Sydney

by Jan Morris

  As a very simulacrum of Britishness in the age of free trade and imperial expansion, the Sydney of the 1880s was intensely self-conscious. Among the professional people, the civil servants, the landowners who maintained their town houses in the city, life seems to have been almost suffocatingly genteel. All the paraphernalia of Victorian decorum flourished. Etiquette was severe, morality ostentatious, social behaviour was derived directly from the example of what was still generally thought of as Home, or the Mother Country. Families competed in splendour of transportation and fashionableness of costume, and we read of incessant visiting among the ladies, of busy club life, political activity and sporting enthusiasm among the gentlemen, the whole revolving around the Governor in his new and far grander Government House in the green Domain above the harbour. People from Melbourne thought it all absurd, and called Sydney Sleepy Hollow; visitors from England thought it rather charming.

  The central city looked very British, too. ‘The houses,’ Charles Dilke had written sourly in the 1860s, ‘are of the commonplace English ugliness, worst of all possible forms of architectural imbecility.’ Sydney’s chief park was called Hyde Park, its lovely botanical gardens looked consciously towards Kew, its university was a transplanted fragment of Oxbridge and its best shops were modelled on the London style – W. H. Soul the pharmacists, for instance, blue-and-white and heraldically crested, or David Jones the draper, which prided itself upon its silky service.1 A mighty Post Office, with a Renaissance tower and elaborate decoration, stood in the heart of the business district. Overlooking Sydney Cove was a solid Customs House with a bust of Queen Victoria above the door, and behind it sundry great Government buildings had arisen, portentous in golden sandstone and rich in symbolisms. The Treasury Building had a portico with Ionian columns, just like something in Whitehall. The brand-new Lands Department building had an onion-domed tower and was equipped with forty-eight niches for statues of famous citizens. The Colonial Secretary’s Office was guarded by images of Wisdom, Justice and Mercy. The Legislative Assembly and the Mint were housed in some of Governor Macquarie’s ambitious Georgian buildings, and Macquarie Street upon which they stood was lined with handsome town houses, some of them very opulent, looking out across a green expanse of parkland in genuinely English style.

  Utterly English too were the villas which now speckled the outskirts of town, and were implanted on suitable promontories throughout the harbour – white-gardened mansions in classical style, with ornamental gates, leafy drives and lodges. The Chief Secretary lived in one such pleasant house, the Bishop of New South Wales in another, and sometimes there were cottages appended for servants, for all the world like an English estate. In less advantageous parts of town the middle classes occupied pleasant terraced houses, and the better-off artisans lived in rows of cottages that were often charming, and were decorated ornately with iron filigree.

  All the symptoms of British imperial system were apparent. Big warehouses dominated the harbour front, and around Sydney Cove had been built a modern landing-place, the Semi-Circular Quay – later, though if anything squared up rather by then, renamed the Circular Quay. There were steam trams in the streets, and steam ferries across the harbour, and trains to Parramatta. There were up-to-date hospitals and water supplies, and the Tank Stream had been diverted into underground channels. A brand-new sewerage system discharged its effluent not into the harbour, but into the open sea. There was an Illustrated Sydney News, and a Sydney Punch.

  But of course, here as in Victorian Britain itself, behind these complacent scenes there teemed an underclass, some of it extremely raw. Slums festered, for all the civic propriety. Public health was terrible despite the sewage system. Society was still full of mayhem and corruption – political shenanigans, drug abuse, prostitution – and most vices were legal. As a contemporary said even of the Imperial Temperance Hotel in King Street, ‘there is no knowing what you can do, if you only know how to work the ropes’. And if you could sin at the Imperial Temperance in King Street, just think what you could do at the sailors’ taverns at the Rocks, that sandstone outcrop above the Cove where the convicts had built their huts! Down the years the Rocks had developed into one of the Pacific’s most notorious sailortowns, where some of the toughest people in the world lodged hugger-mugger among the courts and narrow alleys, drinking furiously, banding together in ferocious street gangs, living by thievery and prostitution and frequently given new blood by deserting seamen and peripatetic rascals from all the oceans.

