by Jan Morris
Sydney is notoriously racist. It was brought up to be so. Robert Hughes suggests, in The Fatal Shore, that the bigotry began with the convicts, despising the Aborigines ‘because they desperately needed to believe in a class inferior to themselves’. In later years it was encouraged by membership of the British Empire, itself so racist and xenophobic that the official attitudes of this city were ingrained with fear of foreigners. Two World Wars sustained the suspicions, and they were powerfully encouraged by the national policy of White Australia, rigidly pursued for several generations. The spectre of the Yellow Peril was vivid here – ‘We don’t want to fight,’ said a Sydney version of an old British cri-de-coeur, ‘but by jingo if we must/We’ll lick, the yellow peril and leave it in the dust.’
These emotions are far from dead, and appear indeed to be self-generating: in the 1970s the children of Lebanese immigrants (‘Lebs’) found themselves horribly bullied at school, and even now women in Muslim dress are treated with open hostility and contempt. The immigrants of one generation project their own resentments on the immigrants of the next – sometimes of the one before too, as I realized when a Greek assured me one day that ‘Poms are arrogant bastards, and ignorant too’. In 1989 there was a proposal for a new industrial satellite city, obscurely called a Multi-Function Polis, which would be built on the outskirts of Sydney and greatly increase its industrial and technological power; support soon soured when it was realized that most of the money behind it would be Japanese, and that some 30,000 yellow men might be coming to work there. I am still taken aback by the attitudes of some otherwise cultivated Sydney gentry to the Aborigines, whom they shamelessly call ‘abos’ – like calling American blacks ‘niggers’ – and whose very mention in a conversation can bring into the Sydney voice a disturbing steeliness, into the Sydney eye an involuntary glint of distaste.
So time and again one finds, exploring attitudes in present-day Sydney, that one is treading emotions of the past.
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Land brought an early and lasting passion to the Sydney style. The Aborigines thought either that it was held in trust for everyone, or that it held everyone in trust. The whites thought it the one permanent and infallible source of personal wealth. The British authorities, disingenuously resolving that since the Aborigines did not appear to do anything with it, they had no right to it, declared it all at the disposal of the Crown, and distributed wide tracts among worthy white recipients. Since the land was mostly thick bush, entirely unworked, It sometimes came in very large parcels. Emancipated convicts were allowed only a few acres, and the more humble kind of free settler could expect little more: migrants of means were soon playing about with thousands, amounting to gigantic if originally hypothetical estates.
I know a man in Sydney whose family owns one of the very same patches of land granted to it at the turn of the nineteenth century – then a small country property, now the site of a row of terrace houses. Many such Sydney clans established their well-being upon land given them by Government (though not many still possess it), and the consciousness of land, its status as the ultimate form of wealth, runs deeply through the ethos of the city. The Lands Title Office swarms always with animated claimants and disputants, like a bank or passport office somewhere else. If there had ever been a Sydney constitution, an inalienable right to the pursuit of property might well have been written into it – also a right to the sale of property, for many of the original land grants were very soon split by their owners and sold off in lots: even Craigend, the Surveyor-General’s lovely place on Woolloomooloo Hill, lasted only thirteen years before it was divided into eighty-six profitable segments of real estate.
