Sydney

by Jan Morris

  Besides, it is still the prerogative of your true Sydneysider unconcernedly to jump the gap between ship and shore just before the ferry docks.

  *

  In 1928 there were 46 million ferry passengers; in 1933 there were 23 million. But the opening of the Harbour Bridge in 1952 not only shifted the pattern of function in Sydney, it changed the city’s conception of itself – even its place in the world, for this was the largest of all arch bridges, and thus the first world-class artefact ever built in Sydney. The bridge was like an icon, an instantly recognizable symbol of Sydney-ness, satisfying civic visions and fulfilling one at least of Erasmus Darwin’s prophecies. It was only proper that the poster announcing its opening should be dominated by a triumphant lifesaver, in those days the city’s talismanic figure, supported by yachtsmen and sunbathers.

  The harbour was so fundamental to the nature, the activity and the reputation of Sydney that throwing an arch across it was like bursting through some great psychological barrier. They had been talking about it for 150 years, generally imagining a crossing at the site where the bridge was eventually built. Greenway was perhaps the first to propose a bridge, claiming that it would ‘bring magnificence, credit and glory to the colony’. In 1840 there was a proposal for a floating bridge, 45 feet wide, guided by fixed chains across the harbour and propelled by steam – ‘at incredible speed’, claimed the proponent of the idea. Drawings survive of a scheme devised by an engineer, Peter Henderson, who had worked under the great bridge-builders Robert Stephenson and Isambard Brunel in England. His spectacular construction would have been an unsupported flat span of cast-iron, supported by towers at each end and lit by oil-lamps all the way across. Then there were plans for a pontoon bridge, and a seven-span bridge, and there was even a suggestion that the harbour might be filled in between Milson’s Point and Dawes Point. For years the matter of the bridge was a great public issue – ‘O, who will stand at my right hand,’ was an election cry in the 1880s of the old ham Henry Parkes, ‘and build the Bridge with me?’ There were counter-proposals for a tunnel, too, but finally in 1922 the Sydney Harbour Bridge Act authorized the building of a bridge. Its founding father was John Job Crew Bradfield, an implacable modernist who was the city’s chief designing engineer, but Dorman Long of England won the tender for its construction, and the contract price was £4,217,721 11s. 10d.

  The bridge was built at the deepest point of the harbour; the height of its road above the water about equals the depth of water below. Many an old corner of the Rocks had to be demolished for its approach road, and many a humble terrace on the other shore. For seven years, as the great shape reached out across the harbour, Sydney waited with some scepticism for its completion –

  Our ’arbour which art in Sydney,

  Good-o be thy name.

  Thy bridge be done,

  If not in ’30, then in ’31 …

  It was ’32, in the event. The work was then declared complete, with its 1,650 foot span, its dual road, its four rail and tram tracks and its ornamental pylons in the Egyptian manner.1 If was tested with a load of ninety-six steam locomotives and forty-eight coal tenders, buffer to buffer, and pronounced ready for its official opening.

  This was to be the greatest public occasion ever known in Sydney. The city was fond of its bridge by then, if only because it had provided hundreds of jobs through the bleak depression years. It was more than just a bridge, said the Australian Worker, but represented ‘oneness, unity, completion … symbolic of what shall yet become universal’. The opening ceremony was broadcast live throughout Australia, and in Britain and the United States. The Governor-General represented King George V. There were aerial displays by the Royal Australian Air Force, and a Venetian Carnival on the harbour. There were pageants, balls, a sailing regatta, a race meeting, a celebratory cricket match. There was a procession that included ‘lady life-savers’, Aborigines and surviving veterans of the Sudan War, 1885. For the first and last time the whole bridge was thrown open to pedestrians, to stroll over it as they would, and the first scheduled train crossed heavily crested and beflagged. A million people are said to have shared in the celebrations.

  It was all very grand, all great fun in the Sydney tradition of festivity. The swells looked fine in their top hats and medals, the lady life-savers were stunners, the newsreel cameras satisfyingly whirred, the aeroplanes gave everyone a thrill. But the touch that was to be remembered best of all, from a day of great memories, occurred at the exact moment of the bridge’s formal opening. This was to be performed by the Labour Premier of New South Wales, Jack Lang, ‘the Big Fellah’, after the reading of a message from the King himself, but the arrangement was not to everyone’s taste. Lang was thought by many conservatives to be almost treasonably radical; the idea that he should perform the ceremony in conjunctions as it were, with His Imperial Majesty particularly stuck in the gullets of a right-wing paramilitary organization called the New Guard, who believed Lang and his Government to be no more than a pack of Communist puppets – ‘we, a people of pure British stock, are under the domination of a band of imported agitators of low type …’

  The moment came. The Premier, the Governor of New South Wales, the Mayor of Sydney in his ermine, J. J. C. Bradfield, various senior officers with their swords and busbies, approached the ribbon which had been stretched across the southern entry to the bridge. The cameras were ready. The radio commentators in their booths busily set the scene. The Governor-General’s mounted bodyguard was drawn up behind. The crowd was hushed. And suddenly there erupted from behind the cavalry ranks a solitary wild horseman in Army uniform, brandishing a sword. Galloping up the roadway and through the astonished dignitaries, he slashed the ribbon with his sword and shouted that he had opened the bridge ‘in the name of the decent citizens of New South Wales’.