  The Bishop and the Chief Secretary lived handsomely enough in their villas; the poor of Sydney lived miserably enough down below, despite the sunshine, the space and the freedom. ‘Drifting past, drifting past, To the beat of weary feet’, is how Henry Lawson the poet thought of them, ‘In the filthy lane and alley, and the cruel heartless street’. Perhaps, after all, the city had not quite transcended its beginnings; sometimes, as we read about its aldermanic pride and prosperity, the grand celebrations with which it greeted its own centennial and Victoria’s fifty years upon the throne, we can just see poor old Dorothy Handland still swinging from her eucalyptus.

  *

  Not for much longer. The Rocks were largely demolished when in 1900 a bubonic plague fell upon Sydney. The worst of the slums disappeared then, most of the vices were made illegal, and in a generation or two the physique of Sydney working people almost miraculously improved. In the new century, as the various Australian colonies banded themselves together into a Federal Commonwealth, Sydney became an epitome of the Workers’ Paradise – as democratic a city as any on earth, with powerful trade unions to fight the poor man’s cause and a burning sense of social equality. Its standards of living were said to be higher than those of any British or American city, and its people had developed, said a local writer in 1907, ‘a sort of clever hecticness, an almost unnatural sharpening of the wits in the furious race for wealth, and a constant and all but unappeasable itching for excitement and amusement and change for its own sake’. When the city’s young men went to war, in 1914, they went with terrific brio. In Victorian times they had been described as ‘wanting in power and weight’; now John Masefield, the English poet, could compare them to ‘kings in old poems’.

  Australia became a nation, people still like to say, upon the battlefields of Gallipoli, and the Sydney that emerged from the Great War was a different Sydney too. Conscious of itself as an Australian city, no longer just a transplanted city of the English provinces, Sydney had acquired an urban character of its own. Although its people were still 98 per cent British in origin, by now they looked, sounded and dressed differently. Let us visit them finally at the start of the 1930s, when the Great Depression was falling upon Sydney as it was falling upon every city of the capitalist west. All the miseries of the slump were visible here then, the shanty towns and the soup kitchens, the unemployed thousands sleeping in parks, at railway stations, on ramshackle houseboats, the mothers with their children scavenging among the seashore flotsam. Communism was strong. Organized crime was rampant. Mutilated survivors of the Great War haunted the city streets, reproachfully begging. Amidst this unhappiness the personality of the community, now more than a million strong, had reached some kind of climax.

  The economy had been more or less stagnant throughout the century, but the city now extended in immense swathes of suburbia far out from the Town Hall: beyond Parramatta towards the Blue Mountains in the west, down to Botany Bay in the south, joining up with the old Hawkesbury River settlements to the north. At the same time the beach culture was developing fast – the Sydney preoccupation with sun, sand and surf, exemplified in bright ocean-front suburbs, and in the competitive pageantry of the life-savers. The city felt more southern, more Pacific than it had seemed in the 1880s, as though it were consciously changing direction. Even the architecture, so slavishly British fifty years before, had acquired extra sub-tropical mannerisms – eaves, overhangs, arcades, verandas, and the canopies over sidewalks, supported by iron wires to keep the sun at bay
, which had become characteristic of the Australian urban style.

  After generations of sunshine and general plenty, the people themselves had been mutated, too. The women were tall and robust, the men had acquired that somewhat louche, shambling, easygoing but powerful gait that for a time was to be their hallmark. This was the real heyday of the dinkum Aussie – the Aussie of the slouch hat, the long-short trousers and the knee-length socks, with his Sheila who stuck with the rest of the girls at the far end of the room, and his well-known place at the bar. It was a macho, philistine, cocky Sydney, or as Kenneth Slessor the poet preferred, ‘gaslight, straw hat, bunch-of-bananas, tram-ride Sydney’.1 ‘In things of the mind,’ declared the Sydney cartoonist Will Dyson in 1929, ‘we show about as much spirit as a suburban old maid.’