The almost universal desire to own one’s own house is part of this territorial instinct. So is the fascination, amounting almost to a public obsession, with house prices. Sometimes I think all Sydney life is governed by the price of property, so inescapable is the subject in conversation and the press, and so obtrusive the hyperbole of the estate agents: The Best Address on Earth, the Quintessential City Terrace, Possibly the Most Eloquently Contemporary Waterfront Residence in the World – Ever. Sydney realtese has a long and often irritating pedigree. When Vaucluse House went on the market in 1838 it was described as ‘a splendid and unequalled Marine Estate, commanding a perfect view of the head lands and sinuosities of the various Bays and inlets of the truly romantic Harbour in which it is situated’. A century later D. H. Lawrence saw bungalows advertised as being 4 Sale or 2 Rent: nothing would induce him, he said through his surrogate character Richard Somers in Kangaroo, to live in a house thus advertised, especially when it was likely to have a name like Arcady or Racketty-Coo.1
Occasionally the fate of a house, its rising or falling value, its varying ownership and its future prospects become part of the general gossip. One recently was Swifts, a mansion on Darling Point said to be the most valuable house in the city. It was built for a nineteenth-century brewer in the Scottish baronial manner, was willed to the Roman Catholic Church as an archiepiscopal residence, and was bought in 1986 by a reclusive and enigmatic racehorse trainer. He paid A$9 million for it and was soon refusing offers of A$38 million, but got into the news when an eighty-four-year-old retired engineer threatened to foreclose on a large debt he said the man owed him. How the press loved it! A huge costly house with statues in the garden, a man of mystery connected with the Turf, an aged complainant (‘ruining the last years of my life’), the Catholic Church, padlocked gates, enormous mortgages, vast potential profits – it was all Sydney wanted of a real estate affair.
Even more popular was the story of Paradis sur Mer, a lavish but unlovely mansion on Point Piper – One of the World’s Great Deep Waterfront Properties, Unparalleled Panoramic Harbour Views, Championship Tennis Court, Etc., Etc, This had become famous as the home of a particularly well-publicized and amusing hostess, several times married and always to celebrities.1 It was bought for a fabulous price, sold even more extravagantly, bought again by a speculator who lived in it for only three months, at an estimated cost of A$2,000 a day, before selling it once more at a loss of A$3 million. All Sydney waited to see what would happen next, but when on the following Sunday people picked up their newspapers, they found that Paradis sur Mer had been demolished overnight by its latest owner, who planned to build several more lucrative buildings on the site. Enthusiasts immediately flocked to Point Piper by boat, helicopter and jet ski, in the hope of picking up souvenirs among the ruins.
Nobody had time to protest about the extinction of Paradis sur Mer, but furious rearguard actions have been fought in defence of other properties. For a time the building unions refused to demolish old buildings in the interest of property developers, and with reason, for not many cities have been so implacably knocked about by speculators. Phillip wanted most of the present downtown area to be inalienable Grown land for ever, but he misjudged the nature of Sydney, and two centuries of the market economy have seldom given the city a breathing space. The old quip about Manhattan that it will be a fine place when it’s finished, applies still more pertinently here, and I know of no other city that seems so permanently incomplete.
Whole neighbourhoods were destroyed in the 1930s, when the Harbour Bridge approach-roads were built, and even now it is hard to keep up with the topography of the place, so drastically and frequently is it altered in the name of progress or profit. Sometimes buildings disappear almost overnight, sometimes they remain for decades in a limbo of uncertainty. In my time Sydney Cove itself, the historical and aesthetic focus of the entire city, has stood always at half-cock. They spent a decade and more building the Opera House, on the eastern side. They spent years restoring, rebuilding and developing the Rocks, on the western side. They were ages building the new Ocean Terminal. They redesigned the park area. They put in new walkways. ‘Revitalizing the Quay’, said a sign they put up above an apparently permanently moribund building site near the Opera House. As I write they are completing a harbour tunnel underneath the cove, planning to do away wi
th the tall ugly buildings on the eastern quay, and about to turn the former Maritime Service Board building into a museum of modern art, while from time to time there are suggestions that they might tear down the elevated railway and the Cahill Expressway, and start all over again.1
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In 1990 a new ‘heritage listing’ plan proposed that more than a quarter of the downtown city should be declared protected property, not to be demolished: not a single city block would be without a protected building, which would probably make future commercial development more than ever subject to hook, crook and wheeler-dealing. For if some people watch all these developments so passionately because they are concerned about the condition of their city, many others watch because there’s big money in it, Sydney people do not seem to me terribly interested in small money, money as such. Easy come, easy go was noted as a Sydney financial maxim at least as early as the 1850s, and foreigners today often marvel at the insouciance of Sydney taxi-drivers, who are not greatly concerned about tips, and indeed often reduce the fare to the nearest round figure. The political economist Andrew Wells recently suggested1 that ‘the Sydney style has now elevated all forms of individual accumulation to an ethical imperative’; on the other hand it is said to be relatively easy to push one’s way to the top of the plutocracy In Sydney, because so few people can be bothered. I get the impression that citizens are chiefly interested in other people’s wealth – not so much in the power of it, either, or the morality, but simply in its ability to dazzle and entertain. The great tycoons of Sydney, however disrespectfully they are treated in the gossip columns, are civic stars really, and the melodramatic spectacles of high finance, the takeover bids, the bankruptcies, the venal internecine feuds, are watched with insatiable fascination.
