Sydney Read online

  Sydney

  JAN MORRIS

  For

  Sam Provstgård Morys

  born 1988

  CONTENTS

  Title page

  Dedication

  Map

  Introductory

  Viewpoint

  Genesis

  Appearances

  1. Urbs 2. Suburbs

  Style

  People

  1. Majorities 2. Indigenes 3. Minorities

  Consolations

  Purposes

  1. Function 2. System

  Connections

  Retrospect

  Thanks

  Index

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTORY

  Sydney has not always given me an easy ride, since I first made its acquaintance in 1962. My persona in those days was unlikely to open arms for me down under, being that of a bloody Pom journo fresh out from Britain, and writing about God’s Own Country for that pinko rag the Guardian – strewth, what could I expect?

  I was young and brash, though, and in a series of articles for my paper I did not hide my opinions about Sydney, either – I did not much like the place, and said so. In 1962 this was playing with fire, and the fury of resentment that fell upon me did not subside for years, and was even detectable when thirty years later I set about writing this book about the city.

  In a way I wish I could say that its reception was just as vivid, but we had changed by then – and when I say ‘we’, I mean the city and me. I was not half so callow and precipitate, measured my responses more steadily, thought a little less of myself and knew the great world better. And Sydney – well, by 1991 Sydney was a different city. From a fairly unlovely ex-colonial, very provincial state capital it had stormed its way into the ranks of the truly great cities, much admired, beautiful to see, enviable to live in and even, if I dare say it, tolerant of foreign criticism.

  One gentle Sydneysider, back in 1962, wrote to the Guardian to hope that I would return to Sydney one day, spend a little more time there and then, ‘with care and circumspection’, reach more valuable conclusions. Well here I am in these pages, kind Mr Martyn Corbett, half a century on and still trying!

  VIEWPOINT

  ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON IN LATE SUMMER TWO ELDERLY people in white linen hats, husband and wife without a doubt, and amiably married for thirty or forty years, stand at the parkland tip of Bradley’s Head on the northern shore of Sydney Harbour in Australia – a promontory whose eponym, Rear-Admiral William Bradley, RN, was sentenced to death in 1814 for defrauding the Royal mails. She wears a flowery cotton dress, he is in white shorts, though not of the very abbreviated kind known to Australians as stubbies. They are leaning on a rail below a white steel mast, the preserved fighting-top of His Majesty’s Australian Ship Sydney, which sank the German sea-raider Emden in 1914. In front of them a Doric column, protruding from the water, marks the beginning of a measured nautical mile; it used to form part of the portico of the Sydney General Post Office. Across the water the buildings of the south shore glitter from Woolloomooloo to Watson’s Bay. Both husband and wife have binoculars slung around their necks, both have sheets of white paper in their hands – lists of bird species, perhaps? – and even as we watch them, with a sudden excitement they raise their binoculars as one, and look eagerly out across the water.

  At such a time – Sunday arvo in the Australian vernacular – Sydney Harbour is prodigiously crowded. It is a kind of boat-jam out there. Hundreds upon hundreds of yachts skim, loiter, tack and race each other in the sunshine, yachts slithery and majestic, yachts traditional and experimental, solitary or in bright flotillas. Stolid ferry-boats plod their way through the confusion. The Manly hydrofoil sweeps by. An occasional freighter passes on its way to the Pyrmont piers. A warship makes for the ocean. Distantly amplified guide-book voices sound from excursion cruisers, or there may be a boom of heavy rock from a party boat somewhere. And presently into our line of sight there burst the 18-footers of the Sydney Flying Squadron, which is what our dedicated pensioners have really been waiting for – not bower-birds or whistle-ducks, but furiously fast racing yachts.

