30 Days in Sydney

by Peter Carey

  He describes the officers as so connected by property and intercourse with the emancipated convicts both men and women that their influence affected public justice. As for the rank and file, they were, he said, engrafted with the convicts to a man.

  Further, the new governor found that people had been constructing houses where they were forbidden to build. They had been given leases but the leases were improper. They had, for instance, built on the domain which Governor Phillip had clearly indicated as a park. Although he acted with the typical bullying brutality which had brought about the mutiny on the Bounty and would produce a second mutiny in Sydney Cove, we can thank God he did do. He reclaimed that great park which we enjoy today. If he had not done so we can be confident that the Rum Corps would never have arranged a replacement.

  Of course, in this great frenzy of knocking down, the king's representative made the mistake of coming up against Captain John Macarthur.

  Macarthur had a lease on land to the east of the new St Philip's Church. I do not know if Bligh was correct in asserting that this land belonged not to the captain but to the church. Still, he hated Macarthur so that was not the point. Like others, Macarthur had a lease, but the lease meant nothing to Bligh who cautioned: Those people holding allotments without any buildings thereon I have warned that whatever they erect will be at their own risk . . .

  Now there were many steps, including a court case too complicated to go into here, that led to the moment when Macarthur wrote that letter which would open him to the charge of treason, to the moment when Governor Bligh was dragged out from under the bed where he had so ignobly fled the rebels, but his not unreasonable insistence on town planning played some part in his downfall.

  For in his attempt to tidy up the mess which Sydney had become, he had given his most powerful adversary joint cause with the common people who were already in a panic lest the land they thought theirs should be taken away from them.

  In the story of the so-called Rum Rebellion it is always Bligh who is the bad guy, and while we would never want another Captain Bligh we might at least allow that there is no one else in our history who had the balls to stand up against the opportunism and cronyism of the Rum Corps or those spiritual descendants who the libel laws forbid us to name.

  The modern CBD is their living monument, a tribute to an élite which places very little value on the public good.

  If there were not that opera house and that harbour just down the road you might accept that you were somewhere provincial and uninspired, but Sydney is not uninspired and on the edges of the CBD, on the rocks at Bennelong Point, you get some glimpse not only of what we were, but what we might yet become.

  On this sunny April morning it was a great relief to escape the chill of the monorail, to walk briskly under the deep senseless shadows of the Cahill Expressway, and out on to the quay, down the number three wharf, and to board the Manly Ferry with just twenty seconds to spare.

  Climbing to the top deck I find myself in a different world, one in which even the harbour bridge seems to me a thing of joy, its two hinges joining beneath a blinking red aviation light.

  In a sea of dancing silver flashes the ferry pulls around that great pink platform on which the opera house stands. That any city would have this masterpiece is extraordinary, but in the city of the Rum Corps it is a miracle.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  JACK LEDOUX HAD PROMISED that his friend Peter Myers would talk about Earth, and that was the only reason I came to Sydney University at six o'clock on a rainy autumn evening. I took a seat in a steep raked lecture theatre in the Faculty of Architecture. When Peter Myers appeared, I obediently opened my notebook and uncapped my pen. No student was ever more eager to hear about midden heaps and lime and convict clay.

  Myers was a bearded grizzled man of average build with a friendly appearance and a dry understated humour. I wished he would speak a little more loudly and would not refer to presumably famous people by first names but he was, after all, an architect talking with other architects and no one had invited me to eavesdrop.

  Eschewing projection or anything overly actorly, he began, in the manner of one resuming an old conversation, by recalling his visit to an exhibition of Alvar Aalto's work in London and finding it, well, very ordinary, and intuiting that there was something missing in this narrative of Alvar Aalto's success. So he said to his friend who had worked with Alvar Aalto, did Aalto have blue eyes?

  And his friend said, oh yes, intensely blue. He was very charismatic.

  QED, said Peter Myers, it was proven.

  What was?

  Why, Peter Myers' belief that you should trust your hunches, and what he was to talk about tonight (although this would be a big surprise to me) was how it was that the opera-house competition jury selected the work of a Dane, Joern Utzon.

