But what an awakening! You must know that I am not a very heavy sleeper…. So on the Wednesday morning early I wake up about five o’clock, feeling my bed rocking as though I am in a ship on the ocean, and for a moment I think I am dreaming that I am crossing the water on my way to my beautiful country. And so I take no notice for the moment, and then, as the rocking continues, I get up and go to the window, raise the shade and look out. And what I see makes me tremble with fear. I see the buildings toppling over, big pieces of masonry falling, and from the street below I hear the cries and screams of men and women and children.
I remain speechless, thinking I am in some dreadful nightmare, and for something like forty seconds I stand there, while the buildings fall and my room still rocks like a boat on the sea. And during that forty seconds I think of forty thousand different things. All that I have ever done in my life passes before me, and I remember trivial things and important things. I think of my first appearance in grand opera, and I feel nervous as to my reception, and again I think I am going through last night’s Carmen.
And then I gather my faculties together and call for my valet. He comes rushing in quite cool, and, without any tremor in his voice, says: ‘It is nothing.’ But all the same he advises me to dress quickly and go into the open, lest the hotel fall and crush us to powder. By this time the plaster on the ceiling has fallen in a great shower, covering the bed and the carpet and the furniture, and I begin to think it is time to ‘get busy’. My valet gives me some clothes; I know not what the garments are but I get into a pair of trousers and into a coat and draw some socks on and my shoes, and every now and again the room trembles, so that I jump and feel very nervous. I do not deny that I feel nervous, for I still think the building will fall to the ground and crush us. And all the time we hear the sound of crashing masonry and the cries of frightened people.
Then we run down the stairs and into the street, and my valet, brave fellow that he is, goes back and bundles all my things into trunks and drags them down six flights of stairs and out into the open one by one. While he is gone for another and another, I watch those that have already arrived, and presently someone comes and tries to take my trunks saying they are his. I say, ‘No, they are mine’; but he does not go away.…
Then I make my way to Union Square, where I see some of my friends, and one of them tells me he has lost everything except his voice, but he is thankful that he has still got that. And they tell me to come to a house that is still standing; but I say houses are not safe, nothing is safe but the open square, and I prefer to remain in a place where there is no fear of being buried by falling buildings. So I lie down in the square for a little rest, while my valet goes and looks after the luggage, and soon I begin to see the flames and all the city seems to be on fire. All the day I wander about, and I tell my valet we must try and get away, but the soldiers will not let us pass. We can find no vehicle to find our luggage, and this night we are forced to sleep on the hard ground in the open. My limbs ache yet from so rough a bed.
Then my valet succeeds in getting a man with a cart, who says he will take us to the Oakland Ferry for a certain sum, and we agree to his terms. We pile the luggage into the cart and climb in after it, and the man whips up his horse and we start.
1967 HELEN PERRY
The ‘Summer of Love’ saw the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco attracting visitors from across the world to explore a new ‘hippie’ way of being. One of these was New York psychiatrist Helen Perry (1911–2001), who described the inaugural Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park on 14 January 1967.
I knew I could attend the Human Be-In only as a potential initiate. The request for participation was very simple: if you feel sympathy, wear a flower, bring a musical instrument, wear bells. I went into a shop on Haight Street and purchased a silver chain with a bell at each end – from India, the young woman in the shop told me approvingly; and I had a sensation of having taken a monumental step, unknown in import to anyone but myself. When I got home and showed my husband the bells, he smiled and decided to go himself. I suggested that he wear a flower, and he found an old gray-green floppy Panama hat that made him look like a sheriff somehow and stuck a flower in it so that he did not look like a sheriff.…
The Polo Field presented a new world. It was a medieval scene, with banners flying, bright and uncommitted; the day was miraculous, as days can be in San Francisco at their best, and the world was new and clean and pastoral. Children wandered around in the nude. People sat on the grass with nothing to do, sometimes moving up near to the small platform where a poetry-reading might be going on, or where a band might be playing. There was no program: it was a happening. Sights and sounds turned me on, so that I had a sensation of dreaming. The air seemed heady and mystical. Dogs and children pranced in blissful abandon, and I became aware of a phenomenon that still piques my curiosity: the dogs did not get into fights, and the children did not cry.…
From time to time the loud-speaker on the platform would be turned up in volume and everyone would become quiet, while an important announcement was made. These announcements concerned lost children. ‘The Hell’s Angels have a little girl here behind the platform and she has curly hair. She says her name is Mary. She wants to see her mother.’ For that particular tribe of young men on motorcycles had also appeared at the Be-In, replete with a station wagon, bearing apparently all kinds of refreshments, liquids and solids. They were well equipped for the task of serving as a clearing house for lost and strayed children since they had walkie-talkies and were well organized. Whether their services had been sought in advance or whether they were commandeered on the spot, no one seemed to know; in hippie language, it happened. When a call would go out for ‘Timmie’s mother’, we all smiled and watched until finally from the huge throng a young woman would be seen moving serenely towards the Hell’s Angels caravan, whereupon we would all settle back into our task of being.…
It was difficult to sort out what happened. It was a religious rite in which nothing particular happened. And yet it was a day that marked for me at least the end of something and the beginning of something else. There was clearly a renewal of the spirit of man, unplanned, non-political. But then what do we mean by political? For at the end of the day, as the sun was sinking into the ocean beyond the Park, someone suggested from the loud-speaker that it would be nice to leave the Park clean, to practice kitchen yoga, and that is what happened. The litter of so many people, all the sandwich wrappings, the wine bottles, and the endless paper products so characteristic of the rubbish of our decade, disappeared, so that the police reported afterwards, with a sense of wonderment, that no other group of people of such a size in the memory of any living person had ever left an area so clean before, whether stadium or park….
