30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account

by Peter Carey

  Don't laugh, you bastard.

  There was nothing malicious about Jack's laughter but as he threaded a squid on to the hook of his handline it was obvious just how relieved he was.

  Anyway, he said, we'll get a kingfish.

  He stood, balancing easily, and cast out a good fifteen yards to where the slick of tuna oil had not yet reached.

  You could talk to Kelvin and Sheridan. Those fellows are always getting into strife. They'll tell you stories.

  It's not the strife I'm interested in. The strife is just a way to show how the city is elemental.

  Earth is an element, he said, seating himself on the aft thwart.

  I know.

  A friend of mine, Peter Myers, an architect, has written a wonderful paper called The Three Cities of Sydney. In fact he's going to deliver it this week at the university, and you really must hear him. He'll be happy to talk to you, I know he will.

  I listened glumly. A university lecture was no replacement for a life-or-death struggle with the elements.

  You knew the first settlers could find no limestone in Sydney, Jack said (and I was reminded, not for the first time, that he had been a famous teacher of architecture). And they needed lime if they were to make mortar.

  They burned shells, I said resignedly. I know.

  Yes, the first settlers extracted the lime for the mortar from shells. But what you might not know is that in 1788, when white people arrived, there were middens of shells twelve metres tall on Bennelong Point.

  Where the opera house is.

  Where the opera house is, exactly. Where Fort Macquarie was before that. So Bennelong Point was obviously the site of the first city of Sydney, and what an ancient city it was, do you see? There was a complex, very religious civilisation here when there were still Neanderthals alive in Europe, before the ice age ended and the oceans rose. This is the site of the most ancient civilisation on earth, but of course no one could see that in 1788. The convicts cannibalised the ancient city to make the colonial city. So the ancient city is still there, sandwiched between the bricks -baked earth - which contain, in turn, the thumbprints of the men who made them. Twelve metres tall, Peter, can you imagine how many hundreds of thousands of wonderful feasts there were?

  CHAPTER SIX

  AT ABOUT THE TIME I hooked into my first ever kingfish, the English editor of Granta magazine was putting his 'Australia' edition to bed. In Hanover Yard, London, he wrote: Colonial history has nothing to be proud of here, but, considering Aborigines as a demographic statistic, the prominence of shame and intrigue about them . . . among the Australian intelligentsia is a remarkable thing.

  Returning home I had been struck by the same thing. It seems obvious and yet it is not so simple an issue to grasp. If you look at it and see simple white liberal guilt you will be misreading the political landscape as confidently as the Europeans misread the physical land of 1788.

  When I talked about the issue to Jayme Koszyn of the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, she asked me, how many Aboriginal people do you actually know?

  One.

  One?

  There were only 700,000 Aboriginals living off this country when white people first arrived. Today there are 400,000 (in a population of 18 million) but you can live and die a white Sydneysider and never meet an Aboriginal. And yet we are obsessed, have always been obsessed, with the original inhabitants, even while we anticipated their passing, while we labelled them 'doomed', stole their land and children too.

  Thinking to find an exact measure of this obsession, I searched through the Stanley Gibbons stamp catalogues in the New York public library. It was in its postage stamps, I figured, that a country represented itself to the world and my recollection of my childhood stamp album was that Australian postage stamps had been filled with Aboriginal portraits and motifs.

  In the library I discovered that the 1930 two-penny stamp was exactly as I remembered it - the hunting Aboriginal. I also had picture-perfect recall of the two-shilling crocodile of 1939 and the Aboriginal of 1946. But that was it. What I had remembered was all there was to know. In all the years from Federation until 1955 there were no other depictions of indigenous people. There were many, many of George VI, Princess Elizabeth, Queen Elizabeth, Captain Cook, Matthew Flinders; there were dukes and duchesses and the Melbourne Cup - in short a portrait of a self-doubting corner of the British Empire.

  You would think, to look at these stamps, not that we were obsessed, but we were forgetful of the facts. The Romans celebrated the barbarians they led away in chains, but not my ancestors.