  Now the generally accepted explanation is that the American architect Eero Saarinen used his authority to PUSH this design through the reluctant jury. What is implicit here is the commonly shared assumption that we would never, not in a million years, have selected this building without a lot of outside help.

  Graham Jahn's Sydney Architecture puts it like this: An extraordinary site on Sydney Harbour at Bennelong Point, an ambitious state premier (Joe Cahill), a visiting American architect (Eero Saar-inen) and a young Dane's billowy sketches were the key factors which generated one of the most important modern buildings.

  Vincent Smith, in The Sydney Opera House, tells the story thus: The winning design had been already marked down to go on the shortlist when Saarinen arrived (late) for the judging.

  When, writes Smith, he saw Joern Utzon's drawings - having been on the site only hours before - he was wildly enthusiastic. It was an extraordinary and complex proposal and the other judges had their reservations. But to every objection they made Saarinen had an answer. He convinced them, though it's hard to believe that their objections to the design were terribly strong. They WERE looking at a monumental building.

  It was already obvious that Peter Myers was not someone to burst into an argument directly through the front door. Whatever his thesis was, he was sidling into it, telling us that he had been a student in London in the late 1960s and had demonstrated outside that great brutal concrete fort, the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, and that the designer of that building had been Eero Saarinen.

  And here was his intuition - that the man who designed this dreadful embassy could not, no matter what he claimed, possibly have been the champion of Utzon's opera house.

  I was ready to follow him but Myers seemed to lose interest in that line of argument and now he returned to Alvar Aalto, alleging he had stolen the work of an architect. Plisjker? Fisketjon? My hearing had been ruined by the Stihl chainsaw and now I could not get the fellow's name no matter how I strained towards it. Just the same, Myers' point was clear: when Alvar Aalto built his plagiarised building he got great reviews, as if the critics didn't know that he had pinched it.

  I was fearful Myers had lost his way, but I underestimated him for now he showed us that Aalto and Saarinen were men in parallel. Saarinen was the architect of that floating shell-like structure, the TWA terminal at JFK, which is always thought of as living proof of his sympathy with Utzon. But no. Trust your intuitions, said Peter Myers. The present TWA building was not Saarinen's original design. Before he flew to Sydney to sit on the opera-house jury Saarinen had a clumpish modernist design for the TWA terminal. After Sydney he redrew the plans.

  In a moment Myers would name the English architect Leslie Martin as the man of power amongst the jury and he would chart a dazzling, almost Byzantine map delineating Leslie Martin's lines of artistic and political force, showing a man of taste and discernment well accustomed to quietly wielding influence. But first, casually, almost accidentally, he came to Earth. He reminded us of the site the Sydney Opera House would stand on.

  At the time of the competition that sandstone point was occupied by an abandoned tram terminus, a crenulated fort of monum
ental ugliness, but in 1788 it had been the site of the first shell kiln. There were, said Peter Myers, middens, great piles of shells abandoned after meals, and these middens were twelve METRES HIGH on that site, evidence of ancient occupation. This was the first city of Sydney.

  He reminded us that the city of the Rum Corps and the convicts was therefore the second historic city of Sydney and explained how the second city died when the Cahill Expressway cut across the quay. The city was blindfolded, he said, only waiting to be executed.

  With the city physically isolated from the harbour, only Bennelong Point was left, free, unfettered. The Sydney Opera House competition was the big chance for Sydney to escape the creeping mediocrity it had become.

  And it was then I saw what Myers was up to. He was actually addressing the great question of Sydney. By what divine intercession were we granted that opera house? Why us? How come?

  The first champion of the Sydney Opera House was clearly Eugene Goossens, the conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and it was he, as early as 1948, who identified this as a perfect site for a performing-arts centre. For years he talked, politicked, addressed the issue in public and in private, and in 1956, with the site chosen and the competition already underway, he was arrested by HM Customs with pornography in his luggage. In what was a spooky funhouse mirror image of Utzon's final departure, Goos-sens was hounded out of Sydney and Australia. Like Utzon, he never returned.