  They are hardly yachts in any ordinary sense. Their hulls are light rafts of high technology with immensely long bowsprits, and they carry overwhelming, almost impossible masses of sail. Their crews, laced into bright-coloured wet suits, faces smeared with white and yellow zinc, lean dizzily backwards from trapezes. Their sails are emblazoned with the names of sponsors, the Bank of New Zealand, Xerox, Prudential, and they come into our vision like thunderbolts. Dear God, how those boats move! It makes the heart leap to see them. Foaming at the prow, spinnakers bulging, purposefully, apparently inexorably they beat a way through the meandering traffic, sending more dilettante pleasure-craft hastily scattering and even obliging the big ferry-boats to alter course. They look perfectly prepared to sink anything that gets in their way, and so like predators from some other ocean they scud past the Sydney’s mast and the pillar from the GPO, sweep beyond Bradley’s Head and disappear from view.

  Romantics like to think that the 18-footers have developed from the hell-for-leather cutters of rum-smugglers, and in evolving forms they have certainly been a beloved and familiar facet of this city’s life for more than a century. Behind them, in the harbour mélange, we may be able to identify a smallish ferry-boat pursuing them up the harbour: this is a beloved and familiar facet too, for unless it has lately been raided by plainclothes policemen, its passengers include a complement of punters, elderly people many of them, who go out each Sunday to place their illegal bets on the flying yachts before them – and some of whom, we need not doubt, were once themselves those sweating young toughs, brown as nuts, agile as cats, driving so tremendously before the harbour wind.

  I choose to start a book about Sydney with this scene because I think it includes many of the elements which have created this city, and which sustain its character still. The glory of the harbour, the showy hedonism of its Sunday afternoon, the brutal force of the 18-footers, the mayhem aboard the gamblers’ ferry-boat, the white-hatted old lovers – the mixture of the homely, the illicit, the beautiful, the nostalgic, the ostentatious, the formidable and the quaint, all bathed in sunshine and somehow impregnated with a fragile sense of passing generations, passing time, presents to my mind a proper introduction to the feel of the place.

  *

  Books about Sydney are innumerable, but they are mostly guidebooks, works of civic history or social analyses, and they have nearly all been written by Australians. No foreigner has tried to write a full-scale study or evocation, and this is not surprising; it is only in the last years of the twentieth century that Sydney has joined the company of the great metropoles. To inhabit a ‘world-class’ city was always an aspiration of Sydney people, but it took them two centuries to achieve it.

  Of course everyone had long had an idea of the city – if the world thought of Australia at all it generally thought of Sydney. Its harbour was popularly ranked for beauty with those of San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong, Naples, Vancouver and Istanbul. Its sad origins as an eighteenth-century penal colony exerted an unhealthy fascination, and fostered many a gibe about criminal tendencies. Its accent was a gift to humorists. Its harbour bridge had been one of the world’s best-known structures since 1932, and since 1966 its Opera House had provided one of the most familiar of all architectural shapes. Bondi beach was an archetypal pleasure beach, the quarter called King’s Cross was an international synonym for Rest and Recreation of the racier kind, and the interminable suburbs of Sydney, so vast that in built-up area this city is twice as large as Beijing and six times as large as Rome, had long figured in travellers’ tales as an epitome of urban error. As for
the people of Sydney, they had impressed themselves upon the universal fancy as an esoteric sub-species of Briton – sunburnt, healthy, loud, generous, misogynist, beery, lazy, capable, racist and entertaining, strutting along beaches in bathing-caps carrying banners, exchanging badinage or war memoirs in raw colonial slang, barracking unfortunate Englishmen at cricket matches they nearly always won.

  It was a vivid image, but it was essentially provincial. Sydney was thought of, by and large, as second-rate – far from the centres of power, art or civil manners, of uncouth beginnings and ungentlemanly presence. Throughout the twentieth century visiting writers, mostly British, had been variously condescending and abusive about the city. At the turn of the century Beatrice Webb the radical thought it chiefly notable for its bad taste: its people were aggressive in manner and blatant in dress, while its Mayor and Aldermen were one and all ‘heavy common persons’. In 1923 D. H. Lawrence, who spent two days in the city, declared it no more than a substitute London, made in five minutes – ‘as margarine is a substitute for butter’. Robert Morley the actor, in 1949, thought the city misnamed – ‘why didn’t they call it Bert?’ Neville Cardus the music critic, in 1952, said it was just like Manchester, except that the harbour was at the bottom of Market Street instead of the River Irwell. Denis Brogan the political philosopher, in 1958, thought the old-fashioned ladies’ underwear on display in the big stores revealed ‘all too plainly the acceptance of a non-competitive mediocrity’. ‘By God, what a site!’ cried Clough Williams-Ellis the architect in the 1950s. ‘By man, what a mess!’ And nobody was ruder than I was, when I first went to Sydney in the early 1960s. It was, I wrote then, no more than a harbour surrounded by suburbs – its origins unsavoury, its temper coarse, its organization slipshod, the expressions of its society ladies ‘steely, scornful, accusatory and plebeian, as though they are expecting you (which Heaven forbid) to pinch their tight-corsetted behinds’. It was five full years before the last letter of complaint reached me from down under.

