by Jan Morris
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There are still no Sydney rulers in quite Lawrence’s sense. There are people with non-hereditary British titles, bestowed upon them before New South Wales abandoned the imperial honours system, and people who are members of the Order of Australia, and put the letters AC, AO, or AM after their names. There are people, naturally, who are richer or better educated than the average. But except among first-generation immigrants there are no obvious distinctions of accent or physique, and stripped of their clothes on a beach Sydneysiders look beyond social analysis; gone are the stooped shoulders and rickety legs of the European poor, and a patrician presence means nothing in a crowd of magnificently bronzed and muscular surfers. Physically at least this really is a city of equals.
But here as everywhere there is an élite all the same, and I often see in it shadows of the early Sydney society. The first thing that strikes me is its proximity. It is not in the least remote. The political Establishment is as immediately to hand as it was in the days when the Governors occupied their first little mansion above the Cove. Three-quarters of the population of New South Wales lives in Sydney, its capital, and this makes the place much like a City–State, with its Head of State always on view, if not actually next door. Everyone knows the Premier, knows where he lives, knows his origins, knows a tale or two about his imprudences or his peccadilloes and seldom hesitates to tell it. Also there are generally a few ex-Premiers around, making the presence of power more familiar still, and it is surprising how often women one meets turn out to have been, at one time or another, their wives.
The very rich, too, are as inescapable now as they were in the early days. People talk of them familiarly. They are not distant figures of legend, as they so often are in London or New York. They are like bank managers in some much more modest city, or perhaps squires in an English market town, so that the X. family house is pointed out to visitors in passing, the Y. family boat seems known to all, and the very day I lunched with one of Sydney’s more influential editors he got a personal note from his proprietor, one of the richest men in Australia, giving him the Immediate sack, effective that afternoon – what could be more proximate than that? In a downtown department store I once came across the former châtelaine of Paradis sur Mer, making a charity appearance at a cosmetic counter and surrounded by admiring middle-aged women. She welcomed them like the lady of the manor at a fête, and they responded, it seemed to me, with familiar affection. ‘There’s our Susan,’ I heard one woman say to her companion, as they hastened excitedly towards the presence.
The moneyed and powerful of contemporary Sydney are often almost allegorically moneyed and powerful. When I first went to Sydney its rich women, in particular, had a famously scornful expression of face, noted by many observers: it was said of the novelist Patrick Whitens mother (née Withycombe and granddaughter of a Somerset inn-keeper) that her mouth was ‘permanently set at twenty past seven’.1 Above the main door of the Customs House, on Circular quay, the architect James Barnet put a bust of the young Queen Victoria which immortalizes that particular Sydney look, and it is also to be seen in some of the portraits in the New South Wales Art Gallery (including at least one self-portrait). It is mercifully out of fashion now, but there is still no denying a predatory character to the Sydney élite. A hint of steel-within-the-velvet-glove characterizes its social style, and I would not care to make enemies among the Sydney jet set. I met a young man at a banquet once who was introduced to me as having just bought a television channel: ‘Two, actually,’ was all he said, without a smile. There is a dauntingly veneered and lacquered look to many of these people, who often seem rather too absolute to be true – too well coiffured, too expensively dressed at the wrong time of day, rather too glittery and enthusiastic. Gush Is a well-known Sydney society failing, but so is the habit of interruption: among the upper crust here the art of conversation is mostly the art of competitive monologue, and I have seen souls from gentler milieux reduced to stunned withdrawal because they have never been allowed to conclude a sentence.1 Nor is delicacy a quality of the Sydney hoi polloi (as Sydney people, in a curious semantic inversion, call their society folk). I was proudly introduced one evening to a woman descended from one of the oldest and most eminent Sydney families, and never in my life have I encountered such an overbearing, loud-mouthed, over-dressed, sozzled and Insensitive old hag.