Wine, incense, food and pot clearly intertwined that day; but none of these was necessary, as I can testify. We had not planned to stay so long, so we were without food; and we had no drugs. But it was the people that turned me on – the spectacle of people from so many walks of life, some come in curiosity, some in search of something, some in worship of the idea, some to be initiated into a new rite. It was people being together, unprogrammed, uncommitted, except to life itself and its celebration.
Afterwards, walking slowly toward the car, we did not have much to say…. Half the city seemed to be waiting at the bus stops…. Most of the people looked tired and droopy, but our eyes met in a secret delight. We had in common the sound of a different drummer.
SYDNEY
Sydney, in New South Wales, is the oldest European settlement in Australia, founded as Port Jackson by Arthur Phillip, commander of the First Fleet of convicts sent from Britain in 1788. It was initially the largest city in Australia until overtaken by Melbourne during the gold rush of the 1850s. Its remarkable setting on a large and protected sea inlet has always been admired, especially since the building of the iconic Harbour Bridge (opened 1932) and the Opera House (1973).
1788 JOHN WHITE
T
he journal of John White (see page 254) described both the voyage of Phillip’s First Fleet and the new land, which he disliked despite taking a great interest in the unfamiliar flora and fauna. After setting up a hospital for the new colony, he returned to England in 1794.
Port Jackson I believe to be, without exception, the finest and most extensive harbour in the universe, and at the same time the most secure, being safe from all the winds that blow. It is divided into a great number of coves, to which his excellency has given different names. That on which the town is to be built, is called Sydney Cove. It is one of the smallest in the harbour, but the most convenient, as ships of the greatest burden can with ease go into it, and heave out close to the shore. Trincomalé [in Sri Lanka], acknowledged to be one of the best harbours in the world, is by no means to be compared to it. In a word, Port Jackson would afford sufficient and safe anchorage for all the navies of Europe.
1871 ANTHONY TROLLOPE
English novelist Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) wrote an account of a year he spent in Australia (1871–72), which the Australians themselves found unnecessarily critical even though his impressions of Sydney itself were favourable. By the time of his visit, transportation of convicts had ended thirty years earlier and the city comprised two hundred thousand people.
I despair of being able to convey to any reader my own idea of the beauty of Sydney Harbour. I have seen nothing equal to it in the way of land-locked sea scenery, nothing second to it.…
The town itself, as a town, independently of its sea and its suburbs, was, to me, pleasant and interesting. In the first place, though it is the capital of an Australian colony, and therefore not yet a hundred years old, it has none of those worst signs of novelty which make the cities of the New World unpicturesque and distasteful. It is not parallelogrammic and rectangular. One may walk about it and lose the direction in which one is going. Streets running side by side occasionally converge – and they bend and go in and out, and wind themselves about, and are intricate.…
The public gardens at Sydney deserve more than the passing mention just made of them. The people of Australia personally are laudably addicted to public gardens – as they are to other public institutions with which they are enabled to inaugurate the foundation of their towns, by the experience taught to them by our deficiencies. Parks for the people were not among the requirements of humanity when our cities were first built; and the grounds necessary for such purposes had become so valuable when the necessity was recognized, that it has been only with great difficulty, and occasionally by the munificence of individuals, that we have been able to create these artificial lungs for our artisans. In many of our large towns we have not created them at all. The Australian cities have had the advantage of our deficiencies. The land has been public property, and space for recreation has been taken without the payment of any cost price. In this way a taste for gardens, and, indeed, to some extent, a knowledge of flowers and shrubs, has been generated, and a humanizing influence in that direction has been produced.… For loveliness, and that beauty which can be appreciated by the ignorant as well as by the learned, the Sydney Gardens are unrivalled by any that I have seen.… A little beyond the gardens, almost equally near to the town, are the sea baths – not small, dark, sequestered spots in which, for want of a better place, men and women may wash themselves, but open sea spaces, guarded by palisades from the sharks which make bathing in the harbour impracticable, large enough for swimming and fitted up with all requisites. It is a great thing for a city to be so provided; and it is a luxury which, as far as I am aware, no other city possesses to the same degree.…
I was much surprised at the fortifications of Sydney harbour. 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 or six at each point – Armstrong guns, rifled guns, guns of eighteen tons weight, with loop-holed 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 casemated batteries, shell rooms and gunpowder 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 for use in an hour or two.… But, in viewing these fortifications, I was most specially struck by the loveliness of the sites chosen. One would almost wish to be a gunner for the sake of being at one of those forts.
