsewhere.

Another illuminating day in Oz.