by Jan Morris
1 And which was founded, like several of the great London stares, by a ‘Cardi’ – a Welshman from Cardiganshire.
1 From his text for the picture-book Portrait of Sydney, 1950.
1 Transmitted, I am told unnervingly by one who has tried, into the sweat of those who eat them.
APPEARANCES
1. Urbs
FOR MOST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD THE LOOK OF SYDNEY IS the grand-slam look, the whole hog, flag-and-fireworks look. This can certainly be magnificent. Little in contemporary travel beats flying down the coast from Newcastle on a fine spring day, following the line of the northern ocean beaches and abruptly turning westward at the Sydney Heads to make the home run down the harbour. It makes you feel majestic even in an elderly shuddering seaplane. It gives you a triumphant feel, as though there ought to be incidental music in the air, preferably Waltzing Matilda.
The Heads fall away below you, bashed by their Pacific waves, the Middle Harbour runs off to the north, and then there are wide red-roofed suburbs below, splodged with green wooded protrusions, with the gleam of innumerable swimming-pools, and glorious splashes of flame trees and jacarandas. A couple of small islands slide beneath your wings. The harbour is streaked with the wakes of ships, freighters off to sea, hydrofoils rushing to and from the city, and here and there stand fine white villas on desirable sites. There goes Bradley’s Head, with the Sydney’s fighting-top, and there is the little island citadel of Pinchgut, and then – tara! tara! – the heart of Sydney splendidly greets us, the great old arch of the bridge, the splayed shells of the Opera House, the stunning green of the Domain, the skyscrapers of the city centre all flash and swank. Beyond it, as in diminuendo, the suburbs fade away dingy around the maundering Parramatta River, and beyond them again is the grey-blue ridge of the mountains, that ne plus ultra to the early settlers. Few cities on earth can offer so operatic an approach.
On the ground the purlieus of Sydney offer some histrionic vistas, too. Sometimes you can see nothing of the distant city but the arch of the Harbour Bridge, mysteriously protruding above thick woods. Sometimes you can so arrange your line of sight that the downtown structures are framed in green ridges, like a city among country hills. There are places on the harbour’s north shore where the size and power of Sydney, ranged along its waterfront, is hallucinatorily exaggerated by sunshine and reflection, and on a very hot day from far to the south, from the brackish beaches of Botany Bay, the skyscrapers on the horizon shimmer like a towering mirage. Although the colours of Sydney are seldom gaudy, in the tropical kind, but more often hazed and muted, this is a city born for show, with a façade of brilliance, and a gift for exhibitionism.
Somebody once lent me five video cassettes of the bicentennial celebrations in 1988, which were the most spectacular of all the city’s spectacular occasions. I played them at high speed, fast forward, and never was there such an exhilarating succession of images: yachts and symphony orchestras and flags and dancing Aborigines – airships, firefloats spouting, princes arriving, bands playing – vast cheering crowds, curtseys, soldiers saluting, gabbled speeches – now a wide shining shot of the harbour, now the Opera House from the air – gun salutes I think, helicopters certainly, flowers, children singing, and as the day rapidly changed to night before my eyes, a violent eruption of rockets into the sky, and a pyrotechnical waterfall over the lip of the bridge.
Speeding it up in this way seemed perfectly proper to me – aesthetically Sydney is made for the instant exciting impact, not five full cassettes of contemplation – but I slowed the tape down in the end when, as the city broke into a last tremendous blaze of rejoicing light, they really did play Waltzing Matilda.
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The original city, on the south shore of the harbour, was built upon shallow hills and outcrops – the gentle bumps and slopes that surrounded Phillip’s Tank Stream. This gave it pictorial advantages, but it also meant a certain meanness of scale, and time and again efforts were made to give the place a more formal dignity. Phillip himself apparently envisaged a Sydney of inspirational quality, like Raffles’ Singapore – ‘built in characters of light’. He decreed that its principal streets should be 200 feet wide, and he imagined a waterfront square with the chief buildings of State grouped around it, and Government House above. Perhaps he was thinking of Greenwich on the Thames, or the foreshore arrangements at Rio, which he must have known well. It never happened, anyway. When the Italian navigator Alessandro Malaspina arrived at Sydney in 1793 with two Spanish corvettes, he was assured that there was a city plan, but could not make out how it operated: today the only relic of it is Lang Street in the heart of the downtown city, the remains of a projected Grand Parade which runs at an unexpected angle towards the spectral plaza by the water.
