by Jan Morris
*
It ought to be a simple city to write about. Started from scratch in modern times, developed according to elemental economic principles, well-documented throughout its history and almost untouched by war, Sydney should offer its chroniclers a straightforward task. It does not seem an introspective place. It is frank about most matters. Its icons are there for all to see, and it has never been over-burdened with spirituality. Sydney, one might suppose, is Sydney is Sydney.
Yet the effect of this city upon its visitors is far from simple, and strangely fluctuates. Sydney is about the same age and size as San Francisco, but it inspires a far wider range of reactions. Hardly anybody hates San Francisco, but plenty of people hate Sydney. Once you have evolved a view on San Francisco you are likely to stick with it, but in my own experience one’s responses to Sydney shift from decade to decade, day to day, even moment to moment. The citizens of Sydney are themselves ambivalent about it, and combine pride with doubt, assertion with apology. The only constant of all Sydney opinion, the one leitmotiv of writing about this city since the very beginning of its history, is the beauty of the harbour. It is as though Sydneysiders feel the harbour to be their one unassailable satisfaction. Every single Sydney man and every single Sydney woman, Trollope reported in 1873, asked him if he did not find the harbour ‘rather pretty’, and in a cartoon of half-a-century later Sydney is stuck all over with posters screaming ‘You Should See Our Harbour’, ‘Have You Seen Our Harbour?’, ‘How Do You Like Our Harbour?’, ‘What Do You Think Of Our Harbour?’, ‘Have You Ever Seen Anything Finer Than Our Harbour?’ It is extraordinary still how often Sydney people comment upon their harbour’s beauty: and perhaps by now it is a matter of self-protective convention, like the British conversational obsession with the weather.
*
For I dare say a latent uncertainty gives this often boisterous city its oddly dappled character. The civic motto is a gnomic one – ‘I Take but I Surrender’ – and the destiny of the city is equally unclear. Dazzling though Sydney can be, it has always stood on the fringes of history – repeatedly spurned by history, I sometimes think. There was a time when it possessed real power, at least in theory. Its early Governors were granted, by their royal commissions, hypothetical authority over more than half of what is now Australia, and ‘all the Isles adjacent’.1 It was from Sydney that Norfolk Island and Tasmania were originally governed, that the first European expansionists burst into the Australian interior, that Matthew Flinders sailed to circumnavigate the continent, that the colony of Port Essington was established on the Cobourg Peninsula at the other end of Australia.2 Then for years Sydney was the capital of an imperial province, subject only to London; New South Wales was virtually a nation, with its own armed forces, fiscal policies, postage stamps and currency. Even Melbourne was subject to Sydney until 1851, and when the Commonwealth of Australia was brought into being in 1901, it was in Sydney that the delegates from the six colonies sealed the agreement – a memorial in Centennial Park remembers the event.
Little by little this consequence was reduced, and the vast authority of the early Governors shrivelled. Tasmania and Norfolk Island went first. Port Essington was transferred to the new colony of South Australia. Melbourne was lost when Victoria was separated from New South Wales. It was Melbourne, not Sydney, that became the first capital of the Australian Commonwealth, and Canberra that was eventually chosen to be its permanent seat of Government. Sydney has been left feeling rather high and dry, like a metropolis of its own disbanded Empire.
Indeed it stands to its remaining dependency, the State of New South Wales, much as Vienna stands to Austria. It is too big for itself. It frequently lives beyond its means, and especially in the flashier things of life, aspires beyond its station. Perhaps this too contributes to Sydney’s feeling of diffidence, anomalous in so brave a city. On the one hand when most people think of Australia, they think first of Sydney and its images, and many of Australia’s national institutions are based here, from the Arts Council to the secret service. On the other hand Sydney is really nothing but a provincial capital, the equal of Perth, Adelaide, Hobart or Brisbane. The city looks out tentatively to the world at large, as though it is not sure of its status. Where does it stand in the order of things? Is it really world-class? Better perhaps to content itself with easier comparisons – livelier than Melbourne, brighter than Adelaide, the richest in the southern hemisphere, or even, as statistics sometimes solemnly suggest, the biggest in New South Wales. Better still to content itself with itself. There is remarkably little news about the rest of Australia in Sydney’s newspapers, the Commonwealth flag flies rarely here, and even the old competition with Melbourne, which used to be real and vicious, seems to have subsided now into a kind of half-humorous convention, like the rivalry between Harvard and Yale, or calling the House of Lords ‘the other place’.1
*
But what mere provincial capital ever aroused such passions and speculations? The vast momentum of the world proceeds far away from Sydney. Ideologies triumph or are discredited. The balance of the continents shifts. Yet it is still possible to wonder if it is here that a New Man may emerge. The peculiarity of the place, its originality of style and history, the fact that the new moon lies the wrong way round in the old moon’s arms, as it rises pale over Barrenjoey – all these help to place Sydney beyond the usual category of cities. Its glittery image, propagated so jubilantly, does not do justice to the place. It is an image far too explicit. Tower Bridge may emblemize London, the Eiffel Tower says the right things about Paris, but the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge do not begin to epitomize the true sensations of Sydney, which seem to me tantalizingly ambivalent.