  As Kelvin had said so passionately, we had fought a war of occupation, at the same time pretending that the land was not used, barely inhabited.

  Yet even the most racist amongst us must grant the Aboriginals intimate knowledge of this hostile land, and that is where they gain their author-ity in our imagination.

  They knew how to live off this land, and we did not, and still do not. In report after report the first settlers described the fertility of the soils. (I find myself surrounded, wrote Francis Grosse, with gardens that flourish and produce fruit of every description.) This was madness. The soil was ancient, leached, sterile. When they saw parks, which they described repeatedly, they were seeing what they wished to see, a mirage of the deep soils that the ice age had bestowed on Europe. Here there had been no glaciers to grind the rock to soil, and if there were only 700,000 people inhabiting the entire continent, it was because that was what the continent could sustain.

  The term El Niño was not in the vocabulary of Governor Phillip when he set his motley crew ashore, but the meteorological pattern it labels had been in force for thousands of years and the land was subject then, as it is now, to erratic swings of weather, droughts, floods. It did not matter how you rendered it in oils, or how optimistically you described it in your letters home, this was not Europe, or America for that matter.

  The truth is that Sydney Cove was only fit for blackfellows, or only blackfellows were fit for Sydney Cove. They did not need a ship to provision them, and if no ships had come from England for another 50,000 years a lot more of them would have survived.

  Our white ancestors, by contrast, were left unprovisioned for just two years, and in that time their crops failed and then they lived with the terror of starvation. This story has been often told, and yet I wonder if we give full weight to the trauma of those years. The fact that there is no Thanksgiving in Australian culture is no small thing.

  Many a guard, wrote Watkin Tench, have I seen mount in which the soldiers without shoes exceeded that which had yet preserved remnants of leather.

  Nor, he continued, was another part of our domestic economy less whimsical. If a lucky man who had knocked down a dinner with his gun, or caught a fish by angling from the rocks, invited a neighbour to dine with him, the invitation always ran, 'Bring your own bread.' Even at the governor's table this custom was constantly observed. Every man when he sat down pulled his bread out of his pocket and laid it by his plate.

  The insufficiency of our ration soon diminished our execution of labour. Both soldiers and convicts pleaded such a loss of strength as to find themselves unable to perform their accustomed tasks. The hours of public work were accordingly strengthened or, rather, every man was ordered to do as much as his strength would permit . . .

  While Tench fretted, the indigenous people ate possum and snake and feasted on bunya seeds and a huge variety of wild food which the invaders would not touch to save their very lives. They did not learn either. A century later the explorer Burke died of starvation in a landscape where healthy families of Aboriginals were going about their daily business.

  It is not romantic or wishful to say that the Aboriginal people made their religion from this earth and its conservation. Their stories grew from the land and were laced through the land and provided detailed instructions for the care of the land. Yet we know that, even when these stories are told to us, we are getting The Dummies' Guide. This is the condit
ion of being a non-indigenous Australian; to know the land itself is like the index to a bible which we cannot read.

  This then puts those who can read the stories in the role of priests and that is unbearably sentimental to outsiders (and many insiders too) but may further illuminate Granta's opinion that Aboriginals provided 'an unpunishing version of Catholicism; the sacred suppliers of art, mystery, tourism, identity and guilt'.

  There is another complication in the imagined dialogue between Us and Them. White Australia still has a strongly underdog culture, one that grew directly out of the experiences of transportation, exile. So even if the convicts raped and murdered blacks (which they certainly did) they also left for succeeding white generations a keen nose for injustice.

  The peculiar history of Sydney has left us with two sets of underdogs in the cultural dynamic. Judging our ancestors' behaviour with our ancestors' values, we find their behaviour abhorrent.

  And if Jack and Sheridan and Kelvinator will, at every turn, consider where the Aboriginals walked, fished, burned, this is not simply romantic or even guilty talk, just white men finally learning about the country that they love.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  UNRULY KELVIN DRAGGED THE chart away from his friend Lester and carried it to the table by the pool. The map showed the east coast of Australia and Lester's extraordinarily neat recording of their yacht's progress through the murderous seas of the 1998 Sydney-Hobart race.

