by Clive James
Almost, but not quite. More by luck than judgment, Circular Quay kept some of its character, and while I have been away has even increased in interest, due to the effects of an unequivocally positive addition to Sydney’s life – immigration. The cosmopolitan, or ethnic, influence on Sydney first of all becomes visible when you notice the amount and kind of fast foods on offer. At the Circular Quay milk bars, where once the most you could hope for in the way of take-away food was a lethal meat pie and a cream bun, you can now take your pick from kateifi, baklava, syrup rolls, honey and almond triangles, Turkish delight and fruit slices. One of the indisputably beneficial European influences – food – has been added to one of the most enduring Australian traditions – the milk-shake. And, as long as you are content to drink your milk-shake on or near the premises, it is still possible to have it prepared as it should be, in a dented silver container battered around the rim from being clipped a million times into the mixing machine.
The completed milk-shake should never be tipped into a glass, but consumed direct from the container, either through a paper straw (with a resonant slurp to mop up the frothy dregs) or by applying the loose mouth to the cold metal and tilting until the blob of ice-cream collides with the top lip. The conflict involved in choosing between these two methods almost always necessitates the purchase of a second milk-shake. While drinking it and eating your pastries, you can lean over the railings between the wharves and watch the sprats feeding underwater around the pilings. At such moments, Sydney offers a petite bonheur comparable to anything obtainable in, say, Paris, where there is seldom anywhere comfortable to eat your crêpes, no matter how delicious the chocolate sauce. Stay on, or near, the water and Sydney’s version of the Little Happiness can be very near to Heaven.
When Australians talk about Culture they seldom mean honey and almond triangles. Perhaps they ought to, though. It’s in the ordinary facts of everyday life that culture is to be measured – which is why Edna Everage reigns supreme as Australia’s greatest cultural commentator, the Raymond Williams of the South Pacific. Australians talk in the one breath about the giant strides made in wine and poetry, but the awkward truth is that while the advance made in Australian wine is beyond dispute, to claim an advance in Australian poetry is largely meaningless. In the minutiae of existence Australia has changed in all sorts of ways since I left home. But in the large abstractions it seems to me to have stayed roughly as it was.
Turn back from leaning over the rails at the Quay and you are looking at Sydney’s answer to Manhattan. The tallest building in Sydney when I left is now one of the shortest in the skyline. Photographs of this upsurge had disturbed me in exile but brought up against it I was less impressed. Some of the straining shapes on view are at least original, but even those are usually hideous, and on the whole I’m afraid the vaunted progress of Sydney’s business architecture (‘Ar, Sydney’s coming on,’ my old friends have been telling me for years: ‘Ya wooden wreckingnise it’) bears out the Italian proverb about fifty skyscrapers screwing a city. To the extent that the tall buildings have created space around their podiums they represent what Raymond Williams (the Edna Everage of the North Atlantic) would call a Clear Gain. But on the whole, the city’s human scale has been destroyed for the sake of physically reflecting an exultation which was always more like arrogance than self-confidence and which was already fading before Whitlam toppled. Large areas of office-space in the new towers are still for rent and will for a long time stay as empty as Centrepoint in London or the Trade Center in New York.
Such conspicuous waste represents the self-destructive element in the burgeoning national consciousness. There is a creative element too, but it works within a more modest range. The care with which the Rocks area of Sydney has been preserved is a good example of the creative element in action.
By now the awareness that there are things to be cherished is widespread, like a taste for wine, which is no longer restricted to the travelled minority. (Nor, of course, is travel.) The wine buff can order his tipple at 30 dollars a dozen before the grapes are picked, with right of refusal at the first tasting: it’s like putting your son down for Eton. But even the uninstructed are not likely to pass the stuff up when flagon wine at least as good as what goes into the carafes in a restaurant in Italy works out at 20 cents a bottle. In other words, it’s free.