Governor Macquarie, who arrived in 1810, also had visionary plans for the city, in which he was abetted by a convict architect, Francis Greenway of Bristol, transported for fourteen years for forgery but pardoned after six. Like Phillip, Macquarie wanted to minimize the convict taint, visually at least, and he fancied a city centred not upon the waterfront, but around a cathedral square a mile or so inland; upon this piazza all the city streets, named after members either of the British royal family or of the Macquarie clan, would geometrically converge, providing both splendour and the easy control of riots. Macquarie’s inspiration was probably Edinburgh, with a touch of British Calcutta thrown in. At the same time his protégé Greenway dreamed of building a castle on the Rocks, and a monumental colonnade around the cove to be Sydney’s ceremonial gateway. Once again the greater designs came to nothing, but before accusations of extravagance stifled them Macquarie and Greenway did manage to get some agreeable building done – a church or two, civilized-looking convict barracks, a beguiling fort on the water’s edge, a nice lighthouse, a turreted toll-house like a Gothic folly, a market with a street to its own wharf and a gubernatorial stable block which, if it was not in fact the castle of Greenway’s dreams, looked remarkably like one.
Ever since then there have been sporadic proposals for the monumentalization of Sydney, usually based upon some variation of Phillips and Greenway – majestic harbour-front developments, that is, together with broad boulevards into town. Sir Robert Garran, Solicitor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia, mused in the 1930s that a Great Fire might be a good idea; they could give the rebuilt city ‘impressive exits and entrances, open up a scenic drive along the harbour foreshore, and provide a fair allowance of stately boulevards’. In the 1950s a redevelopment scheme for William Street, one of the chief east–west thoroughfares, imagined it transformed into a café-lined, tree-shaded, eight-laned ceremonial highway, elegant with plazas, malls and colonnades and with a stream running down the middle – ‘at least the equal’, as the plan’s chief progenitor foresaw, ‘of the Champs Elysées of Paris’.1 More recently the Sydney Planning Committee (ever hopeful as planners must be, or they would lose heart) has envisaged a downtown divided into twelve zones each of ‘unique character’ – a zone for cinemas, for instance, an educational zone, a ‘business area with heritage flavour’, a Chinatown zone and a ceremonial civic zone.
There was a time when the Victorians did manage to give this city, as they gave to so many others throughout the British Empire, a discernible unity of style and purpose. The Town Hall complex had definite authority, and pictures of Circular Quay in the late nineteenth century show it, too, handsomely balanced, the Customs House centrally presiding, sandstone offices of State on the slopes behind, Gothic Government House stately in its gardens above. The Government’s private Domain had become a superb park, stretching in uninterrupted green down the eastern flank of the city centre, and lively sandstone devices of Baroque and Rococo gave the downtown streets exuberance. For a few years, too, in the early 1880s, the scene was majestically crowned by the domed Garden Palace of Sydney’s first International Exhibition, looking rather like a basilica from Central Europe; but this was only made of wood, and burned down in a matter of hours in 1882.1
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With the turn of the twentieth century the balance was lost, and by the time I first reached this city, at the start of the 1960s, its centre was uncompelling indeed. Its principal streets were dowdy, its older quarters were run down and its skyline, limited until 1957 to a height of 150 feet, lacked either panache or romance. Sydney Cove, far from being grandly colonnaded, had been crassly masked by the Cahill Expressway, an overhead ring road which hideously blocked the city’s central vista, and went on to cut the lovely Domain in two.2 On the point where the Opera House now stands there was a tram station thinly disguised as a fort, and the tallest structure in town was a radio mast on top of an office block, forlornly pretending to be the Eiffel Tower.
Things are not half so dull today. The Victorian balance has never been restored, and architecturally Sydney’s is certainly not one of the most distinguished of the New World’s city centres. Nevertheless the explosion of steel, glass and concrete in the past twenty years has given it a cohesive excitement, and the central clump of high rise is nothing if not energetic. It is capped by the burnished gold steeple of the Sydney Tower, the tallest structure in the southern hemisphere, and though the caprices of post-Modernism have hardly affected it yet, it does present a lively variety of shapes, levels and angles. The radio tower has long been submerged in the mass, but many of the Victorian monuments still manage to assert themselves, if only in daintily preserved façades, and here and there graceful survivors of Macquarie’s day stand assiduously preserved amidst the frenzy.