  He was pulled from his horse by the police, the ribbon was tied together again, and the ceremony proceeded.1

  *

  The Harbour Bridge did for Sydney what the Brooklyn Bridge had done for New York half a century before – Bradfield declared in fact that the suburbs of the northern shore would be a Brooklyn to Sydney’s Manhattan.2 He also foresaw that its existence would greatly intensify Sydney’s centrifugal tendencies, encouraging people to live ever further from the city fulcrum. By now a vast web of roads has grown out of the original convict-hacked highway to Parramatta; parts of it have been given high-sounding names like the Great Western Highway or the Pacific Highway, which hold out some promise of clarity, but most of it remains a drab obfuscation. Suburban railways clatter in all directions, there are elaborately networked systems of buses and subways, hundreds of bridges cross creeks and inlets, there is a brief mono-rail track and there will soon be the harbour tunnel too, a few yards east of the great bridge, but built by Japanese.

  The first forms of public land transport were the trams, horse-drawn at first, then steam and finally electric. I would like to have seen the city when the trams were still about. They operated in ramshackle partnership with the ferries, and must greatly have added to the city’s flavour. Like streetcars everywhere, they were always objects of popular affection – a tombstone at Rookwood is decorated with a bas-relief of the No. 51 tram that ran over the deceased – and are now remembered with nostalgic regret. The horse trams sound striking enough, since they were painted bright yellow, were sometimes double-deckers, and were often pulled by teams of four or five horses. The steam trams were better still. The first of them were American, imported for the 1879 International Exhibition. Hauled by violently exhaling locomotives with Cyclopean headlights, they sometimes trundled around town in trains of five double-decker cars, leaning dramatically as they rounded curves.

  By the end of the century, when the system was electrified, Sydney had one of the largest tram networks in the world. Trams went everywhere, it seems. They ran all the way round Circular Quay. They ran at Manly and at Parramatta. They were propelled by a fixed cable at Edgecliffe, like the San Francisco cable-cars. Th
ey were conveyed in specially-equipped punts across the Middle Harbour. Down many a harbourside slope they scraped their way to meet the ferries at the bottom. Through the eastern suburbs they plunged, displaying the white or red disc that warned they were on their way to Bondi, and on race days, bursting as they were with merry punters, they hardly needed the three green diamonds that stood for Canterbury. Three times at least, in the 1940s, trams fell into the harbour, sliding down the slushy hill to Athol Wharf on the northern shore, and hurling themselves uncontrollably through all obstructions; but at Balmain they were restrained on the steeper hills by a trailer called a dummy, upon which it was the delight of reckless urchins to ride.

  The last Sydney tram ran in 1961, and the trains and buses are not so much fun, though I do find a certain shabby romance in the double-decker commuter trains which clank past my balcony, over the Harbour Bridge, and away through forty-nine stops to their terminus in the distant haze of the Blue Mountains. The fact that trains and city buses still converge upon the original landing place at Sydney Cove adds something to history’s patina, and until a year or two ago there were places on the rail system which spoke most evocatively of an older Sydney – brass knobs, Bakelite switches, Instructions to Employees in copperplate script behind metal-framed glass, names on destination boards that seemed to me then as rhythmic and evocative as the English country-station names so beloved of romantic poesy: Warrimoo, Bullabarra, Blaxland, Falconbridge or Emu Plains.

  The Darling Harbour mono-rail is entertaining to ride, sliding as it does high above the city streets, so close to the corners of office blocks that you feel sure it is going to hit them. But the most enviable land journey in Sydney is one I have never tried: the slow haughty journey of the Inclinator, the opulent device that takes fortunate residents of the harbour front smoothly down their steep bluffs, past their hillside palms and lawns, to the pools and yachts awaiting them at the bottom – like a divine progress, it looks from the outside.

  *

  A potent element in the Sydney system is corruption. It always has been. Mayhem was rampant in the penal days, and not only among convicts: the officers of the Rum Corps were crooked to the core, the doctors at the hospital sold its drugs at huge profits to their private patients, and I cannot help suspecting a whiff of nepotism in the result of the competition instituted by Governor Darling for a Government House design in 1827 – it was won by his wife. In later years innumerable developments were accompanied by hints of jobbery: insider trading in land, for Instance, where a railway was likely to be built, or untendered contracts for public works, or dubious complicity between architects and contractors. A surprising number of estate agents stood for municipal office, where they would get inside knowledge of planning decisions. When the Premier Sir Robert Askin died in 1981, it was alleged in his obituary that illegal casino owners had been paying him A$700,000 a year hush money.1 More recently a famous scam surrounded the taking of driving tests, which were conducted by a system of organized bribery: seven faults was the official failure rate, but one woman, sufficient money having passed under the gear lever, was given her licence after committing seventy-two. A private investigator, the Independent Commission Against Corruption was told in 1990, sent the following bill to an insurance company:

  To attend to your attorney’s instruction to conduct certain inquiries in this matter, including the corruption of several members of the Police Force and obtaining printouts relating to the man’s criminal form, then drinking with them for long periods, and reporting as attached: Hours, many, but say four at A$25=A$100

  Most contemporary scandals have concerned the police. In Sydney they speak cynically of ‘the police culture’, implying a general rottenness of morality. We are told standards have improved, but when an eminent villain was recently asked about the prevalence of organized crime in the city, he mentioned six conspiratorial groups – two Australian brotherhoods, one Lebanese, two Chinese Triads and the New South Wales police. Certainly in the 1920s the police were blatantly in cahoots with the crime syndicates, and even in 1950, when the Superintendent of the Metropolitan Police retired he was given a banquet by 300 underworld leaders, together with a generous cheque.

  I have seldom been in this city when a Royal Commission of Inquiry has not been investigating some rort or other. The very first such inquisition was mounted by Commissioner John Bigge, who was sent out from England in 1819 to investigate the alleged extravagances of Governor Macquarie, and who by a combination of nitpicking and cheeseparing succeeded in squashing Macquarie’s plans for the shape of Sydney.1 Since then Royal Commissions have inquired into every subspecies of public misdemeanour, and during my research for this book one was looking into the matter of Harry the Hat, a senior police officer accused by his own force, with maximum publicity, of having raped eight women over a twenty-five-year period of his career. The charges were later dropped. The inquiry into this odd affair was quite odd enough itself. Processions of poker-faced policemen appeared one after the other in the witness box, dressed for the occasion in high tight collars and business suits; the presiding judge looked remarkably sceptical throughout; a number of fearfully expensive barristers cross-examined; and in the front of the court, accompanied by his wife and sometimes putting his feet up for comfort on a chair in front of him, sat bespectacled and balding the man at the centre of the case, so recently accused by his own colleagues of having been a sexual monster. He was exonerated absolutely, and his character was agreed to be so irreproachable that according to the Sydney wags it made Mother Teresa look like a sex-maniac. On the other hand the police operation against him was characterized as incompetent, gross, slipshod and deceitful

  But then twenty years before, as a Deputy Police Commissioner blandly deposed, looking on the bright side I suppose, Harry the Hat, secure within the closed ranks of the police culture, would not have been charged if he had been a rapist.

  *

  It is only to be expected that Sydney should be especially interested n matters of crime and punishment. They dominate whole pages of the newspapers, they crop up frequently in conversation and their monuments are intrusive. One of the best-known buildings in Sydney is the old George Street police station, scene of many an ancient misery, which is now a café but is still surmounted by a lion holding a policeman’s truncheon in its jaws. The National Art School is housed in the former Darlinghurst gaol, upon whose façade the very same lion is holding a key; classes are held where the cells once were, and the gallows yard houses a toilet block. The best-known of the modern Sydney prisons, Long Bay, is as familiar in idiom, in joke, in simile and in allusion as it is in grim silhouette on the road to La Perouse, if only because a surprisingly large number of Sydneysiders have had some family connection with it: as the art historian Joan Kerr wrote dryly in 1986, it is ‘the architectural monument most commonly identified as the ultimate destination after reaching Sydney’s social pinnacles’.1 Here, as in Britain, imprisonment is still a favoured punishment for misdemeanours of all kinds; as I write one New South Wales citizen in every 1,500 is in gaol, and they are busily building 1,500 more cells, and planning several new prisons to cope with future demand.

  For most of Sydney’s original citizens, of course, crime was a natural way of life. The Newgate pickpockets of the 1780s did not lose their cunning when they came to Australia, but enthusiastically stole from their comrades, from their gaolers and from the Aborigines. Ralph Clark, having started a vegetable garden on his eponymous island in the harbour, found that no sooner did his vegetables start to grow than somebody stole them. Brick houses were conveniently easy to break and enter – householders of early Sydney often awoke to find a hole picked in the wall during the night – and when Governor Gipps moved into his new Government House in 1845 some of his silver was nicked on the way. Dead-end streets became so uncomfortably connected in the Sydney mind with thievery that well into the twentieth century town planners were reluctant to sanction them.

  For years the city’
s natural instincts, like my own, were with the criminal rather than the gaoler. Sydney’s first public heroes were the bushrangers, convicts or adventurers gone feral and living by their wits as highwaymen. They had bold names – ‘Captain Thunderbolt’, ‘Bold Jack’, ‘Mad-Dog Morgan’ – and robbers and murderers though they were, and often anything but romantic, they were seen as popular champions of liberty, expressing in their lives many a pent-up grudge, and many a yearning for wider horizons. It would be hard for any poor convict of spirit, permanently ill-treated by destiny, to resist the appeal of the bushranger ballads:

  Some dark night when everything is silent in the town,

  I’ll kill the tyrants one and all, and shoot the floggers down.

  I’ll give the Law a little shock; remember what I say –

  They’ll yet regret they sent Jim Jones in chains to Botany Bay.

  or:

  Comes all my hearties, we’ll roam the mountains high,

  Together we’ll plunder, together we’ll die.