It’s in these things – in food and drink and places to be and ways to behave – that Australia has come on since my time. But in more grandiose matters – matters where national consciousness is really self-consciousness – the results are more equivocal. Culture with a small c is doing all right. Culture with a capital C has lost its erstwhile diffidence, but in many instances seems to have replaced it with a bombast equally parochial. The Sydney Opera House is a case in point. The case in point, because in daring to suggest that there is something wrong with the Opera House, you run the risk of appearing to deny the whole country its right to an identity – a slur not easily forgiven.
Back in England and safe from physical reprisal, it now seems possible to say aloud what I scarcely dared breathe in Australia, even to my relations: that the Opera House is a dud. In the matter of its appearance I have no very strong opinion. To me it looks like a portable typewriter full of oyster shells, and to the contention that it echoes the sails of yachts on the harbour I can only point out that the yachts on the harbour don’t waste any time echoing opera houses. But really it is quibbling to talk about the way the thing looks. What matters is the way it works. And for its nominal purpose it doesn’t work, and never can.
During the time that I was in Sydney there were no operas scheduled, but I did see a ballet – The Sleeping Beauty – sufficiently big to test the opera auditorium’s facilities. (There are two auditoria: the smaller one for opera, and the larger one for concerts, including concert versions of those operas too large to fit into the smaller one.) They failed the test. It was embarrassing to see the corps de ballet queueing up to get off, there being very little wing-space for them to disappear into. The flimsiness of the décor and the tension in the dancing could all be traced to simple lack of room.
The effort which was poured into finishing the edifice after its architect was fired should not be discounted, even though the American Beauty upholstery in the concert hall (in the opera hall it’s tomato red) might not be to one’s taste. But similarly it is foolish to suppose that all would have been well had Utzon remained in charge.
The farce began at the beginning, in that first flush of enthusiasm at Utzon’s preliminary designs. The judges fell in love with an idea without grasping its substance, thereby acting out in little – or, financially speaking, in large – the Australian attitude to Culture. That attitude is likely to go on generating unintentional humour in large amounts. But since to some extent I once shared that attitude myself, I’m not entirely whole-hearted about joining in the laughter.
June 20, 1976
Footnote By now I feel much more affectionate about the Opera House but the first impression recorded above is probably the more objective. If a Wagner orchestra has to be reduced in size to fit the pit, what you have got is an edifice which does less than the one at Bayreuth at a thousand times the cost. But it looks better: there is no denying that.
Postcard from Sydney
2 Here Is the Noos
‘R OASTED in coconut oil and lightly salted, you’ll enjoy the smooth richness, the unique flavour of this entirely Australian nut.’ This masculine rubric, with its hefty pair of dangling participles, appears on the 500 gram tins of Macadamia nuts now on sale in my homeland. Firm, fleshy and sensual, the Macadamia nut (accent on the third syllable – Macadaymia) is the perfect nut. The first person to import Macadamia nuts into Britain will make a million pounds. Once you start eating them there is no way of stopping until you faint.
When I left Australia fourteen years ago, the only way of getting at the kernel of the Macadamia was with a large hammer, since the nut came equipped with a casing of th
e same dimensions and consistency as ball-bearing ammunition. If you swung the hammer absolutely vertically the casing fractured and the kernel rolled away. If your swing was even slightly angled, the nut disappeared with the sound of a ricocheting bullet, and you might see an old lady collapse in the street, clutching her forehead. While I have been away, someone has found a commercially practicable method of stripping the casings from the kernels. Presumably the casings are then sold as railway ballast or shrapnel. The delicious kernels go into tins, which the people may purchase, thereby enriching their lives. The sum of such small leaps forward – and there have been many – represents Cultural Advance.
Whether there has been Cultural Advance in the grander sense is another question. During the Whitlam era it was taken as axiomatic that Australia was expanding on all fronts, realising its creative potential in every direction after decades of stifling conservatism. Both economically and artistically it was supposed to be boom time. And even now – especially now – that the economic on-rush has faltered, the cultural explosion is taken to be an irreversible gain. The concept of cultural advance is clung to desperately by an intelligentsia still trying to cope with the glaring fact that the same people who voted Whitlam in voted him out again when they began to fear that his liberalising policies would involve them in becoming less rich.