We think of it as a young city, but it is not so young really. Many a great city is younger – Toronto, Chicago, Hong Kong, Singapore, Washington, Johannesburg. Sydney, though, feels young: if not young physically, young in an abstract way, as though the generations succeeded each other extra quickly here. There is something fugitive to the fascination of the place. Charles Causley, who responded with such affection to the natural generosity of Sydney, felt this elusive quality too, beginning and ending his poem, not so many years after his visit with HMS Glory, with a gentle hint of it:
Now it seems an old forgotten fable:
The snow-goose descending on the still lagoon,
The trees of summer flowering ice and fire
And the sun coming up on the Blue Mountains.
An old forgotten fable – not the metaphor one expects of so splendid and apparently confident a city. ‘Sydney,’ I wrote myself when I was young, ‘is not one of your absolute cities.’ I was looking perhaps for the black-and-white, sharp-edged resolution that usually characterizes showy young towns of ambition, and all I found instead, I thought, was aloofness and introspection.
Sydney is still not your absolute city, but what seemed to me so long ago an affront to my sensibilities now seems a seduction – a kind of divine opacity, making me feel that perhaps the city was God-given after all.
*
I began this book with a harbour prospect on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Let me end with an evening stroll after the opera. Violetta, being a particularly robust specimen of local talent, has not unexpectedly recovered from her decline in time to take several rousing curtain calls. The lady in the next seat has remarked to nobody in particular well, thank goodness it could never happen in this day and age. We leave the great building euphorically, entranced into the Sydney evening.
There is something phosphorescent about Sydney Opera House. It glows almost merrily in the daytime, with the sun on its flying wings, and it glows refulgently at night. Walking now out of its foyer on to the wide terrace is like emerging into a holograph, so that we feel we are being absorbed into the light itself. Beyond this lustre there is a panoply of lesser lights – moving lights of ships, towering lights of waterfront skyscrapers, beacon lights, lights of oyster bars, coffee shops, restaurants, fairy lights glittering all over a tr
ee at the foot of the Domain. High above is the hump of the Coathanger, with its stream of cars hurrying over it, and on the highest point of its arch the two jaunty flags are floodlit in the breeze – surely the proudest flags in the world.
But we will find ourselves some secluded harbour spot, above a little-used pier perhaps, where all those bright lights are far away, the rumble of the traffic is almost silent, the great city around us seems astonishingly remote, and a more ambiguous magic settles on the scene. The evening is warm, with a scent of night-flowers somewhere. Very likely there is a flash of torchlight from the jetty. A couple of men are fishing with lines down there, and we hear snatches of an unidentifiable language – Indonesian, perhaps, or Thai. When the torch goes out only the ember of a cigarette remains, looking rather like a wavering firefly, and in the voluptuousness of the moment we may be surprised to find ourselves feeling a little sad. Why, I wonder? The harbour is all at peace, the city is one of the world’s happiest, those fishermen are delighted to be there, the recession is officially said to be past its worst, the bridge is strong, the Opera House is lovely, the flags are fine, Violetta is even now enjoying a hearty turf’n’-surf with Alfredo. Yet at such moments as this, in the velvet sensual darkness on the harbour shore in Sydney, I sometimes feel myself haunted by a sense of loss, as though time is passing too fast, and frail black people are watching me out of the night somewhere, leaning on their spears.
*
1 Australia was never annexed as an imperial entity, but when in 1840 a French official asked the Colonial Secretary, Lord John Russell, how much of it was British, ‘I answered him “the whole”, and with that answer he went away.’
2 An unsuccessful settlement whose forlorn ruins poignantly suggest to me how Sydney might look, if Phillip had not seen it through its first cruel years: deserted stands the little Government House on its eminence above the sea, the quay below is crumbled, tangled foliage covers brickworks, sawmills, sergeants’ mess and all, and one of the tombstones in the cemetery says simply: SACREAD TO THE MEMOERY OF THE DR OF THE SETTLEMENT.
1 My favourite sally in this battle of badinage was made by James Fitzpatrick, who once said that Melbourne was a work of art, like the two-minutes’ silence. But then somebody once said ‘In the midst of life we are in Perth.’
THANKS
COUNTLESS KIND SYDNEY PEOPLE HELPED ME TO WRITE THIS book about their city, and I thank them one and all. I am especially grateful to a number of friends and colleagues who honoured me by reading the book in typescript, in part or even most generously in whole, saving me from many errors and offering me many new perspectives: they include Rowena Danziger, James Hall, Ian Hicks and Anthony McGrath, and I hope they will not think this final version has let them down.
I have acknowledged in my footnotes the books I am chiefly indebted to, but I must mention here two famous essays about Sydney that I especially admire: the final chapter of J. D. Pringle’s Australian Accent, London 1958, and Gavin Souter’s Sydney Observed, Sydney 1968 – both illustrated, as it happens, by my oldest friend in the city, George Molnar.
Finally, my warm thanks to Charles Causley, whose poem HMS Glory at Sydney has provided a melodic line for my book.