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Downtown Sydney‚ the square mile or so south of Circular Quay, remains somewhat warren-like. A kind of grid system has been imposed upon its streets, but only just, and visitors are surprised to discover that it is really rather picturesque – in character not unlike lower downtown Manhattan, and far more crannied and quirky than most of the other great modern cities of the world. This is partly because of its irregular terrain, which has required steep streets, unexpected staircases and interesting variations of level, but partly because of its ad hoc origins.
The early planners having failed in their designs, the city was to retain for ever a touch of the ramshackle, and even now it is possible to discern in corners of inner Sydney glimpses of ancient social styles –styles Dickensian or Hogarthian, or older still, inherited from England. Deep-worn steps in waterside lanes, unexpected squares, the occasional unimproved pub, back alleys littered with leaves and blown blossoms, smells of rot and damp wood in about-to-be-gentrified cottages – all these easily evoke for me times and manners long gone.
Anthony Trollope thought the same, when he came to Sydney in 1873. He was baffled by Sydney’s sense of antiquity, since it was then less than a century old, but charmed by its intricacy. It had few of the straight lines and obvious vistas of most modern cities – it was not, he remarked approvingly, parallelogrammic. Ten years later Richard Twopenny, also direct from England, thought its tangled streets ‘like old friends’, and the artist Lloyd Rees, entering the city centre for the first time in 1917, was delighted by its sense of enclosure – ‘one cannot see through Sydney’.
Flower, fruit and food stalls add to this feeling of organic age, together with the crowded arcades, full of small shops like medieval markets, that burrow between the streets. The Rocks have long been prettied up for the tourists, but still cherish a few nooks of suggestive shadow, lanes where the whores once lurked, steps where you might once have had your throat cut for your cash, taverns where unscrupulous landlords might have dropped you through a trap-door and Shanghai’ed you off to sea. Sometimes there are glints of the harbour, between the office blocks, as one used to see snatches of the Thames down waterside staircases of Wapping or Limehouse. Sometimes the enormous girders of the Harbour Bridge loom high above a row of terrace houses, cast their shadow over a park or close the prospect of a busy street: and this always suggests to me the presence of a mighty cathedral, in whose lee for a thousand years some far more antique town has flourished and suffered.
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Within the general jumble there are several enclaves or patches of distinction. There is Macquarie Street for a start, a fashionable residential street when we visited it in the 1880s, now a street of politicians, doctors, lawyers and institutions. Parliament is here, and the State Library of New South Wales, and the modern Supreme Court, and the rambling Sydney Hospital, and the whole street looks out over the Domain, part park, part the purlieus of Government House, still all a prodigy of light and colour running down to the water’s edge through the flowers, trees, lawns and greenhouses of the Royal Botanic Gardens.1
This quarter of Sydney has the air of a true capital, and Government House within the Domain is the nearest thing Sydney has to a palace – as the home of the Governor of New South Wales it is indeed the proxy palace of the British monarchy far away. People sometimes confuse it with its nearest neighbour, the battlemented pile which Greenway built as the gubernatorial stables, but which now houses the Conservatorium of Music. Government House is battlemented too, but was built a quarter of a century later by Edward Blore, designer of Sir Walter Scott’s mock-feudal home at Abbotsford in Scotland, and is a jolly caprice of Ivanhoe Gothic, described by John Hood, when it went up in 1843, as being ‘somewhat in the Elizabethan style, but not exactly’. The buildings of upper Macquarie Street look towards it across the green rather as the apartment blocks of Manhattan look over Central Park, and all in all there is something very invigorating about this thoroughfare, especially when you reach it up the gentle hill from the cramped financial district, to be greeted by its wide sunny space and its air of consequence, its palm trees, its flags, its flowers and its general impression of statuary.