This raw but effective aristocracy is extremely well-travelled, often owning properties abroad and sometimes sending its children to Europe or America for their education. There was a time when it was also passionately Anglophile and royalist, and one comes across survivals of the convention – any visiting peer is soon adopted by the party-going classes. A Sydney novelist once told me that a prime characteristic of Sydneysiders was their ability to tug a forelock and spit abuse at the same time, and the dichotomy Is apparent even among the sophisticated, who are by no means unaware of their own elevation, but curiously susceptible to the altitude of outsiders.
With all this, there is something undeniably attractive about Sydney’s higher society, in a cynical, glittery, hospitable way. It gives me the disarming impression that it enjoys life hugely, and if I tread warily in its generic presence, I tread with pleasure too. It is a small society. It meets frequently, knows itself intimately and is made homogeneous by common success. At a single party in the city I met, one after the other, two Premiers of New South Wales, two of Sydney’s most notoriously expensive barristers. Its most famous living architect, one of its most celebrated authors, the headmistress of its most fashionable girls’ school, the director of its greatest library, the chairman of several of its most profitable companies and the man who had just bought the television channels. Almost all were equally charming to me, though some kept their eyes on the door behind my back, in case somebody more important walked In – Robert Campbell perhaps, or (far better at a party) Bee Boyd of the Wanderer.
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Sydney’s original society was polarized simply enough between the gaolers and the gaoled, but gradually there came into existence a powerful middle class of professional people, functionaries and politicians, and down the generations this was to produce some of the city’s most memorable characters. Six of them, now:
¶ John Piper (c. 1773–1851) first arrived in Sydney in 1792 as a member of the New South Wales Corps, bet so clearly realized the potential of the place that he returned in 1812 to take the job of. Naval Officer – part harbourmaster, but more importantly part customs collector, which gave him 5 per cent of all customs due. He was an enthusiastic Scot, despite (or perhaps because of) German paternal origins. Handsome, dandyish and extravagant, he married a convict’s daughter and lived headily, breeding and racing horses, throwing money around, while steadily making himself rich on the strength of his 5 per cent. By the 1820s he had built himself so grand a mansion that he was known as the Prince of Australia: twin-domed and colonnaded, Henrietta Villa stood at the tip of one of the most delectable harbour promontories, and was the scene of glorious junketings. Piper had his own band, and his guests danced quadrilles beneath the verandas, being seen off in the morning with ceremonial salutes from miniature brass cannons on the lawn. Behind the house, as If In expiation, a huge Cross of St Andrew was laid out in clipped hedges on the hillside. Alas, this endearing hedonist over-reached himself. Obliged to resign his office because of inexact accountancy, burdened with frightful debts, one day he was rowed out into the harbour with his kilted piper, and jumped overboard to the playing of a lament. He was fished out anyway with a boathook, but his glory days were over. Henrietta Villa was sold to pay off the debts, and Piper retreated from history to die in altogether more bathetic circumstances.1 All that remains of him is the name of the promontory he made so fashionable – Point Piper, which at least is soigné still.
¶ Two violent clergymen bring zest to the old Sydney annals. The Rev. Samuel Marsden (1764–1838) was a gross eighteenth-century figure, a Fielding character. He was the son of a Yorkshire blacksmith, ha
d a Cambridge degree and came to Sydney as assistant chaplain in 1794. He looks in his pictures a perfect horror – fat-faced, bull-necked, sour-mouthed – and he made himself a squarson of the old English school, at once landowner, magistrate and vicar of Parramatta. In 1807 he took to London the very first bale of Australian wool, and was presented to King George III wearing a suit woven from his own fleeces. He is remembered in Sydney, though, chiefly as an exponent of corporal and capital punishment – Flogging Sam. He ordered floggings at the drop of a hat, he fervently wielded a whip himself, and he ordered hangings without compunction. It is said he used to drive parishioners to church with a dog-whip; he certainly sentenced one of his own servants to death for absconding, and then attended him on the scaffold. He was a famous proselytizer of the Maoris, but saw no salvation for the Sydney Aborigines, declaring them to have ‘no Reflections, no attachments and no wants’. Sam Marsden was a pillar of society, as a clergyman must be, a member of the Turnpike Trust, president of the Benevolent Society, committee member of the Bible Society, but even the generally temperate Macquarie was once goaded into calling him a Mendacious and Vindictive Cleric.2
The other memorable man of God was the Presbyterian John Dunmore Lang (1799–1878), who was violent In a more forgivable kind. He was a flaming Scottish Calvinist who came to Sydney In 1823 especially to reform its morals. For nearly half a century he thundered and raged about them, attacking everybody from venal bankers to delinquent Governors. He built his own Scots Kirk, he started two newspapers, he founded a college, he wrote innumerable pamphlets, he was a vociferous member of the Legislative Council. At his own expense he brought out about a hundred Scottish craftsmen and their families in order to elevate the quality of the Sydney proletariat.1 He was a Napoleon of the manse! Nothing could restrain him in his headlong pursuit of the right. He infuriated officialdom by publishing a series of parodies supposed to be intercepted dispatches to London, and at the height of his fame spent four months in Parramatta gaol for libel. But he was undaunted, and carried on in just the same way, God’s rabble-rouser, until his death.
