by Jan Morris
*
Sydney’s substitute for a truly ceremonial centre is Martin Place, three blocks back from the waterfront in the heart of the business district. This has been developed in fits and starts from one of the old crosstown streets; widened, cleared of traffic and planted with trees, it now extends from George Street, the city’s original main thoroughfare, to Macquarie Street on the edge of the Domain. It is the pulse of downtown Sydney, especially at lunchtime on a working day, and an index to the city’s style and sensibility. The Cenotaph is there, guarded by sculpted servicemen with bowed heads. An unfortunate essay in modern imagery, like a tower of aluminium kites, commemorates the Sydney artist William Dobell and is nicknamed the Silver Shish-Kebab. There is a small sunken arena with a stage, and a big splashy fountain at the western end.
All is dominated by the General Post Office, which after nearly 120 years still has a claim to be Sydney’s central and archetypal building. It holds its own bravely against the mass of the surrounding skyscrapers, and its Italianate colonnades greatly add to the dignity of the street. Its series of noble Letter-Boxes (officially called Apertures and certainly worthy of capital letters) are set in magnificent brass surrounds.1 There are brass railings inside, too, and flags, and a picture of the Queen, and big ball lights, while on the Pitt Street façade there are some cheerful sculptures illustrating the ever-willing public attitudes of the postal service. These were thought to be downright indecent when they were first unveiled; the worst I can see in them, however hard I try, is a possibly slightly lascivious smirk on the face of a postman delivering the morning mail to a perhaps too invitingly smiling housewife in the righthand panel.
Martin Place is lined with big banks and insurance houses, and crossed by four busy streets which unfortunately reduce the plaza effect. Nevertheless at its best it can be delightful. Flower stalls and newsstands give it colour. The Coolibah Hut offers Satay and Asian Food. There are always people doing nothing in particular on the big semi-circular benches beneath the trees. Sometimes street musicians strike up, guitarists, Irish harmonica players, and when there is a concert in the arena, as there generally is at noon, hundreds of young people give the scene a cheerful animations, unwrapping their sandwiches on the rim of the fountain, doing frantic things on skateboards (penalty A$200), queuing for cut-price theatre tickets at the Halftix kiosk or dancing to disco music outside the Commonwealth Trading Bank. One Friday lunchtime I saw an elderly paralysed lady drawing a picture with a pencil attached to her head, watched by a large admiring audience.
*
Martin Place is Sydney’s Trafalgar Square; Sydney Cove, where it all began, is its Piccadilly. There are pedestrian ways around it now, and it is dominated by the great pavilion of the Opera House, whose soaring and eccentric silhouette almost everyone knows. With its nine flying roofs of off-white tiling, its varying planes and mingled textures, Sydney Opera House is the hardest building I have ever tried to draw, and it has not been universally admired. Beverley Nichols the English journalist thought it was like something that had crawled out of the sea and was up to no good. The writer Blanche d’Alpuget likened it to ‘an albino tropical plant rootbound from too small a pot’. I myself find it unattractive seen head-on from the harbour side, when its big teeth-like windows, framed by their hoods, have a distinctly rapacious look, likened by a Brisbane wit to that of Sydney’s heroine Joan Sutherland in the mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor.
It is an immensely suggestive building. When I walk down its wide shallow steps, with those soaring roofs above me, I feel remarkably like one of the minute stereotypical figures to be seen in architects’ drawings of visionary cities – figures almost irrelevant to the scene, and impelled only by the momentum of the future all around them. But there is also something unguent about the Sydney Opera House, something enveloping, so that when I have got over feeling like an extra in an architect’s scenario, I feel rather like an insect in an ice-cream.