  The world turns; societies, like authors, age and mature; today Sydney really is, by general consent, one of the great cities of the world. Its population, though still predominantly British and Irish in stock, has been alleviated by vast influxes of immigrants from the rest of Europe and from Asia. Modern communications and the shifts of historical consequence mean that it is no longer on the distant perimeter of affairs, but strategically placed upon the frontier of twentieth-century change, the Pacific Rim. Its prickly old parochialism has been softened by a perceptible ability to laugh at itself, and a flood of Sydney talent has been unleashed upon us all, greatly changing perceptions of the city. When in 1988 the bicentennial of European settlement in Australia was spectacularly celebrated around the harbour, with fireworks and operas and tall ships, a new vision of Sydney, resplendent, festive and powerful, was once and for all stamped upon the general imagination.

  I have often visited and written about the city since that reckless foray of 1962, and I return now primarily as an aficionado of British imperial history. Having commemorated in a series of books the rise and decline of the Victorian Empire, having written its elegy in a study of the last great colony, Hong Kong, I wanted to conclude my imperial commitment with a book about something grand, famous and preferably glittering left on the shores of history by Empire’s receding tide. Pre-eminent among such flotsam, it seems to me, is the city of Sydney – not I think the best of the cities the British Empire created, not the most beautiful either, but the most hyperbolic, the youngest in heart, the shiniest. I do not entirely retract my judgements of thirty years ago, but like the rest of us I have come to view Sydney in a different light, and I think now that of all the strangers who have written about the city, since it first emerged from the origins I was fool enough to emphasize then, perhaps the poet Charles Causley got the municipal flavour most nearly right in his HMS Glory at Sydney, 1951, which celebrates all the mixed offerings of a shore leave in this city, barmaids and tram rides, theatres and hangovers, besides the beauty of a sea-entrance:

  O! I shall never forget you on that crystal morning!

  Your immense harbour, your smother of deep green trees,

  The skyscrapers, waterfront shacks, parks and radio towers,

  And the tiny pilot-boat, the Captain Cook,

  Steaming to meet us …

  Back to Bradley’s Head; and as we watch the 18-footers storm out of view, that crystal light and smother of trees is all around us, and the skyscrapers look back at us from over the water (though alas the elegant Captain Cook long ago sailed its last). And to add to the authenticity of the scene, now it turns out that our friends in the white hats have a little money on the boats too. ‘Betting?’ they say with poker faces. ‘We don’t know the meaning of the word.’ But those papers in their hands are race cards, not bird-spotting charts, and when Xerox and Prudential disappear behind the trees they cheerfully hasten down the woodland track around the point, the better to follow their fancies. The contest lasts for another couple of hours, and sends the boats twice scudding up and down the harbour along courses dictated by the weather; thus making sure that whether it is the dry west wind that is blowing that day, or the maverick they call a Southerly Buster, or a humid nor’-easter out of the Tasman Sea, in one direction or another the Flying Squadron is sure to go pounding through, as our old enthusiasts might say, like a Bondi tram.