¶ William Charles Wentworth (1790–1872) was Sydney’s prototypical politician. His mother was transported for theft. His father was a physician who had been charged with highway robbery in England, but had escaped punishment by volunteering as a surgeon for the colony, where he had greatly thrived and sired at least eight children by various women. W. C. Wentworth became famous in his early youth as one of the first three Europeans to cross the Blue Mountains, in 1813, and when he went up to Cambridge he became something of a poet: in 1823 he was runner-up for the Chancellor’s Medal for his poem ‘Australasia’, dedicated to Macquarie and full of apostrophe’d Sydney images (throng’d quay, lengthen’d street, column’d front, glitt’ring heaps and vent’rous tread). All his life, impelled perhaps by his slightly disreputable origins, he stood for the New Man, the self-reliant Australian-born. He called himself The First Australian, and started a newspaper called The Australian which argued vehemently for self-rule in the colony, and was perpetually at odds with Government House. Wentworth had inherited a fortune from his father, and used it with brio, making his house Vaucluse the Henrietta Villa of his generation. It was there that the Constitution Bill was drafted, giving responsible Government to the colony of New South Wales, and there that Wentworth cocked a famous snook at one of his chief opponents, the martinet Governor Ralph Darling: when Darling sailed for home in 1831 Wentworth invited 4,000 guests to a rollicking celebratory party on his lawns, the climax of the evening being a firework display which spelled out the words DOWN WITH THE TYRANT triumphantly across the night sky. ‘Australia First’ was one of Wentworth’s slogans, but it was not Australia to the Last for him, because he went to England again in 1862 and died there ten years later.
¶ The two most celebrated Sydney politicians of later years were Sir Henry Parkes (1815–96) and William Morris Hughes (1862–1952). Both were born in Britain, the one of English parents, the other of Welsh. Parkes was six times premier of New South Wales and the dominant Australian politician of his day. Hughes was Prime Minister of Australia during the First World War, the Antipodean Lloyd George. They were both unforgettable figures, and both began their careers humbly in Sydney – Parkes worked in an ironmongery and kept an ivory knick-knack shop, Hughes mended umbrellas and ran a general store in Balmain. The huge, richly bearded and lavishly whiskered Parkes looks in pictures remarkably like an Aborigine. The small, jug-eared and gnome-like Hughes had long droopy moustaches and melancholy eyes, and was known universally as Billy. Parkes’s voice varied peculiarly from deep bass to falsetto, and he bore himself like an actor-manager, sometimes adopting a visionary expression of the eyes and sometimes falling into what was once described as a ‘vast and inexpressive weariness’. Hughes became in his prime an ardent British imperialist – ‘what fields are left for us to conquer?’ he demanded rhetorically of the King’s subjects after the victory of 1918. ‘We are like so many Alexanders.’ Parkes, who was accused in 1885 of ‘an inane and tedious vulgarity of rhetoric’, was married three times, went in and out of bankruptcy and died very poor at the age of eighty-one. Hughes, who was a famously entertaining orator, sat in one assembly or another without a break for fifty-eight years, chose his first Sydney constituency because It was the only one within a penny tram fare of Parliament House, and was given a State funeral In Sydney, In 1952, which was attended by 100,000 people.