The intelligentsia has been so traumatised by Whitlam’s fall that it has placed the blame everywhere except on the people’s democratic right to be self-interested. It has tried to blame the Murdoch Press (which is indeed, in its home country, a wonderfully petty organisation), Sir John Kerr, Malcolm Fraser and – in wilder moments – the CIA. But no amount of fulminating can alter the fact that Australia’s economy is in a slump for which the people are just as likely to blame Whitlam as to blame Fraser. The intellectuals have perforce gone back to their erstwhile condition of feeling ranged against, rather than with, Government. Like the JFK intellectuals after their hero’s assassination, they have lost their power to influence politics directly and now must cultivate their own garden. It is no surprise that they cultivate it with hurt pride, small humour and a greater determination than ever to pronounce Australia independent of all debts to Europe.
But to a great degree, independence from Europe seems to have involved dependence on America, in the small change of culture if not in the large. And since the small change of culture indubitably affects everybody’s life, whereas larger cultural matters are for the few and often putative even for them, it is Americanism that nowadays strikes you first about the quotidian tone of Australian existence. A signboard on a unisex hairdresser’s shop apostrophises: ‘Guys! Gals!’ The Sydney traffic signs, which used to be just red, green and amber lights, now say ‘WALK/DON’T WALK’. A church advertises ‘the friendliest modern worship experience’. When I queried something at the reception desk of a Melbourne hotel the girl on duty said she’d ‘check it out’.
Such Americanisation of the language is much more significantly pervasive than the high incidence of skate-boards and roadside fast food parlours. The Australian eastern seaboard is one long Fun City for surfers and wherever there is surf in the world there must inevitably be skate-boards. And the car-trips between towns are very long, so California-style roadside refreshment makes sense, even if the chiko roll – one of the staple fast foods to have emerged since my time – looks and tastes like something which has been slowly passed through a live dog. McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken are everywhere in Australia, but then they’re everywhere in Britain too, all set to drive the Wimpy into the sea. The American invasion of the Australian stomach was always on the cards. But the invasion of the language is less easy to laugh off.
The incursion is most noticeable on television. Australian TV is so bad it is almost impossible to describe. If you have seen American television and can imagine it without its redeeming features, then Australian TV is even worse than that. On Australian TV, ‘It’s A Knock-Out’ (retitled ‘Almost Anything Goes’ and deprived of even the element of literacy conferred on the British version by Stuart Hall and Eddie Waring) rates as highbrow. The locally conceived product is qualitatively shown up by a few imported British series and quantitatively overwhelmed by Americana. ‘Homicide’, acted with scarcely believable stiffness in front of cardboard sets and taped in black and white, is a representative home-grown series: it makes ‘The Streets of San Francisco’ look urgent. With the run-of-the-mill stuff so bad, there is no chance for the occasional prestige venture to be any good, since nobody – especially not the actors – is in practice.
Apart from such fitful indigenous efforts, everything and everybody on television is American-derived, including most of the link-men. I remember when Australian TV got started in the Fifties, all the radio newscasters who wanted to get into it raced off to Hawaii and came back a week later with names like Chuck Faulkner and accents to match. ‘Here is the noos.’ All that still goes on, only more so. During my visit the big TV event was the filming (and, after a two-week editing session in California, the screening) of an episode of ‘McCloud’ set in Sydney. Less substantial even than usual – the presence of Australian actors ensuring an extra level of awkwardness – the episode used Sydney locations. The heavies threw someone to the sharks and McCloud threw one of the heavies off the hotel at King’s Cross. Inevitably the final shoot-out was at the Opera House. From the accompanying hoo-ha of publicity it was hard to escape the impression that Sydney was at last rating as a world-class metropolis, now that McCloud had been there.
English writers of my acquaintance who were at the Adelaide Festival at the same time as I was in Sydney have since told me that they were continually struck by the way the Australian assertion of independence was undermined by an anxiety about being recognised by the rest of the world. It’s an ambivalent, confused attitude: to proclaim Sydney a great city but never quite believe it yourself until McCloud agrees with you. The conflict is partly resolved by appealing to internationalism.