  We followed the rhumb line, said Kelvinator.

  No we bloody didn't, said Lester. The rhumb line, he explained to me, is the direct line from Sydney to Hobart, and that's where the flat-out racers go, in the shallow water by the coast. It's called rock-hopping.

  Kelvin peered belligerently at the chart. I thought we followed the rhumb line, he said. But he stood back now and allowed his friend to control the map.

  Jesus, Kelvin, where were you?

  On deck, Kelvin snorted, when I had to be. He uncorked a second bottle of Pinot Noir and filled our glasses.

  Lester had come straight from his office in a dark Italian suit. It was hard to imagine him on any deck, but now he retrieved his chart and carefully placed his brimming wine glass to one side in order that he might unfold it to its full extent for me. His finger traced the grid of small neat numerals that I had always seen on charts but never understood.

  These numbers represent fathoms, he said. A fathom is six feet. So you can see that the leaders in the '98 race hit the storm in three or four hundred feet of water while we were further east in fifteen thousand feet. That was my choice. I had been to the weather briefing the day before Christmas and what I saw there disturbed me.

  The meteorological briefing took place on a hot bright Sydney morning. The water in Rushcutters Bay was mirror smooth, Force Zero on the Beaufort scale. The Cruising Yacht Club was chock-a-block. This is one of the rules of the race - the skipper and the navigator must attend the meteorological briefing which was given, in this case, by a certain Kenneth Blatt.

  The clown was wearing a Santa Claus hat, Kelvin interrupted.

  Yeah, well, that was sort of OK at the time but later the hat did make me angry.

  No, Kelvin said, at the time too.

  Lester hesitated. I was uneasy, yes, he admitted. Of course I had no clue of what was going to happen, but there was too much macho ho-hoing to my taste. Ken Blatt put on his red hat and his white pompom and said he'd run the various weather data through three or four different weather models and none of them could give him a coinciding view of what the weather systems were likely to be. So what he told us, in this jokey way, was . . . you're going to get hit by something somewhere.

  To be fair, that's normal for the Hobart, said Kelvin.

  To be fair, said Lester, five yachts sank, six men died.

  Lester and Kelvin and eight other friends sailed from Neutral Bay at one pm on December 26 1998. It was not their boat. They were along as crew on Gordon Cameron's White Lie 2.

  It was Saturday, a bright perfect summer's day in Sydney Harbour, and as White Lie 2 made its way out towards the Heads there was information available in Hobart that showed a deepening low-pressure system 600 miles away in Bass Strait. They were all on deck here, even Lester who would soon retire to the navigation table where he would remain wedged for the next thirty-six hours.

  We were about third last out the Heads, Kelvin laughed. You have a little spit when you come out the Heads. That's the custom.

  He means a vomit.

  Every time I've done it, said Kelvinator, I've had a spit but never again after that.

  I've never had a spit, says Lester. Never. But I've seen Kelvinator eat half a plate of lamb navarin, throw it up, then finish the second half.

  Only way.

  It's nerves, says Kelvinator, not sea sickness. In 1998 there was a fair-sized swell, but it was nothing like the year before. Just on nightfall we had this ROLLING weather coming in on us in a straight line. In the middle of the night, there are about five of us around the sink, all vomiting in the dark. But it was just tension. You know there's at least a fifty per cent chance you're going to get clobbered. But you're really excited and all of us, except Lester who has gone downstairs to sharpen his pencils, are on deck. This is a great time in any race. You've had your spit and it's just fabulous. You forget you are married. You forget you've got to fire your office manager and your shares are down the toilet. But about three or four hours out, the watch kicks in and now you get serious because you know you've got to race the boat. The wind is twenty-five knots. At this stage, with the spinnaker up, it is incredibly fast. It's the sort of sail you live for.