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And here now on a North Shore pier stands a modern Sydney bourgeois, waiting for the ferry. Is he a Wentworth, one wonders, is he a Piper, is he at heart a Flogging Sam? He is in his early forties, perhaps, slim but florid. He wears an Italianate three-piece suit with double vents to the jacket and four buttons on each sleeve, together with a stiff white collar above a blue-striped shirt, and a tightly knotted tie of the old school sort. His brown hat, tilted forward, has a wide and slightly curled brim. Under his arm he carries a not too bulging briefcase, and he walks up and down the pier, one hand in pocket, with a preoccupied air. Perhaps he is preparing a brief, we may speculate, or weighing a prognosis. But then we notice his shoes. They are expensive-looking, highly polished shoes, but if we look closely at them, when his back is turned, we may see that they are pathetically down at heel. He is not what he seems – his clothes are a bluff, his briefcase probably contains nothing but the morning tabloid, and he hasn’t the cash to get his shoes heeled. Let him be a lesson to us: the contemporary Sydney bourgeoisie, of which we thought him so substantial a member, is extremely hard to pin down.
This is because it ranges, as it always has, from the criminal to the genteel, freely mixing. We are quite likely to meet the man with the worn shoes at tonight’s sixtieth birthday party for the Professor, but equally we might run into him taking illegal bets on the 4.30 at Randwick. If fashionable Sydney is almost incestuously tight-knit, middle-class Sydney seems to me generously heterogeneous, and is the least obviously Australian of the city’s social layers. It has its fair share of glorious southern physique; but I once went to a Sydney theatrical occasion, attended in particular by young intellectuals, and thought that all in all, with their pale exhausted faces, their lounging postures and their generally lacklustre or perhaps hungover attitudes, they were the weediest theatre-goers I had ever seen.
Let me take you to a dinner-party among the better-off Sydney middle classes – a composite picture, so to speak, true in the detail but fudged in the whole. The style of the apartment is trendy – everything new, everything the newest in fact, pictures by the most admired Sydney figurist of the day, furniture in the latest Slav-Mexican mode, tulips in Chinese vases, fabrics in the muted cerise, streaked with green, which has recently been decreed by Australian Vogue. The food is excellent, the wine terrific. The conversation is partly about last night’s La Bohème, and partly about real-estate prices, and predominantly about other people, and is very catty.
One of the guests tells us without embarrassment that among her fam
ily connections are some of the best-known members of the Sydney criminal classes. Another recalls his happy time as a Rhodes Scholar. A third explains the anti-corrosion system which has made his family business so successful around the world. A fourth is that awful old harridan of eminent pedigree. Two more are, before the pudding is served, sitting on each other’s laps in a corner of the room. A seventh is the man we saw at the ferry pier, who presently spills his glass of red wine over the brand-new and gleaming white carpet. They all laugh a lot, ignore those they choose to ignore, interrupt freely, eat wholeheartedly and repeatedly congratulate our host upon the rapidly rising value of his property. We enjoy it all tremendously. We are sitting among truly historical figures, clearly recognizable in the Sydney annals, and bringing to that well-appointed apartment on the North Shore resonant echoes of old habits and intentions.
It seems to me that the professional, artistic and business classes of Sydney have only recently found themselves. When I first encountered them, thirty years ago, they were still patently subject to what used to be called the Cultural Cringe – the general assumption that things foreign, and in particular things British, were necessarily superior. Today this old complex is mostly dissipated, and the middle classes are generally confident of their own merits – as well they might be, since they have produced in the last couple of decades an astonishing stream of distinguished representatives. They are proud and fond of their city, too: during Sydney’s annual day of clean-up in 1990 some 40,000 people, most of them undoubtedly from the bourgeoisie, volunteered to help.