To be extraordinarily rich is a properly native ambition. In many callings there comes a moment, if you want to be really in the big time, when you must abandon Sydney to practise in Europe or the United States. You can, however, become supremely rich without ever leaving home. Some of the older rich families have mellowed into a conviction of ample superiority, requiring no exhibitionism. Some have put their money out of sight, so to speak, into estates in California, country houses in Hampshire or Paris apartments. But there is something about the flash of Sydney, the easy conceit and the lack of envy, that makes it the perfect setting for extravagance, and it is the lifestyle of the brasher wealthy that seems best suited to this city. The showy carriages of the nineteenth century displayed (as an observer wrote in the 1850s) ‘luxury without refinement’; their truest successors are the power-boats which rampage around the harbour today, the perfect images of uninhibited wealth – ostentatious, deafening, socially defiant, totally unnecessary and fun.
Sudden wealth is the thing – not the long slog, but the bonanza. It was always so. The stupendously successful emancipist Solomon Wiseman was asked once if he did not regret his illiteracy. ‘What’s the use of education,’ he retorted, ‘when the acquisition of wealth is the main lesson on life?’ In 1850 the discovery of gold at Bathurst, beyond the Blue Mountains, galvanized the city: citizens from clergymen to labourers rushed off to the diggings, countless firms found themselves without employees, and there is a splendid picture of the arrival of a gold transport at the Treasury in 1851 – the clattering cart of treasure with its top-hatted driver, bearded guards with rifles on their knees, cavalry men cantering around, the populace gaping and the whole scene informed with the excitement of instant riches.1
The last quarter of the twentieth century, with its emphasis on theoretical money, has suited Sydney admirably. Fortunes built on fantasy are very much its style, and in the 1970s and 1980s the whole ‘paraphernalia of monetarism flourished mightily in this city. When the character then called the Yuppie first emerged in New York, he very soon found his clones in Sydney, and long after he fell out of mode elsewhere his local incarnation thrived. Nobody could be yuppier than a Sydney yuppie, nobody’s BMW was more carelessly parked beside the four-wheel-drive in the car-port, nobody’s trousers were more fashionably baggy, nobody flaunted his suspenders more dashingly, or spoke with such fluency about such multi-digited sums over cellular telephones in public places.
There is a place called Hopwood’s Terrace, at Blue’s Point on the north side of the harbour, where I used to love to watch the yuppies perform. It is a modest row of buildings of the 1920s,’ with a quaintly ornamented roof line and shingled gables here and there, but it has been trendified. There is an Expo Oz Design House, a boutique, an advertising agency, Giuseppi’s Italian Restaurant and something called the Image Bank. There is also a pleasant pavement café, and here the young executives, in the brave days of yuppiedom, loved to gather for Sunday morning breakfast. One in particular always engaged my attention. He was an ageing example, balding rather and a little too plump for the squash court, but he sported a proper Sunday-morning mode of T-shirt with whales on it, blue shorts and bare feet, while his companion had her blonde hair in pigtails, and wore khaki slacks and sandals. Suavely he drank his cappuccino and ate his croissant. Knowingly but condescendingly he read out bits in the paper about people he knew. If his cellular phone rang he would saunter over to his Porsche talking loudly into his telephone as he went. How largely his laugh used to echo down Blue’s Point Road! How unsmilingly soignée his woman watched him as he returned still talking and joking across the road to the café, deftly flicking his diary pages as he came – successful, progressives worldly, barefoot for all to see!