  Myers now turned his attention to the jurors, sifting through them, looking for our benefactor.

  There was Colin Parkes, the New South Wales state architect, the son of Sir Henry Parkes, the so-called 'father of federation'. Without doubt he was not Utzon's first champion.

  The professor of architecture at Sydney University was the second jury member. Professor Ashworth had served with distinction in the Second World War, and was a lieutenant colonel at its end. It was he, Peter Myers explained, who selected Leslie Martin.

  Myers then projected a transparency which showed two books, one by Leslie Martin, one by Professor Ashworth, each bearing the same title: Flats.

  Meaning? That their characters and value were here clearly contrasted. On the left, the dull but useful Ashworth. On the right, the elegant designer, the connoisseur Leslie Martin.

  Peter Myers then projected an image of a third book, Circle. The authors: Leslie Martin and Naum Gabo.

  What was this about?Why, open the book and you can find work by Arup, the engineer who would finally work on Utzon's opera house. Thus proving? Thus proving that Arup knew Martin, that it was Martin who brought in Arup at the end, that Martin was the quiet puppet master of the show.

  Utzon, according to Peter Myers, always understood that Leslie Martin was the most important judge. Utzon would have read Leslie Martin's book. He would have been aware of Leslie Martin's design for the Royal Festival Hall in London. And now Myers alerted us to the strong similarities between these two large performance spaces, both addressing water, both sitting on a kind of platform.

  He reminded us that the brief for the Sydney Opera House required two halls, one seating 3,500 and the other 1,200. He showed an image of the Royal Festival Hall and then, presto, he was a magician. He doubled the image, so there were two identical halls side by side, and what did you have?

  The Sydney Opera House on the River Thames? Not quite, but imagine a man of genius beginning this way, just as Picasso might take Veliizquez perhaps, and by a series of daring steps arrive at something new. The double image of the festival hall looked like two captives, blocks of stone from which the masterwork would soon be carved.

  This is how culture works, asserted Myers. The Sydney Opera House is Joern Utzon recasting the Royal Festival Hall in such a way that Martin will understand. So the opera house is an esoteric letter from the architect to the most powerful member of the jury.

  There is not the slightest doubt, said Peter Myers, that Martin would immediately decode this compliment, this fabulously sophisticated, dazzlingly successful attempt to take his own work and turn it into something even more wonderful. Amongst the proofs that he continued to pull out of his sleeve was Utzon's perspective drawing of the opera house.

  The Conditions of Competition (item no. 7) required perspective drawing of such elevation as the competitor may select as his main elevation and/or approach to the building. Utzon chose, instead, to insist on what he had done, to emphasise the doubling, and he audaciously rendered, not the two halls in perspective, but the space between them.

  He heightened the drawing with gold leaf, said Peter Myers, which is perhaps one reason none of the drawings were shown to the public. This one with the gold leaf might be deemed to have broken the rules of the competition.

  Finally it was Saarinen who rendered the required perspective drawing of Utzon's opera house, and to that extent he was the hero for without this drawing the design could not have won.

  Well he had convinced me, but Peter Myers would not leave well enough alone, and now he was driven to prove that both Utzon's and Martin's designs related to a famous building in Copenhagen and that each of their designs were, in a sense, a conversation, a love letter written to another building, invisible to all but them.

  Enough.

  At past seven, just as he produced issue number two of the Architects' Yearbook (of which Leslie Martin was the editor), I had to stand, not just because I was out of my depth, but because I was late for David Williamson's play The Great Man which had recently begun its Sydney season in the Drama Theatre of the opera house, a space which was not even indicated in the original brief and which was one of those indications that Utzon would inherit a client who not only gives bad information about the nature of the site but also changes his mind continually.

