by Jan Morris
*
The ultimate planned suburb, though, the Sydney suburb in excelsis, is Haberfield, which survives only partly violated on the south side of the Parramatta River, and is one of the most truly Sydneyesque places in Sydney. Early in the present century a developer named Richard Stanton, together with his architect J. Spencer-Stanfield, set out to create the perfect urban living environment. It would be conveniently linked by rail and ferry to the city centre, and was to be everything Australians wanted, everything they deserved – unashamedly Australian in every way, and unashamedly profitable too. It would be, so the publicity said, a suburb ‘Slum-less, Lane-less and Pub-less’, where every house would have a bathroom, and every householder would be able to say, ‘This is my own home – this is mine for life.’ Some 1,500 houses were built, on a 200-acre site. They were all designed by Spencer-Stanfield, and most of them are still there.
The bungalow was the prime Sydney building form by then, and Haberfield is a town of them, sometimes extending into attics and even turrets, but for the most part compactly single-storeyed. They are built in the style called in Australia the Federation Style.1 This is a blend of English, European and American influences, medieval to Victorian, suffused in specifically Australian allusions. It has a touch of Prairieism from the United States, and a hefty dose of Arts and Grafts from England, and grace notes of Art Nouveau. Its characteristics are, to my mind, hard to isolate. It is a Queen Anne-ish, Tudory, semi-countrified, sometimes whimsical sort of style, with eaves often, and fancy chimneys, and ornamental ridge cappings, and much woodwork. Stained-glass windows go well with the Federation Style, and tiled floors, and bargeboarding, and a veranda is almost essential. It is a style easy to mock or patronize, but on the whole it is humane, attractive, practical and fun, and it is a worthy instrument of the Australian Dream – to live in that house of one’s own, with that garden all around it, in a respectable, healthy and thoroughly Australian neighbourhood. Such a neighbourhood was quintessentially Haberfield, and they call it still the Federation Suburb. It extends in unpretentious serenity, its streets lined with diverse trees, from the Parramatta Road to the edge of Iron Cove, an inlet of the Parramatta river, which has a tropical-looking island picturesquely wooded in the middle of it.
A good deal of shabby building has crept in since Stanton’s day, much unadvised improvement has occurred, but part at least of Haberfield is protected as an urban conservation area, and it remains an endearing place. Although from its highest points you may see the skyscrapers in the distance, its streets are wonderfully quiet, its gardens are lush, people sit on porches reading newspapers and in the air, even now, one hears the cooing of pigeons, the humming of insects and the gossiping of neighbours over fences. Every single house in Haberfield is different. If one house has a hexagonal glass conservatory, the next has a conical turret. Here is a veranda decorated in fretted woodwork, here an elaborately tiled garden path. There are fancy roof-ridges. There are gables and wide eaves. There are stained-glass windows rich in kookaburras, watarahs, wattles or sinuous Art Nouveau abstractions. Stanton kept his promises. There are no back alleys, there are no slums, and to this day there is no pub.
But it is really only an apotheosis of your average Sydney suburb. Haberfield is occupied nowadays largely by Italian immigrants, but its aspirations have not changed. Wandering around it one day I happened to notice a crude sign tacked beside a modest house gate, and thought that while its lettering and style were perhaps not up to Spencer-Stanfield’s standards, its message was purest Federation:
‘STRICTLY’. RESIDENTS. CARS. ONLY. CAN. PASS. BEYOND. THIS POINT. THANK. YOU. (‘OWNER’)
There are many surprises in the suburbs – corners of survival, anomalies, sudden glimpses of eccentricity.
I am always surprised for instance to find the former Government House still in its park at Parramatta. A pleasant, middle-sized, easygoing English rectory sort of a house, it looks slightly surprised to find itself there, too, still extant in the suburban wasteland, and guarded by National Trust ladies so implacably didactic that they send me scuttling through its rooms like a rat. Hardly less incongruous are two nearby buildings which, set high and dry in milieux of ineffable modern ordinariness, both claim to be the oldest house in Australia, and are the prototypes of the sheep-station house that appears in every self-respecting Australian movie. Elizabeth Farm and Experiment Farm Cottage are surrounded now by bungalows, in plain bourgeois streets, but they have wide pillared eaves, stone-flagged floors, verandas for the supervision of estates, whitewashed outbuildings for the stacking of mealies or the slaughtering of pigs, and dark cellars specifically designed, so popular and ill-informed legend has it (Australian legend loves a touch of the horrors), for the dreadful incarceration of convict servants.