  GENESIS

  A GAP BETWEEN ROCKY SCRUB-COVERED HEADLANDS, ABOUT a mile wide, is the entrance to Sydney’s harbour and thus the sea-gate to the city itself and all its history. It stands at longitude 151°112’ East, latitude 33°52’ South, and the welcome it offers voyagers is allegorically benevolent. Outside, the Tasman Sea stretches away towards South America, New Zealand, South Africa and the Antarctic; inside, the landlocked haven promises every kind of comfort, navigational, climatic, sensual and domestic. Sydney Harbour is really a twisted valley, flooded by the sea a few millennia ago. It has two principal arms and a myriad smaller bays, and it disperses in the west into two channels which, though they are really more sea-inlets than fresh-water streams, are called the Parramatta and the Lane Cove Rivers. The harbour is 16 miles long, covers an area of 21 square miles, reaches a depth of 160 feet and, despite the presence of the great city that lies around its shores, remains organically antipodean. Inland the low line of the Blue Mountains, for years the frontier of white settlement, still seems to speak of a wilderness beyond, especially when a golden-grey haze, like the suggestion of a desert, masks the suburbs at its feet, or when a bushfire smokes and flickers on the horizon; and even within the easy limits of the harbour itself, to a stranger from the north matters can feel sufficiently esoteric.

  Over Sydney Harbour the moon wanes and waxes topsy-turvy, and on its shores, as everyone knows, water goes the wrong way down the plug-hole. The climate is benign in reputation and enviable in statistic (mean averages range from 22.3° in February to 12.3° in July), but in practice rather queer. It is said most closely to approximate that of Montevideo, in Uruguay, and can be disconcertingly capricious – hot one moments, cold the next, wet in one part when it is dry in another, with abrupt rainstorms and terrific winds which suddenly blow everything banging and askew, or instantly make the temperature plummet. It never snows in Sydney, but on average there is rain 140 days each year, and while the winter can be superbly bracing the summer often drags on week after week in muggy debilitation. Allergies and asthmas are common; in earlier times, before the European metabolism was acclimatized perhaps, Sydney people often complained of chronic sleepiness – ‘born tired’‚ they used to say.

  Then the green which is still the predominant colour of the harbour shores is a peculiarly Australian olive-green, overlaid sometimes with a pinkish veil which is said to come from the vaporous essence of gum trees, and interspersed with a drab primordial grey of rocks. Many of the trees look to a foreign eye somehow inside-out, with a ghostly glint of silver to them, and an indolent drooping of leaves: eucalyptus trees of m
any kinds, cabbage palms, blackboys, iron-barks, turpentines, mangroves, trees whose barks look as though they have been scribbled all over, trees bearing huge squashy figs, mighty pines of the South Pacific, strangely mixed with old familiars like limes and chestnuts and often encouched in ferns, orchids and casuarinas, or attended by plants with strange and lovely names – milkmaids, parrot-peas, lilly-pillys. Botanists still find surprises here: the scraggy pseudo-oak Allacasuarina portuensis was first identified in 1989, and only ten specimens have yet been discovered.

  Swathes and patches of evergreen foliage are everywhere around the harbour. Wild ravines survive below busy streets, tangles of scrub lap commuters’ houses. There are fine windy headlands above the ocean cliffs, and the Great North Walk, a 160-mile bush track, starts in the heart of the suburbs. Heaven knows what fauna you will encounter, if you explore these glades, gulleys and inlets. Possums will certainly be about, and wallabies perhaps, and multitudes of cackling, shouting and coughing birds – manas, cockatoos, kookaburras, lyre-birds, egrets, languorous pelicans, sea-eagles, the Red-Whiskered Bulbul, the Black-faced Cuckoo-Shrike, or most maddeningly a kind of cuckoo called the Koel, which emits for hours on end a tuneless cry like a small boy’s early attempts at whistling. There may be koalas, or bandicoots, or possibly even duck-billed platypuses. The cicadas will be shrilling in the various timbres attributed to their kinds – the Black Princes in one key, the Yellow Mondays allegedly in another. Crayfish skulk on the beds of streams. At night squirrel-like marsupials called sugar-gliders saunter from tree to tree. Even the Sydney gulls seem to me particular to the place: in grassy spots I have sometimes seen them staring fixedly between their legs for minutes at a time, yawning a great deal and settling themselves amply in the green like hens.