  I slink out of the lecture theatre, out into the dark rainy streets of City Road where - another miracle - I find a taxi.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I WAS MUCH SURPRISED at the fortifications of Sydney Harbour, wrote Anthony Trollope. Fortifications, unless specially inspected, escape even a vigilant seer of sights, but I, luckily for myself, was enabled specially to inspect them. I had previously no idea that the people of New South Wales were either so suspicious of enemies, or so pugnacious in their nature. I found five separate fortresses, armed, or to be armed, to the teeth with numerous guns, - four, five, six at each point; - Armstrong guns, rifled guns, guns of eighteen tons of weight, with loopholed walls, and pits for riflemen as though Sydney were to become another Sebastopol. I was shown how the whole harbour and city were commanded by these guns. There were open batteries and casemented batteries, shell rooms and powder magazines, barracks rising here and trenches dug there. There was a boom to be placed across the harbour and a whole world of torpedoes ready to be sunk beneath the water, all of which were prepared and ready to use in an hour or two. It was explained to me that 'they' could not possibly get across the trenches, or break the boom, or escape the torpedoes, or live for an hour beneath the blaze of guns . . . But in viewing these fortifications, I was most especially struck by the loveliness of the sites chosen. One would almost wish to be a gunner for the sake of being at one of these forts.

  Trollope was in my mind as the departing Manly Ferry scraped, iron on wood, along the wharf at Circular Quay that Monday morning.

  If only you would get your head out of books, said a by now familiar voice. Look around you. Is it not a lovely sight?

  Yes, I answered, but the book helps you see this landscape better. It is the book that shows you that this city has been shaped by its defences. Over there, to the left, where the bridge sticks its claws in the rock, was once Fort Dawes. And there on Bennelong Point, where the opera house is, that was Fort Macquarie, the ugliest thing Greenway ever designed. And a few hundred metres north is Pinchgut . . .

  Don't mention Francis Morgan . . .

  . . . who was hung in chains until he fell apart. Pinchgut's proper name is Fort Denison.

  Behind Fort Denison is the naval dockyard of Gard
en Island where you can see that great ugly cream-brick structure, so typical of Australian barracks architecture. This five acres of inner-city waterfront is still controlled by the Defence Department.

  On the north shore, directly north of Farm Cove, five acres of splendid gardens tumble down towards the sandstone cliffs and there, behind that armed policeman, is the sandstone mansion of Admiralty House. It was, for many years, the home of the British admiral commanding the British squadron in Australia.

  Time and again the armed forces have taken possession of the most beautiful land on Sydney Harbour. Five bays along from Kirribilli House you will find that great scabby finger of Bradleys Head. In 1880 Sydney waited to engage the Russian navy here. We had a proper fortress, mighty cannons, pyramids of balls encased by nets. There are photographs, taken very soon after Trollope's visit. They show three white-helmeted gunners posing at the fortress with folded arms. Behind them - the yellow sandstone cliffs of Sydney Heads.

  After Bradleys Head the Manly Ferry passes Chowder Bay and the wild wooded headland of Georges Head. According to the splendid map reproduced on page twenty-five of Reflection on a Maritime City - An Appreciation of the Trust Lands on Sydney Harbour, an enemy craft following the ferry's present course, north-northeast in twelve fathoms, is passing into a deadly barrage of fire. On the north-west shore, in that forested hillside where those white cockatoos rise in a raucous crowd, those same shell rooms and powder magazines and barracks can still be found, pretty much as Trollope saw them. Together with one hundred and fifteen acres of waterfront bush, they are in the process of being returned to the public.

  The map was made in 1880 and revised again in 1917. It shows Trollope's battery as the locus of a radius which swings in a defensive arc across the harbour, a fine grey line intersected by other thicker arcs representing first artillery, then searchlights, and other signs I cannot understand. I can count eleven of these arcs all crowding around the Heads, one with its locus at Georges Head, others at North Head and South Head, one centred at that very place on New South Head Road where Jack Ledoux and I stopped to admire the yellow cliffs above the empty Pacific Ocean. At that time I had grappled for an explanation of those tiny windows in that ugly block of flats - why anyone would place this life-denying style in such a spectacular setting. But when I saw the map of these shore batteries, the style at last made sense.