Some of the old villas are lovely. Vaucluse House above its eponymous bay, which began as a simple cottage, and was aggrandized in stages into a country house, now feels to me remarkably like a West Indian plantation house, with its big windows and cool rooms, the corrugated iron roof of its veranda, the rattan screens that shade it and the great dark trees growing all around. On the other hand Admiralty House, on the north shore, may be Georgian and Victorian in architecture but is suggestively Italian Lakes in temperament. Its steps run down to moorings where lovers’ skiffs should lie. Its gardens look across to Sydney Cove where Como ought to be. Twelve commanding admirals in succession used it as their residence when the Royal Navy was at the peak of its confidence and good taste, and now the lucky Governor-General of Australia lives in it when he is visiting Sydney.
There are some old stone houses in the northern suburbs which look like forest lodges, shady, woody, mushroomy, as though there are cut logs piled for the fire inside, though the kookaburras may be laughing and the dreary highway is only a few hundred yards away. Here and there one sees the delightfully absurd extravaganza of some late Victorian millionaire, all spikes and towers, probably converted into hospital, school or nursing home but still superbly nouveau riche. The main building at the Sydney Church of England Grammar School, known as Shore presumably because it stands on the harbour’s northern shore, used to be the home of one such tycoon, Bernard Otto Holtermann, and is just recognizable as such, though heavily educationalized. Prominently mounted in its tower (and now removed to a library wall), a stained-glass window depicted the bearded magnate standing beside the gigantic Holtermann Gold Nugget, nearly five feet long and reaching to his shoulder, which had enabled him to build the house.
I never fail to be surprised by the bridge which leads across a wooded ravine to the suburb of Northbridge. There I am, driving along an unnoticeable stretch of standard suburban highway, 1930-ish, when turning a corner and descending a steep hill I find before me an enormously castellated mock-Gothic bridge, with hefty towers, arches, crests and arrow-slits, such as might have been thrown across a river in Saxe-Coburg by some quixotic nineteenth-century princeling (actually it was built by the North Sydney Tramway and Development Company, in 1889, to encourage interest in a flagging housing estate). I am invariably charmed by the little church of St Peter’s above Watson’s Bay, designed by Edmund Blacket in 1864 to be the very first building newcomers would see when they sailed through the Sydney Heads: with its belfry and homely porch it is uncannily like an English village church in a meadow somewhere, except that it stands histrionically on a windswept, sun-soaked, ocean-salted plateau looking over the wild Heads. I am naïvely thrilled every time I discover, up by the Hawkesbury River, the truly glamorous marina at Akuna Bay: deep in the bush on its silent creek, a glittering assembly of yachts and launches, attended by Mercedes and BMWs, with a swish restaurant and a boat hangar, with a forest of aerials and radar masts, suddenly revealed among the empty woodlands of the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park.
Of all these suburban serendipities, my favourite happens at Lavender Bay, a small inlet of the northern shore just west of the Harbour Bridge. Long ago barrack ships were moored here, some to house sto
ne-cutters and lime-burners, others waiting to take some of the more recalcitrant of the Sydney convicts to still worse banishment on Norfolk Island. Nowadays it could hardly be more innocuous. On its east shore are the dilapidated buildings of the once-famous Luna Park amusement centre, deprived now of the huge laughing face which constituted the entrance and was one of Sydney’s trademarks, and left in a kind of stagnancy between purposes. On the west shore a suave restaurant stands at the water’s edge. There are two ferry jetties and a sailing school‚ lots of yachts are moored offshore, and a couple of apartment blocks overlook the waterfront.