‘International’ is a vogue word in Australia, like ‘situation’ in Britain. Some Australian cabaret artistes still bill themselves as ‘London-based’, but it is more common for them to describe themselves as ‘international’. Billboards show Dennis Lillee fiercely endorsing dozens of different products, his John Newcombe moustache unashamedly Aussie. But on the billboard next door the Benson & Hedges advertisement will feature George Lazenby, ‘a well-known Australian international’. A newspaper ad will inform you that people with ‘international tastes’ buy their shirts in Parramatta Road, Annandale. The anxiety is all-pervasive – even where it is unnecessary, since in things like men’s clothes Australia has more than caught up with the rest of the world. At the time I left Sydney an ordinary Marks and Sparks pullover would still be displayed individually on a chromium stand in the window of a George Street shop. Today it would take Alan Whicker about an hour to duplicate his entire wardrobe of snazzy schmutter, right down to the Gucci accessories – all without leaving the Wentworth Hotel. And in the simple matter of drinking hours Sydney has transformed itself, so that it is now as rare to see a drunk on the streets as it once was common.
But in other matters there is not just plenty of room for anxiety, there is plenty of reason. The Ocker cult is a natural consequence of the attempt to achieve an Australian identity by sheer force of assertion. The Ocker is Barry McKenzie without his creator’s controlling irony – a monster who has broken out of Frankenstein’s laboratory and run wild. The idea, apparently, is to identify dinkum forthrightness with beer-swilling, prawn-chundering aggression. Barry McKenzie was intended to convey the disturbed naïvety behind the Australian male’s parade of male chauvinism, but by the time he has been transformed into the Ocker the intended self-revelations have been forgotten, although the unintended ones are more self-revealing than ever.
For a mercy, Ockerism is derided by the educated young, who buy the post-Woodstock package in its entirety and are by now immune to the cruder forms of populism: their own
conformity is more benign. The Ocker is strictly a mass media event – but then Australia is pre-eminently a mass society. Ockerism’s most famous incarnation is Paul Hogan, a stand-up comic who rivals even Dennis Lillee as an advertiser’s idea of irresistible consumer-bait.
I went to the St George Leagues Club to catch Hogan’s act. The Leagues Club, which has doubled in size since my time, more than lived up to its reputation as the biggest thing of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere – although it is difficult to think of any other place in the Southern Hemisphere which might conceivably want to emulate it. Built as a reinforced concrete hymn to the St George Rugby League team (they won the championship for eleven years straight from 1956–66 and there was a time when I could recite the names of the whole side, including the reserves), the place has 40,000 members and looks like an aquarium full of slot machines. Kitsch portraits of front-row forwards with necks wider than their heads are spot-lit in the stairwells. Yet as a believer in art deriving its power from a primitive impulse, I expected to find Hogan vulgar but hoped he would be inventive.
Alas, he was trouncingly boring, with no idea of how to work his material. His earthiness was sheer hard-hat invective. His best line was reminiscence. Like Barry Humphries’ character Sandy Stone, Hogan went in search of time past. He was quite good on, if inadvisedly proud of, the awfulness of the Australian male’s sexual education, which has been such bad news for the men of my generation and even worse news for the women.
He recalled accurately how you bought your best girl scorched almonds at the pictures but fobbed off your second best with conversation lollies (they were shapes of tooth-breaking candy with messages in pink ink). Unfortunately he lacked the discrimination necessary to organise such resonant subject-matter. The linguistic fastidiousness of Humphries he just couldn’t match. Hardly any Australian can match it, since it is linked to the consciously European richness of Humphries’ personal culture. Humphries’ internationalism, unlike George Lazenby’s, is not an ad-man’s shibboleth but a condition of mind. The force of intellect Humphries brings to the seemingly worthless minutiae of everyday Australian life depends on his studious immersion in European culture and his readiness to measure his work by its standards.