  It was Sydney at its most truly provincial. Inevitably the place half thought of itself still as an imperial metropolis, and figured in works of imperial self-gratification as the Second City of the Empire. But it was really neither one thing nor another. Though it was still a State capital, now it was only one of six in a self-governing Australia whose federal capital was at Canberra, 180 miles away. Its governing classes remained, by and large, almost ridiculously royalist and conventional, but many of its working people were generally indifferent to the British link, often republican of tradition, often Communist of sympathy, militantly organized and Irishly inclined.

  It was not really much of a place, by international standards. Its Victorian landmarks and Georgian relics had been swallowed up in run-of-the-mill commercial development, of no particular style. Its suburbs, often cruelly deprived of trees, were mostly unlovely. Since the Great War hardly a public building had gone up which was worth a second look, or would seem in future decades worth preserving. The cockiness was probably largely chip-on-shoulder, and I would think it fair to say that the early 1930s were Sydney’s nadir. The city looked back still with bitterness to its squalid start; it was torn between a sickly imperial loyalty and a raucous independence; one would hardly guess, surveying its philistine parochialism and sense of resentment, that within another fifty years it would have burst into the buoyant post-imperial prodigy that this book is going to describe.

  *

  Yet only two years later, in a gesture of anomalous exhilaration, at the worst time of the depression Sydney opened its Harbour Bridge, one of the talismanic structures of the earth, and then by far the most striking thing ever built in Australia. At that moment, I think, contemporary Sydney began – perhaps definitive Sydney. Another World War, a few more booms and slumps, confirmed Sydney’s economic status. The decline of the British Empire shifted its attitudes to the world. A tremendous migration of continental Europeans and Asians drastically altered its manner. We have arrived at our Sunday arvo of the 1990s, with the 18-footers storming past Bradley’s Head, and the skyscrapers gleaming on the foreshore.

  Sydney people often say their city lacks a sense of history, but I do not find it so. I find the past more easily retrievable in Sydney than in most cities, so familiar to us are the people who founded this place, whether we know them by name or simply as generic figures, and so easy is it to imagine the scenes of earlier times. Many a monument of the Victorian age stands grandly Victorian still. David Jones now claims to be ‘The Most Beautiful Store in the World’, and W. H. Soul the Pitt Street pharmacy offers a SOULCOLOR fast film service. The Treasury’s cortile now shelters the coffee shop of the Intercontinental Hotel. The Land Department Building still has vacant niches for twenty-five heroes. When George Street (né Sergeant-Major’s Row) swerves near its northern end, it is avoiding the vanished boundary of the original Government shipyard; when it veers to the east and back again by the Town Hall it is shying away from the ghosts of the first city graveyard, where the pigs molested the goats. The unpredictable street-pattern of downtown Sydney relates still to the site of Phillip’s malodorous little mansion. The Tank Stream, sometimes fierce with storm-water, still empties itself into Sydney Cove beside Pier 6 at Circular Quay. Graffiti remain from the days of the First Fleet. Often in the evenings, around the harbour, I see solitary meditative figures sitting on rocks just as the Aborigines sat long ago; and after dark, when the riding light of some small fishing-craft swims across the water, I find it easy to expect one of those elementary canoes to come paddling out of the night, with a naked black woman in the stern, and a cooking-fire burning amidships.