He was a gambler, I suppose, if only a gambler with other people’s money, and Sydney has always liked a betting man. Sydney people will wager on almost anything, and as we have seen illegal off-course betting is a vice even among the most homely of linen-hatted senior citizens. Alone among the big Australian cities, except only Canberra the federal capital, Sydney has no casino, but this is not surprising, because in New South Wales there are more poker machines per head (fruit machines, as they are called elsewhere) than anywhere else outside Nevada. In 1976 the money that passed through these devices, the vast majority of them in Sydney, amounted to one-fifth of the entire disposable income of the State; so perhaps the best way nowadays to glimpse the instinct for immediate wealth is not to tour the opulent suburbs, looking for show-off houses, but simply to visit one of the Rugby League social clubs, where Sydney’s working people stand hour after hour before the poker machines, the old one-armed bandits, hoping for the sudden thrilling clatter of silver coins that means jackpot: not an estate in the country, perhaps, not a flashy equipage or a power-boat, but at least money for nothing.
To gamblers as to all others, though, the tall-poppy syndrome applies. Many of the entrepreneurs who were Sydney heroes in the 1980s fell upon hard times at the end of the decade, and found themselves plagued by bankruptcies and criminal investigations: the press turned upon them then, and called them collectively Greed Inc.
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Sydney has traditionally prided itself upon being a classless society. There are certainly no such obvious emblems of class distinction as there are in England, no such fearful contrasts between rich and poor as one sees in the United States, Slums are rare, the standard of living is high, and there are no more than a dozen families of any dynastic pretension. Houses generally pass from hand to quite unrelated hand. There is one called Mort’s Cottage, in Double Bay, whose history has been meticulously recorded by its present owner.1 Its owners and occupiers have included a grocer, an umbrella-and-parasol-maker, a celebrated industrialist, a pioneering woman physician and John Tawell, the emancipated forger whose opulent dinner-party we glimpsed a few pages back. Egalitarianism has always been a Sydney brag: it was said of the Anzac soldiers in the First World War that they had never in their lives known what it was to be given a direct order, ‘undisguised by a “you might” or a “would you mind”’.2
Nevertheless class always counted strongly in the style of Sydney, as it did everywhere the British trod. Hardly had the colony been founded than it evolved c
lass distinctions of its own. There were the administrators and military officers – the official Establishment. There were the Sterlings or Exclusives, the English-born free settlers – the colonial gentry. There were the Pure Merinos, the sheep graziers who saw themselves as the county folk of Sydney. There were the Currency Lads and Lasses, white people born in Australia, whose nickname implied a coinage good only in the colony. There were the emancipists who were ex-convicts, and their sub-kind the more modest Dungaree Settlers. There were the Ticket-of-Leave men who were more or less on parole. There were the convicts, who included gentlemen-felons called Specials, and who preferred to be known as Exiles, Government men or Empire-builders. And there were the Aborigines, grounding at the very bottom in that lowest of the lowest of Sydney society, the black woman, ‘Ladies, Gentlemen or Others’, was the formula used in the small advertisements of the day.
Much of all this was based upon English precedents, and English social values were often anomalously applied – one can imagine how bitter was the sense of caste among the twenty-seven free women who arrived with the 750 felons of the First Fleet, and how reluctant they must have been to employ convict wet-nurses. Those gentlemen-convicts were put into a special camp, where unfrocked clergymen, cashiered officers, disgraced lawyers and exposed bankers got special treatment. One such was the naval officer John Knatchbull, member of an ancient Kent family.1 Dismissed the service for behaviour unbecoming an officer, this patent psychopath was transported in 1825 for picking a pocket in London, but was not deterred. He beat a man to death on the voyage out. He tried to poison the entire crew of the ship taking him to Norfolk Island. He murdered a woman with a tomahawk. Yet he was given his own servant on the journey to Botany Bay (the man he beat to death) and to the very day of his eventual execution, by hanging in Sydney in 1844, he was surrounded by suggestions of aristocratic privilege, Lady Gipps the Governor’s wife herself was supposed to have agitated for his reprieval, and when he went to his death nevertheless he was wearing a handsome new suit allegedly supplied, for the sake of his class, by Her Excellency.