Trefan Morys, 1991
INDEX
Aborigines, 1 adaptability, 1
adapting to settlers, 1
art, 1
black revival movement, 1
Circular Quay camp, 1
community at La Perouse, 1, 2
convicts despise, 1
debasement of, 1
decline of, 1
drinking habits, 1
evangelization, 1
first settlers, and, 1
Government policy towards, 1
living standards, 1
popular view of, 1, 2, 3
pride in origins, 1
Redfern area, 1, 2
settlements, 1
treatment of, 1
Abraham, Esther, 1
Adams, Francis, 1
Admiralty House, 1
agricultural trade, 1
Akuna Bay, 1
Allen, George, 1
Alt, Augustus, 1
Amotic Machine, 1
Anderson, Charles, 1
Anderson, John, 1
Anzac Memorial, 1, 2
Anzus Defence Treaty, 1
Appian Way, 1
architecture, Anglo-Indian style, 1
bungalows, 1
city plan, original, 1
early, 1
inner subnrban, 1
modern, 1, 2, 3, 4
1930s, 1
19th century, 1
outer suburban, 1
post-war planning, 1
preservation of old properties, 1
slums, 1
survivals from the past, 1
Sydney Cove, 1
Town Hall area, 1
Argyle Place, 1, 2
Ashton, Julian, 1
Askin, Sir Robert, 1
Australia, commonwealth of, 1, 2
Australian Museum, 1
Baha’i Temple, 1
Balcombe, William, 1
Balmain, 1, 2
Balmoral, 1
Banks, Joseph, 1, 2
Barnes, Chika, 1
Barnet, James, 1, 2
Barrenjoey, 1
Barrington, George, 1n.
Bathurst, 1 gold fields, 1
beach culture, 1
Becke, Louis, 1
Beiren, Baron Carl von, 1
Bennelong, 1, 2
Bennelong Point, 1
Bernhardt, Sarah, 1
bicentennial celebrations, 1
Bigge, Commissioner John, 1
Bland, William, 1
Bligh, William, 1, 2, 3
Blore, Edward, 1
Blue, Billy, 1
Blue Mountains, 1, 2 first crossing, 1
mining, 1
roads built, 1
Boake, Barcroft, 1
Bondi, 1, 2 bcach, 1
Boswell, James, 1n.
Botany Bay, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Barons, 1
Boyd, Benjamin, 1
Boyd, Robin, 1
Bradfield, J. J. C., 1
Bradley, Rear-Admiral William, 1, 2 and n.
Bradley’s Head, 1, 2
Bradman, Don, 1
Brandt, Dr, 1
bridge, see Harboor Bridge
Brisbane, Admiral Sir James, 1
British ties, Anglophobia, 1
army regiments, 1, 2
class structure, 1, 2
early administrators, 1
imperial pride, 1, 2
loss of, 1
Royal navy, 1, 2
surviving vestiges, 1
trade connections, 1
Brogan, Denis, 1
Broughton, William, Bishop of Sydney, 1
Bryant, William and Mary, 1
Buckley, Vincent, 1
buildings, see architecture
Bulletin, 1
Braigaree, 1, 2
Burwood, 1
bush, 1
bushrangers, 1
buskers, 1
Byrne, J. C., 1
Cabramatta, 1
Caesar, Black, 1
Campbell, Robert, 1
Canberra, 1
Canterbury race-course, 1
Captain Cook (pilot cutters), 1
Cardus, Neville, 1
Carter, Henry, 1
Castlecrag, 1
Casula, 1
Causley Charles, 1, 2, 3, 4
Central Business District (CBD), 1
Central Europeans, 1
character of people, 1, 2, 3 masculinity, 1
Chicago, U.S.S., 1 and n.
Chidley, William James, 1
Chinese community, 1
Chippendale, 1
Church of England Grammar School, 1
Circular Quay, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 Aborigine camp, 1
piers, 1n.
Civic administration, 1
civic
pride, 1
Clark, Lt Ralph, 1, 2
class distinctions, 1 élite society, 1
fashionable areas, 1
intelligentsia, 1
‘mateship’‚ 1
merging of classes, 1
middle class, 1
Ockers, 1
proletariat, 1
wealthy women, 1
Clifton Gardens, 1
climate, 1, 2, 3
Clonard, Sotton de, 1
coal mining, 1
Collins, David, 1
Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur, 1n.
Conrad, Joseph, 1n.
Conservatorium of Music‚ 1
convicts, see transportation
Cook, Lt (later Captain) James, 1, 2
cricket, 1
crime and corruption, 1
Culotta, Nino (John O’Grady), 1
cultural Sydney, 1
Cunningham, Peter, 1
Cutler, Sir Arthur Roden, VC, 1
Cutty Sark (wool clipper), 1
Daceyville, 1
Daley, James, 1
d’Alpuget, Blanche, 1
Darling, Ralph, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Darling Harbour, 1, 2, 3, 4
Darlinghurst, 1
Darwin, Charles, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Darwin, Erasmus, 1
Davies, Michael, 1
Davies, Richard, 1
Davis, William, 1
Dawes, Lt William, 1, 2
de Groot, Francis, 1n.
Dee Why, 1
Dellitt, C. Brace, 1