  By eight o'clock, says Lester, we had travelled sixty-five miles and were due east of Nowra with the wind still behind us. That was when we got the first storm warning. Winds of forty-five to fifty knots south of Merimbula.

  Merimbula, said Kelvin, is, comparatively speaking, sheltered. And you think, oh shit, if it's like that in Merimbula what will it be like when you poke your nose around the corner into Bass Strait? Now it's clear, we're definitely going to get clobbered, but what can we do? Turn around? Go home and say, ah, sorry, it was going to get rough? No, you're stuck like a train on rails. You're not only stuck, you're committed, you're CHARGING towards it flat out. And, Peter, honestly, the conditions were perfect. By nightfall we were as far as Jervis Bay, that's eighty miles in just eight hours, pretty good for a big heavy boat.

  We took the spinnaker down before it got dark, said Lester.

  Other crews might have been able to deal with a spinnaker in the night but it's fair to say, said Kelvinator, that we're more cautious. Some of these other boats, they train all year, the crew sleep out on the rails. But we're amateurs. We haven't done a lot of racing at night with spinnakers on.

  If you get hit by a line squall . . .

  It wraps around your mast.

  Yendys had trouble with its spinnaker that night. They were bringing it down in thirty-eight knots.

  Yeah, it broached, rolled on its side. These guys are pros but they lost their bowman off the side without a life jacket.

  He wasn't hooked on. He . . .

  Got washed clear off the boat and then a big wave dumped him back on the deck.

  That was a lucky bugger.

  That was a very lucky bugger.

  That first night out, as White Lie 2 hurtled down the coast, the crew worked their shifts but now Lester knew there was a storm ahead he would not leave the desk. He may have been one of the few navigators in the race who kept his radio on all the time.

  I'm a control freak, said Lester proudly, wobbling his head as he always does when he speaks well about himself.

  The one thing I don't like about sailing, said Kelvin, is going into the night. Going into the night with a storm coming is really a gut-churner because if you're going to die, you'd really like to die in the light. There's a whole lot of noise in the night, creaking stuff, and most of it is to do with stress, on wire . . .

  A l
ittle boat will hurt you but a big boat will kill you. There are wires that can snap, spinnaker poles that can spear you right through the chest . . .

  While White Lie 2 carried my friends through Saturday night and the early hours of Sunday morning, a cool pool of air in Bass Strait was deepening into a low-pressure system. At first it was moving eastwards but then it slowed down and was cut off from the high winds that might have sent it safely on its way.

  At three in the morning there was a sked, says Lester. That means that the navigator of every boat calls in his or her position, and they give us a forecast. There are two of these a day and they take an hour or more to get through every boat.

  If the forecast had been a fish, said Kelvin, you would know enough never to eat it.

  Well we didn't know that then, said Lester, but the forecast they gave us at three in the morning had been issued at nine o'clock the night before. What was forming ahead of us was actually a cyclone.

  They don't call it a cyclone in these waters.

  They call it a fucking storm.

  At four in the morning of the second day, while we were off Narooma and Montague Island, it was snowing in Victoria. In midsummer. We had no idea.

  By now the leaders were starting to get the serious weather from west-south-west. They still didn't know the extent of it, but we were in the lee of the mainland.

  By the middle of the morning the low-pressure system was starting to pass directly over the racetrack and these terrifying winds and seas hit the shallows of Bass Strait. What you've got here is swirling cold eddy colliding with the warm East Coast current. This is horrendous - the waves collide and whip up Bass Strait until it feels like you're in a washing machine in hell.

  I'd only been on Bass Strait once before, says Lester, and that was on a freebie on the QE2 in 1986. And we had a Force 10 storm. The QE2 had to throttle back from about thirty knots to twenty-five and I thought to myself . . . Fuck. You would not want to be in a yacht in this sort of stuff. I went out on to the wing of the bridge deck in a pair of light cotton pants and the wind was blowing the hems of my pants so hard that it stripped all of the stitching out and the hems of my pants just dropped down. It was fucking horrible, but the wind that we were heading into was worse than that. Force 11.