Cann Park, Botany Bay

This afternoon we drove down to La Perouse, which stands at the north head of Botany Bay. Botany Bay, you might remember, is not Sydney Harbour. Botany Bay was the first place Captain Cook landed and had a punch up with the aborigines. There's a monument marking his landing place on the south side of the bay near Kurnell.

Just after Captain Cook landed, the french explorer La Perouse arrived in Botany Bay and raised the flag on the north head, which now bears his name.

These days, Botany Bay is an odd place. The airport's two runways stretch out onto the water and there's a mix of ugly industry and pretty beaches scattered about the shore. La Perouse is the sort of place you suspect the beach might be littered with broken glass (and it is). The local kids don't apologise when they bump into you, they just stare. It's not like the eastern suburbs.

Just recently, the police have taken to providing escorts to city buses running out to Lapa (as the locals call it) at night because of problems with youths boarding the bus, refusing to pay and then pulling the emergency handle to force the bus to stop when they want to get off. There's talk of pulling the service altogether.

Sydney has its share of crime, but it's somehow not in the same league as the sort of crime affecting large cities at home. In Maroubra, a gang calling themselves "The Bra Boys" (as in MarouBRA, not because they wear ladies underwear) claim the north part of the beach as their own. It's off limits for surfing, I don't know what they do to people who try, but they also have a history of drug crime (and perhaps guns). A movie has been made about them (called, imaginatively, "The Bra Boys"). It's showing in the cinema here, though I don't expect you'll be seeing it in the UK anytime soon.

The road at La Perouse curls around near the clifftop then snakes back up the way it came. It's a hot-spot for kids cruising in customised Holden (Vauxhall) Corsas and old American-looking cars in shades of pastel blue and green. The blokes (and girls) driving them look like the T-Birds and the Pink Ladies from "Grease". It's all terribly impressive, especially when they make screeching noises and leave a trail of smoke.

But not as impressive as the local snake show that's been running for 108 years, or three generations of the Cann family. We stumbled across it in action this afternoon. John Cann (author of the above book, which he shamelessly plugged) has been running the show for over forty years at the same spot, which has since been designated "Cann Park". He has literally bags and bags of snakes (and goannas and water dragons) that he lets loose in a corrugated iron pen at the side of the road while he gives a talk on the snakes and reptiles of Australia. Afterwards, he passes around his battered old akubra hat for coin donations, which not everyone offers. It was unnerving to hear stories of children in the western suburbs of Sydney killed by brown snake bites. I watched where I parked my bum after that.

Ella wasn't impressed. After a quick shuftie at the water dragon, she went tearing across the grass after a west highland terrier called Dilly. I've seen half of the snake show, Darren has seen the other half. We'll put our heads together and get the full story later on. In the meantime, I now wish I'd taken more notice of Steve Irwin.