Three different localities are combined to make Sydney. There is the old city…in which are George Street and Pitt Street, so called from George III and his minister, running parallel to each other, from the centre. The other chief streets are all named after the old governors – Macquarie Street, King Street, Bligh Street, Hunter Street and Phillip Street.… To the south of these rises the important town of Wooloomooloo – as to the remarkable spelling of which name the reader may take my assurance that I am right.… Then there is the ‘North Shore’, less fashionable, but almost as beautiful as the hills round the southern coves. The North Shore has to be reached by steam ferry from Sydney Cove, which now is better known as the Circular Quay, where is congregated the shipping of the port. When the wool ships from England are here, lying in a circle all round the margin, no port has a pleasanter appearance.… Crossing the main harbour from the Circular Quay, the inhabitants of the North Shore reach their side of the town in ten minutes.
1895 MARK TWAIN
Threatened with bankruptcy, the American writer known as Mark Twain (see page 241) undertook a long lecture tour of India and the Southern Hemisphere, which he turned into the book Following the Equator (1897).
We entered and cast anchor, and in the morning went oh-ing and ah-ing in admiration up through the crooks and turns of the spacious and beautiful harbor – a harbor which is the darling of Sydney and the wonder of the world. It is not surprising that the people are proud of it, nor that they put their enthusiasm into eloquent words. A returning citizen asked me what I thought of it, and I testified with a cordiality which I judged would be up to the market rate. I said it was beautiful – superbly beautiful. Then by a natural impulse I gave God the praise. The citizen did not seem altogether satisfied. He said:
It is beautiful, of course it’s beautiful – the Harbor; but that isn’t all of it, it’s only half of it; Sydney’s the other half, and it takes both of them together to ring the supremacy-bell. God made the Harbor, and that’s all right; but Satan made Sydney.
Of course I made an apology; and asked him to convey it to his friend. He was right about Sydney being half of it. It would be beautiful without Sydney, but not above half as beautiful as it is now, with Sydney added. It is shaped somewhat like an oakleaf – a roomy sheet of lovely blue water, with narrow off-shoots of water running up into the country on both sides between long fingers of land, high wooden ridges with sides sloped like graves. Handsome villas are perched here and there on these ridges, snuggling among the foliage, and one catches alluring glimpses of them as the ship swims by toward the city. The city clothes a cluster of hills and a ruffle of neighboring ridges with its undulating masses of masonry, and out of these masses spring towers and spires and other architectural dignities and grandeurs that break the flowing lines and give picturesqueness to the general effect.…
There are four specialties attainable in the way of social pleasure. If you enter your name on the Visitor’s Book at Government House you will receive an invitation to the next ball that takes place there, if nothing can be proven against you. And it will be very pleasant; for you will see everybody except the Governor, and add a number of acquaintances and several friends to your list. The Governor will be in England. He always is. The continent has four or five governors, and I
do not know how many it takes to govern the outlying archipelago; but anyway you will not see them.…
Another of Sydney’s social pleasures is the visit to the Admiralty House; which is nobly situated on high ground overlooking the water. The trim boats of the service convey the guests thither; and there, or on board the flagship, they have the duplicate of the hospitalities of Government House. The admiral commanding a station in British waters is a magnate of the first degree, and he is sumptuously housed, as becomes the dignity of his office.
Third in the list of special pleasures is the tour of the harbor in a fine steam pleasure-launch. Your richer friends own boats of this kind, and they will invite you, and the joys of the trip will make a long day seem short.
And finally comes the shark-fishing. Sydney harbor is populous with the finest breeds of man-eating sharks in the world. Some people make their living catching them; for the government pays a cash bounty on them. The larger the shark the larger the bounty, and some of the sharks are twenty feet long. You not only get the bounty, but everything that is in the shark belongs to you. Sometimes the contents are quite valuable.
1922 D. H. LAWRENCE
British novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) visited New South Wales with his wife Frieda in 1922, and his experiences fed into his novel Kangaroo, published the following year.
[In which state of mind] they jogged through the city, catching a glimpse from the top of a hill of the famous harbour spreading out with its many arms and legs. Or at least they saw one bay with warships and steamers lying between the houses and the wooded, bank-like shores, and they saw the centre of the harbour, and the opposite squat cliffs – the whole low wooded tableland reddened with suburbs and interrupted by the pale spaces of the many-lobed harbour. The sky had gone grey, and the low tableland into which the harbour intrudes squatted dark-looking and monotonous and sad, as if lost on the face of the earth: the same Australian atmosphere, even here within the area of huge, restless, modern Sydney, whose million inhabitants seem to slip like fishes from one side of the harbour to another.
Great Cities Through Travelers' Eyes Page 32