High above the bay rise the office towers of North Sydney‚ a formidable financial and commercial centre in its own right, but below them there is a settlement of a very different kind. There a handful of old houses tumbles down the hillside in the seclusion of a small and well-wooded park. This is a favourite artists’ and actors’ quarter, and the houses possess a strong sense of languid bohemianism. They are built variously of sandstone and clapboard‚ and one has a merry little tower. At the top there is an Indian restaurant‚ and this is apposite‚ for with their gables, bleached railings and balconies these houses have an evocatively Simla look. Clustered tightly together there, thickly shaded by the trees‚ embedded by ferns and jacarandas‚ almost out of sight either from the land or from the water, they ought to have white-robed bearers preparing tea on their verandas‚ and memsahibs in floppy hats.
*
Back we come‚ though‚ inevitably to the harbour itself, towards which all these suburbs‚ however remote and landlocked‚ instinctively seem to strain: in Sydney‚ the playwright David Williamson once said‚ nobody cares about the meaning of life – it’s a harbour frontage that counts. The harbour was the original raison d’être of this city‚ and remains its visual saving grace. Trollope said of it, in one of Sydney’s favourite quotations, that he thought it might be worth a man’s while moving to Sydney just so that he might look at it ‘as long as he could look at anything’. It is the Sydney standard‚ by which all else is measured.1
The harbour is ringed with sensuous delights‚ pleasant little coves‚ waterside parks all green and welcoming‚ fine houses to look at, boats riding by, the tinkling of yacht fittings, the slap of ropes, the singing of the cicadas. Sometimes it reminds me of the Bosphorus – notably at Kirribilli, where the apartment blocks stand side by side at the water’s edge, their inhabitants to be waved at from passing ferries. Sometimes the glitter of its waterside commerce is like Manhattan. Sidney Nolan once painted it looking like a lake in a barren desert, while the nineteenth-century watercolourists gave it a gentle Home Counties allure, alleviated only by the odd kangaroo, or by groups of natives ornamentally disposed.
All the same, the harbour seems to me less a spectacle than an event. It is like a perpetual pageant, punctuated by astonishments. Something is always happening on it, even in the small hours of the morning – always a ship passing, a helicopter flying by, unexplained lights wavering in the distance, dim white sails loitering. I looked from my balcony one morning to see an enormous pair of inflatable sunglasses perched high upon a wing of the Opera House as upon its nose: they had been placed there by a group of ecological activists, including the first three Australians to reach the summit of Everest, in protest against the depletion of the ozone layer, and I could see those adventurers scrambling over the high roofs pursued by policemen. The very next day, when I looked out again, I saw a man sitting on the gantry at the very highest point of the Harbour Bridge, threatening with angry gestures to jump off: policemen and white-coated medics were up there, trying to persuade him to come down, a police helicopter hovered above him, a police launch cruised below‚ police cars and ambulances jammed the bridge approach, and on both sides of the harbour hundreds of people were staring up at that high arch, half-hoping despite themselves that the man would jump.
He never did‚ and the police soon deflated the opera house sunglasses, but anyway on Sydney harbour there is always another day‚ another drama. It is by no means always blithe and sunny there. When one of those sudden winds blows up‚ and everything is flying, scudding‚ racing‚ flattened, flecked with white, the whole pace of the haven seems feverishly quickened. When one of Sydney’s thunderstorms comes raging in, suddenly all turns a bronze or ochre colour, the lowering clouds hang like doom over the skyscrapers‚ and the whole harbour seems to be catching its breathy waiting for the lightning and the rain.
I once crossed the harbour in a tossing small launch during one of the most ferocious of these downpours, described at the time indeed as Sydney’s worst natural disaster, and seeing the place grotesquely distorted through our water-streaked windows, as in an old surrealist movie, now the bridge swooping above us, now the office towers crooked and bent, made me feel that another and altogether more sinister city had been conjured.
1 William Street in 1991 is chiefly notable for car salerooms in the daytime, prostitution at night, and is bounded at its eastern end by an enormous Coca-Cola sign.
1 ‘In a great lustrous sea’, the Sydney Morning Herald reported with relish at the time, ‘of red-hot metal and burning woodwork’. The Palace gates are still there‚ on Macquarie Street.