Yet in many ways the building is very sensible, and is far more than an opera house in any conventional sense.1 Sydney citizens use it almost as a club, so accessible are its halls, cafés and restaurants, and so handy its lesser buttresses for small boys to slide down. One rainy Sunday afternoon I went there to hear the Sydney Youth Orchestra playing in one of the foyers, and thought the place seemed positively homely. The orchestra bravely played, and all around it people wandered about, leant on rails, drank tea, pointed out their daughters among the cello players or sat on the floor reading newspapers. Through the windows I could see slanted umbrellas and hurrying laughing women, Japanese taking each other’s pictures in the wet, gulls scudding around, yachts hastening home, ferries labouring through the rain; snugly indoors the orchestra played Brahms, while teacups tinkled, the crowd amiably chatted, and a little boy left behind scuttled down the foyer stairs, two paces to a step, calling ‘Daddy! Daddy!’ through the music.
Sydney Cove is attended by some of the ugliest buildings in Sydney, making for a meanness beneath the shine of it, but it is given character by the remains of gabled old warehouses, like something from Bergen, now serving as restaurants on the western side. There is a patch of green above the Rocks, where the Observatory stands, and the Ocean Terminal is properly hefty, and the skyscrapers rise behind, and to complete the ensemble the Harbour Bridge lumbers immensely away across the narrow harbour channel to the west. This is certainly not the world’s loveliest bridge, but it is one of the world’s old friends by now. It speaks of familiar loyalties, it does a good workaday job, and is thus in every way a proper complement to the esoteric folly of the arts below.
Nothing can quite match the particular sensations of this scene. The cove foams with the passage of the ferry-boats. Cafés and bars are lively and sun-shaded. Perhaps there is a cruise ship moored at the terminal, towering above us with bunting and fresh paint. Cars rumble incessantly over the bridge, and sometimes the earth seems to shake when a train crosses it. Excursion boats circle around, their loudspeakers echoing; there is often a tinkle of zither, a thin strain of violins, a beat of drums from buskers on the quay. It always seems to me Australia idealized – so young, so energetic, so hopeful. The Opera House is like a very emblem of fresh starts, and the old bridge above, the jumble of the harbour front, the ceaseless turmoil of the water traffic, the sense of dazzle superimposed upon grubbiness, once more bring home to me Sydney’s peculiar sensation of time truncated.
2. Suburbs
In a satellite photograph Sydney looks less like a city than a geological feature, and among its expanses of dark grey and red, between the sea and the mountains, the downtown quarter scarcely shows. The Central Business District – CBD as everyone calls it – has hardly grown in size since the last century. It is about as big as downtown Birmingham, England, or Dallas. Greater Sydney, though, that slab on the satellite picture, is as big as London. With a population of about 3½ million it is one of the most sprawling of all the earth’s cities, covering 670 square miles. It can take a couple of hours to drive out of Sydney, whichever way one goes, and there are said to be people in the remoter districts who have never set eyes on the Harbour Bridge. This is pre-eminently a city of suburbs – the city of suburbs, perhaps; a city which has whole books written about its suburbs, gazetteers and directories of its suburbs, architectural studies of its suburbs, social analyses of its suburbs, suburban Governments, suburban styles, suburban loyalties and intense suburban prides.