  And the bush survives. We will end this skim through the Sydney past with a glimpse of the wild present – more than mere rus in urbe, more nature indestructible. We stand on a road bridge in one of the northern suburbs, looking down upon one of those tangled gulleys of bush far below the sidewalk. It is dusk. A full moon is rising, and little groups of people, in twos and threes, are fitfully assembling on the bridge. The traffic is light, the evening is sultry, there is not much sign of life in the houses which are scattered among the trees. Below us the river glints through huge ferns. A youth with tattooed forearms throws a cigarette end over the bridge, and it floats into the gulley in a scatter of sparks. A couple of small children race each other up and down the sidewalk. We are waiting for the Sydney fruit bats, the big flying-foxes, which nest somewhere down there in their hundreds of thousands, allegedly emitting a frightful vespertilian smell.1 Each evening they leave their perches in the wood to go foraging through the city, all over the northern suburbs and far across the harbour, where they are often to be felt, rather than exactly seen, fuzzily passing apartment windows. They are among the southernmost fruit bats, the largest community in Sydney, and they have survived everything that history has been able to do to them. Today they have many admirers, and I went once to a protection-society meetings up the road in the well-heeled suburb of Gordon, whose enthusiasm the bats themselves would have been astonished to discover – bat friends of all ages were there, wearing bat badges and bat-ornamented T-shirts, listening to zealous bat lectures, examining a bat skeleton in a glass case and distributing bat pamphlets with missionary zeal.

  Night begins to fall. The little audience crowds to the parapet. Out of the murky bush there emerges a solitary Pteropus poliocephalus, flapping over our heads and wheeling southwards towards the harbour. After a minute or two another follows, and then a couple more. It seems a desultory progress, and the children begin to lose interest, and start racing up and down the pavement again. ‘Is that all?’ says a girl to her young man. ‘Fucking hell,’ says the youth with the tattoos. But after a few minutes the pace theatrically quickens, the bats appear in threes and fours, and then in batches, and then in squadrons, and then in fleets, until the whole darkening sky is full of them, and they pour out of the bush in an apparently endless stream, hundred upon hundred, thousand upon thousand, like a furious reassertion of old supremacies.

  After a while their interminable passage into the night becomes a bit of a bore, and long before the last bat has flown over that bridge the children have seen enough of them, and are clamouring to go home.

  1 Or in the case of the most prolific recorded specimen, milked of its venom in 1934, enough to kill 40,000.

  1 Mysteriously, it may be thought – there is no record of his having seen South Wales, the coast is very different, and there was a New South Wales already, on Hudson’s Bay in Canada – but the name was apparently chosen as a favour for Thomas Pennant, the Welsh patriot and botanist, who was a great friend of Banks, and perhaps really means the New Wales of the South.

  2 More obviously, since on its shores Banks and Solander collected scores of plants hitherto unknown to science.

  3 After George Jackson, a Secretary of the Admiralty, who presently spurned this gift of immortality by changing his name to Duckett.

  1 I take these figures, which are uncertain, from Mollie Gillen’s The Founders of Australia, Sydney 1989.

  2 Including the chaplain’s cats.

  3 Including, for instance, 40 wheelbarrows, 747,000 nails and 250 women’s handkerchiefs.

  1 As it certainly did t
wenty years later to the littérateur Barron Field, who came to Sydney as a Supreme Court Judge, thought evergreen trees inimical to the poetic urge, and said he could ‘hold no fellowship with Australian foliage’. When. Field left Australia in 1824, the British Dictionary of National Biography delicately tells us, ‘the complimentary address of the lawyers did not represent every shade of public opinion’.

  2 And last, the title dying with him. Why he called himself Sydney the Dictionary of National Biography does not say, and it suggests that were it not for the Australian city named after him he would probably be best-remembered by a line of Oliver Goldsmith’s about Edmund Burke: “Though fraught with all learning, yet straining his throat/To persuade Tommy Townshend to give him his vote.’ However citizens of Sydney, Nova Scotia, founded 1785, might disagree.

  1 A common imperial practice: St Stephen’s at Ootacamund, for example, is named not for the proto-martyr, but for Stephen Lushington Esquire, Indian Civil Service.

  1 Pinchgut is said to have got its original name either because of the poor convicts deposited there in punishment, and fed only bread and water, or (more probably) because the harbour narrowed around it. It is now officially called Fort Denison.

  1 We shall return to the penal environment; for a complete evocation of convict Australia Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore (1986) has no rival.