2 Passing, by an act of rare justice, within a few feet of the dining-room windows of the Royal Automobile Club.
1 It was Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens, not Sydney’s, that the Prime Minister Sir John Gorton eulogized in a famous speech in 1970, but I cannot resist quoting his words anyway: ‘If this collection here in these gardens is not thoroughly matchless and I think it probably is, but if it’s not, and if it’s not unique of its kind, then I have no doubt that under the guidance of Mr Shoobridge it very shortly will be, if it isn’t already.’
1 Although wandering around it one day when it was being converted into a museum, and wondering at its gentlemanly proportions (far more civilized than many a barracks I have myself been obliged to occupy) I was chilled to see faintly legible on a wall a relic from some intermediate stage in its career, announcing the Master in Lunacy’s Office s Top Floor.
2 All three originally intended to have been surmounted by steeples, which are optimistically shown in all their glory in one of the best-known Victorian engravings of Sydney.
1 ‘Well worth waiting for,’ as a bystander with a pronounced Irish accent once remarked to me.
1 Maintained in varying degrees of polish: when I asked one of the cleaners why OVERSEAS, SPECIAL POSTINGS AND INTERSTATE were so much more shiny than SUBURBAN, COUNTRY, A.C.T. AND SYDNEY CITY, he just Said ‘Ah, well, SUBURBAN AND COUNTRY’S the other shift.’
1 Far less, too, opera people say, since it is primarily a concert hall really, and its operatic facilities are sadly inferior to those of the visually far less exciting Melbourne Arts Centre. This has given rise to the quip that Australia has the best opera house in the world – its exterior in one city, its interior in another.
1 He thought it perfectly marvellous at first, but when he saw more of it ‘perhaps my admiration fell a little’.
2 In Kangaroo (1923), of which by the way an anonymous letter-writer in the Sydney Bulletin wrote: ‘God save Australia from these cheap writers from semi-literate countries … There are plenty of Australian writers of rubbish, and local rubbish should have the preference.’
1 Griffin built six houses elsewhere in Sydney, besides a number of monumentally styled and technically progressive incinerators.
1 Because its emergence coincided with the federation, in 1901, of the six Australian colonies. It is the one truly Australian style, though the Central Sydney Heritage Inventory categorizes eighty-four, including Immigrants’ Nostalgic and Post-war Stripped Medieval.
1 In many ways the Australian standard too: for example I learn that Australian engineers measure reservoirs by a unit called the ‘Sydarb’.
STYLE
YEARS AGO, IN THE PUBLIC ICE-RINK NEAR THE CENTRAL station, I came across a Sydney boy whose style I have never forgotten. He
was about five years old, tough, blond and capable. He could not actually skate, but he was adept at hobbling about the rink on his blades, and his one purpose was to gather up the slush that fell off other people’s boots, and throw it at more accomplished skaters. Hop, hop, he would abruptly appear upon the rink, and choosing a suitable target, staggering his way across the ice, zealously he would hunt that victim down until splosh! the missile was dispatched – and quick as a flash he was out of the rink again, gathering more ammunition.
I could not help admiring him. He hardly ever fell over, he seldom missed, and he did everything with dexterity. When I asked him his name he grimly spelt out GORGE with his finger on the rail of the rink; and in my mind’s eye I could see him thirty years from then, exploding into a company meeting with an irresistible takeover bid, relentlessly engineering the resignation of a rival, or (it occurs to me now) bashing his way down the harbour in command of an 18-footer.
Of course he made me think of the convict children. It used to be popular to see penal origins to everything about Sydney, and occasionally I fall into this romantic fallacy myself – it is all too easy to fancy the mug of an eighteenth-century London footpad in a passing loveless face, or to imagine in a well-fed child at a skating rink some apotheosis of those poor little abandoned creatures in the streets of Sydney 200 years ago. The chances are remote indeed that Gorge is connected in any way with the transportees: if his grandparents were not homely souls from Macclesfield they were probably hard-working fishing folk from the Aegean. Still, it is fair to conjecture that the existence of the original penal settlement may have permanently affected the style of the city, and even of Gorge himself.