The city’s epicentre is supposed to be somewhere around Parramatta, some fifteen miles inland from Circular Quay. This is proper, for Parramatta was the earliest of the out-settlements, and for a time at the end of the eighteenth century was bigger and busier than Sydney itself. Over the generations several such towns and villages have been absorbed into the metropolis, but the chief reason for Sydney’s unnatural extent has been the inexorable outward growth of the city itself. Immigrants landing in Sydney were generally reluctant to go far into the interior, preferring to settle on the edge of town, an
d as long ago as 1900 the suburbs became more populous than the city proper. Since then they have expanded ever further, ever more coagulatively into the bush – it was in the 1950s that the last of Sydney’s black swans, seeing the way things were going, flew away en masse from their lagoon in the suburb of Dee Why. Suburbia came naturally to Sydney. In 1836 Charles Darwin likened the entire city to a London suburb;1 a century later D. H. Lawrence described it as ‘crumbling out into formlessness and chaos’.2
The old inner-city suburbs are mostly of terraced houses in the European kind, economical of space. They line the streets convivially with small front gardens, verandas, assorted decorative addenda and a profusion of the fancy ironwork known as Sydney Lace – of which it is claimed that twenty different patterns can be seen in one row alone, Argyle Place above the Rocks. The outer suburbs are more absolutely Australian. They are mostly of bungalows, often built of a kind of cement known in Sydney as fibro, with red terracotta roofs, and their size has been dictated by one of Australia’s most fervent and admirable beliefs, the conviction that a family should own its own house, with a garden all around it (in later years with a garage too, and nowadays preferably with space for a boat). Mile after mile the Sydney suburbs illustrate this creed, with varying degrees of beguilement. The main roads that connect them must be among the least attractive city roads on earth, a dismal mixture of English provincial humdrum and tacky American display. The roads themselves are often narrow and twisty, being based upon the coach roads of long ago. The buildings that line them make the heart sink – not quite hideous enough to shock, but monotonous enough to make you feel, as you lurch from traffic-light to stop sign, through one unenticing shopping centre after another, as though they will never end. For myself I will do almost anything to avoid these gruesome arteries: but the suburbs themselves are another matter.
Robin Boyd the architect launched a famous attack on the more recent suburbs in his book The Australian Ugliness, 1960, using a fine vocabulary of invective – destructive … pretentious … stealthy crawl like dry rot … cold comfort conservatism. There is no denying that many Sydney suburbs are less than lovely, their plans tedious, their streets (as Lawrence thought) like children’s drawings – ‘little square bungalows dot-dot-dot …’ I can see that socially progressive architects and planners must detest them. Nevertheless they represent, for several hundred thousand people of many national origins, true human fulfilment – the very antithesis of the crowded tenements from which so many of them or their forebears came. Besides, they often turn out to be more interesting than you expect, when at last you reach them along those interminable highways.
*
Some are historically interesting. Parramatta in particular illustrates the development of Sydney almost as well as the city centre. Its original plan was devised in 1790 by a naval officer of the First Fleet, Lieutenant William Dawes. He laid out a grid system of five wide streets, with one main highway running from Government House to the Parramatta River, and another terminating in a plaza with a Town Hall in it. Symmetrically around them were to be disposed the institutions of Church and State. Much of this plan, overlaid by urban sprawl, is apparent as in palimpsest still.
Grand as ever Government House stands in its park, with the lodge at its gates and the very tree where in 1847 Lady FitzRoy the Governor’s wife was dashed from her carriage to her death. George Street runs away to the river’s bank. St John’s Cathedral with its twin towers stands in a rather Mediterranean way above its little gravel close. The cavalry barracks are elegant in their compound. The Town Hall still presides over its wide plaza, and nearby are the Centennial Clock-Tower of 1888 and the Bicentennial Fountain of 1988 (which portrays three ghoulish figures apparently about to be drowned in a waterfall, and was put up during the Town Clerkship of Mr R. G. Muddle). It may not be all as Dawes foresaw it, but the shape of Parramatta is recognizably his memorial.
Other interesting suburbs are simply rich. Not all rich suburbs are interesting, by any means, but Sydney’s often are. All around the harbour, and intermittently along the ocean shore, houses of an infinite variety of styles are encouched in opulent green, their gardens dripping with bougainvillaea or frangipani, rich old trees shading their yards. Sometimes they stand defiantly on the edges of cliffs, or deep in bushland, or are built on hillside declivities so steep that cars and boats are parked on their roofs. Sometimes they have tree houses, gazebos or private external elevators (‘inclinators’ in the vernacular) connecting them with the harbour front. They have pools, they have awnings, they have sprinkled lawns, they have appropriated picturesque steps or urns from antique shops. They have two cars in the garage, and on their sidewalks, in good times at least, crates of empty champagne bottles habitually await the garbage men.