Just up the road is Hyde Park, and this green oblong, frequented by lovers, tramps and chess-players, is properly metropolitan too. The ornate Great Synagogue overlooks it from the western side, on the east is the heavily pilastered Australian Museum, and among the trees stands the Anzac Memorial, for my tastes one of the noblest things in the city. Hyde Park’s most admired monuments, however, stand to the north, around the site Governor Macquarie envisaged as the ceremonial centre of the city. They include two of Francis Greenway’s best buildings – his graceful St James’s Church, which would be unremarkable perhaps in London or in Boston, but which looks exceptionally urbane here, and his Hyde Park Barracks across the way. This he designed for Macquarie in 1819 to provide, for the first time, a place of confinement for male convicts; for nearly thirty years its initials, HPB, were stamped on their clothing. As an ex-con himself Greenway was presumably reluctant to design anything too gloomy (though there was a triangle in the yard for floggings) and he created a building that has remained an ornament to the city ever since. A big rectangular block with a pitched roof, a cupola and a fine old clock, it stands in a wide courtyard behind grand gates, and always suggests to me some mellow institutional buildings an examination hall or a proctor’s office, within the precincts of academe.1
Hyde Park’s other dominant building is St Mary’s Catholic Cathedral, at the north-west corner. This is huge. It is not quite as long as Lincoln Cathedral, its model, but it is probably the largest Christian church anywhere in the overseas British Empire, and I suspect that when it was completed in 1882 it may have been the largest building of any kind erected by the British in their imperial territories–astonishng to contemplate, when one remembers how small was the city it was built to serve. It is a kind of standard Gothic cathedral, such as you might order from an ecclesiastical catalogue, with high pointed arches, dim transepts, a crypt and three towers;2 two heroic statues outside the south door are not of saints nor martyrs, but of recent Archbishops.
The area around the Town Hall, the pride of the 1880s, still has some swagger. St Andrew’s Anglican Cathedral, it Is true, is infinitely less grandiose than its Roman rival, and is indeed curiously unobtrusive nowadays; its main entrance used to open to the west, but when in the late nineteenth century new streets and buildings hemmed it in the arran
gements were turned back to front, so that the entrance is now where the high altar ought to be s giving the structure a slightly shamefaced air. The Town Hall itself, on the other hand, is as cocksure as ever, and could well serve as a manual of architectural styles. Eleven architects are said to have had a hand in its design at one time or another, and the result is a defiantly eclectic mix of intentions, crowned with a five-layered, arched, columned, windowed, porticoed, architraved, buttressed, domed, urned and flag-staffed clock-tower.
Even better is the adjacent Queen Victoria Building. This was built in 1898 as a market, and after housing a library, a wine store and various bureaucratic offices, has now been gloriously done up by Malaysian entrepreneurs to be one of the most sumptuous shopping centres on earth. Not only is its exterior wonderfully entertaining, with a galaxy of domes, domelets and roof pavilions, but its complex galleried interior suggests to me a happier Piranesi at work; there is also a glorious hanging clock which, every hour on the hour, displays a series of mechanically moving tableaux of British kings and queens, heralded by loud automaton trumpeters and ending with the very slow beheading of Charles I.1
Not far away is the city’s newest architectural set-piece, Darling Harbour. Called by the early settlers Cockle Cove, this is the next harbour inlet west of Sydney Cove, and until a few years ago was one of the city’s chief dock areas. Now it is a tourist and convention centre of a certain slapdash splendour. It straggles around the old wharfs in a sequence of white and glass buildings like so many winter gardens, linked over the inlet by the Pyrmont Bridge, the oldest working electrical bridge in the world, and crossed by the concrete viaduct of a motorway. There is a fun-fair and an aquarium, a Chinese garden, a huge convention centre, multitudinous shops and two museums: strewn as it all is around the water, and backed by some fairly drab old industrial buildings, it has a frisky fancy to it, and is linked to the city centre by a mono-rail train which sweeps over the water, circles around those spiky white buildings, like a portly red-and-cream worm. On a sunny Saturday Darling Harbour is a cauldron of activity, and on one such day I came across a group of stilt-dancers, painted and feathered, prancing in weird silence beneath the motorway bridge; oddly enough their tall gliding motions, with the spinning of the funfair mechanisms, the comings-and-goings of the boats, the wavering of fugitive toy balloons and the easygoing crowds sauntering here and there, gave Darling Harbour that afternoon an unexpected air of power.