Some of these houses do strike me as arid and artificial, in the Hollywood manner. Many others seem all too enviably organic. I know of no city with so many houses that I would be extremely happy to acquire, and it is no surprise that the plutocratic old suburbs like Vaucluse, Point Piper or Clifton Gardens, sun-splashed on their headlands, like to call themselves generically The World’s Best Address. Almost since the beginning of Sydney the rich have been building themselves homes in these parts, and many an old villa or cottage orné still basks among its flower-gardens as it has since some lucky official or wool factor commissioned it long ago; so that even in districts now glitzy with boutique and high rise, a sense of privileged continuity prevails.
Most of the suburbs have developed piecemeal, but some have been sociologically planned. The first was Woolloomooloo Hill, not far to the east of downtown and now more usually called Potts Point. In the 1820s Governor Ralph Darling earmarked this pleasant promontory as a place of residence for senior functionaries, well away from the penal quarters or the homes of vulgar emancipated convicts. Generous lots were granted to people like the High Sheriff or the Surveyor-General, and rigid planning restrictions were imposed – all buildings must face the town of Sydney, for instance, and no home was to be of less value than £1,000. Woolloomooloo Hill was fastidiously developed, with Gothic villas, well-wooded gardens of imported trees and shrubs, and stately nostalgic names – Craigend, Brougham Place, Telford Lodge. Few mansions remain, Woolloomooloo in general having long since been overwhelmed by urbanism, but the names of some have been inherited by the apartment blocks (‘home units’, they are called in Sydney) which now occupy their sites, and Potts Point remains, as Darling would have wished it, decidedly posh.
Several planned enclaves were built around the turn of the twentieth century, in the heyday of the Garden Suburb idea. The grandest was a very up-market development called Appian Way, completed in 1911 within the otherwise undistinguished suburb of Burwood. It was, and still is, like a very small slice of Newport, Rhode Island, and is now a popular location for film-makers. Its thirty-odd villas are set in wide gardens, surrounded by picket fences and shaded by magnificent brush box trees. In the middle is a small park, communally owned by the householders, in which one used to be able to play croquet, and can still play tennis, resorting for gossip and lemonade, I like to think, to a folly-like pavilion beside the green. At another social extreme was Daceyville, in the south. This was the first State-planned suburb, created in 1912 as an example of how it should be done. It was an extremely ambitious project, and architects’ plans show it as an immense swathe of symmetry, ovals, squares and residential oblongs interspersed with ample parks; but it rather petered out when in 1924 an inquiry convicted the State Housing Board of gross carelessness, incompetence and improper management, and all one can see of it now is a kind of fizzled ghost of its pretensions, festooned with telegraph wires, speckled lamely with ornamental palms and made all too spacious by brownish grass medians.
Then in 1924 the American architect Walter Burley Griffin, fresh from designing the new Australian capital at Canberra, arrived in Sydney with his wife Marion, herself an architect (and supposed to be of American-Indian blood). Appalled at the genera
l standard of Sydney suburbia, he set out to build an enclave in the Frank Lloyd Wright manner, blending imperceptibly with nature and housing a community of artistic or philosophic temperament. No tree was to be unnecessarily felled, no inch of bush needlessly destroyed. There were to be no fences, no boundaries and certainly no red terracotta roofs. Griffin acquired 750 acres of land at Castlecrag, overlooking Middle Harbour in the north, and laid out his streets around the contours of a rock known locally as Edinburgh Castle. Half-buried in bush and boulder, all different but united in conservational spirit, the houses were built either of local sandstone or of a rough pre-cast concrete. There were also a couple of shops, a golf club and a small amphitheatre in a gulley, where the Griffins put on ecologically compatible plays. Many of the houses still stand, and the romantically rambling streets of Castlecrag still bear their original castellan names – The Bulwark, The Redoubt, The Citadel, The Parapet, The Rampart, The Postern, The Bastion. ‘We want to keep Castlecrag for ever part of the bush,’ declared the Griffins, and they have succeeded, for those of their houses that have survived are half-obliterated by the foliage.1