by Jan Morris
In many ways, indeed, Gorge’s style is Sydney’s style. He was a delightful boy, but not exactly tender; Sydney is a genial and generous city, but with a streak of malice to it. A well-recognized characteristic of the place is called ‘the tall-poppy syndrome’ – the tendency to cut you down to size, if you are seen to be too successful. This is the municipal equivalent of throwing ice-slosh at you.
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The transportation policy was not all evil. Its methods were ghastly and its chief intention was certainly to rid Great Britain of as many unwanted persons as possible, but it was seen also as a chance for the miserable discards of British life to make a new beginning. Once their sentences were worked out they were ‘emancipated’. They became free citizens of New South Wales, very likely with grants of land, and this gave thousands of people a better chance of success than they would ever have found at home. Many spent the second halves of their lives as respectable run-of-the-mill colonists, and a few became extremely rich. In the later years of the system, when the worst was over, convicts often looked upon exile as a kind of assisted emigration. Charles Darwin, in 1836, thought that transportation had succeeded ‘to a degree perhaps unparalleled in history’ in converting useless vagabonds into active citizens, and by the time the system ended the sons and daughters of the transportees had indeed proved themselves remarkably law-abiding. A fine interesting race, the naval surgeon Peter Cunningham called them in his book Two Years in New South Wales (1828), intensely proud of their city, and only anxious to distance themselves from criminal association (‘I should be afraid to go to England,’ one girl told him, ‘from the number of thieves there’).
Nevertheless Sydney grew up, like a child in a bad home, inured to terrible facts, terrible sights. Penal Sydney was run in the first place by officers of a brutalized Royal Navy – offending Marines were punished even more horribly than convicts – and cruelty was endemic. Prisoners were part of the street scene in the early years. They were clanking about in irons, breaking stones, building roads, digging sand, sometimes degradingly kitted out in frayed exotic uniforms taken from foreign prisoners-of-war, sometimes in a ragged mixture of prison dress and miscellaneous hand-me-downs. They were shackled like beasts to wagons. They were bonded as domestic servants or as labourers on private farms. Between 1788 and 1840 huge works of development and reclamation – the Argyle Cut through the Rocks, the Semi-Circular Quay, the road over the Blue Mountains – were accomplished by these slaves of the State, whipped mercilessly to their labours.
There was no closing one’s eyes to the truth, in this little town. For the first decades of Sydney’s history gaols, barracks and labour yards were among its most prominent buildings – as one visitor remarked, all the best buildings ‘had something to do with convicts’. St Phillip’s Church looked more like a prison than a house of God, and even Greenway’s elegant St James’s had arrows stamped all over its steeple in case the copper sheathing was stolen. If you went to divine service you shared your devotions with sullen prisoners on compulsory church parade – ‘the most miserable beings in the shape of humanity’, thought Tench when he went to church one Sunday, ‘worn down with fatigue’. As a matter of course artists included in their landscapes convicts labouring in chains, or pulling carts in which the muslin-dressed and sun-hatted women-folk of officers reclined.
Sadism was institutionalized, and must have given the infant city a pervasive air of the macabre. The whistle of the scourge, the cries of flogged men were familiar to everyone – you could be flogged just for the expression on your face, or for looking at a passing ship. The treadmill creaked and groaned the hours away. Women sat in the public stocks, or were ducked shaven-headed in ducking-stools. The very first court that ever convened in Sydney, on 11 February 1788, sentenced its first prisoner to 150 lashes (he had abused his guards), and sent its second to spend a week alone on Pinchgut. Forty years later two delinquent soldiers were committed to gaol with fifteen-pound fetters on their wrists and ankles, linked by chains to spiked iron collars riveted around their necks. On Goat Island, at the eastern end of the harbour, one is shown the rock to which a convict named Charles Anderson was sentenced to be chained for two years. An eighteen-year-old orphan, transported for smashing shop windows, during his time in Sydney he had already received 1,500 lashes for petty offences; now he was forbidden any human contact, made to sleep at night in a crevice with a wooden lid locked over him, and fed like a mad creature with food on the end of a pole.1
Inevitably the administrators of the place, and the free settlers, were contaminated by all this. Gently nurtured families found themselves the slave-drivers of felons. Priests who had given men the holy sacrament one day passed by them chained in road-gangs the next. Children grew up with a contemptuous disdain for working people – for all working people in those early years were convicts – and sometimes horrifying vocabularies. Gentlemen got used to employing shackled prisoners around the estate, and the servant who brought your dinner, as Darwin observed with distaste, might well have been flogged the day before at the instance of your hospitable host; George Allen, the Godly and teetotal owner of Toxteth Park, in the suburb of Glebe, thought little of ordering thirty-six lashes for a carpenter who took a day off, twenty-five lashes for a boy who drank.
People went out in their boat-loads to stare at Anderson in his misery, and when a new gaol was opened at Darlinghurst in 1841 crowds of citizens jeered and catcalled as the convicts were marched bedraggled through town to their new quarters. As late as 1846, according to David Mackenzie, a local clergyman, anyone standing at the door of the Sydney police office on a Sunday morning would hear a barbaric sentence pronounced from the magistrates’ bench every two or three minutes – ‘Six hours to the stocks – twenty days to the treadmill – fifty lashes!’ Another priest, J. C. Byrne, arriving in Sydney at about the same time, was shaken to hear that his assigned servant had received, at one time or another, an aggregate of 2,275 lashes.
For of course not everyone was desensitized. If children sometimes learnt to despise their convict fellow-beings, sometimes they learnt to sympathize with them, and even to side with them against their parents. We read of the Scottish wife of a farm superintendent, Margaret Wightman, crying herself ‘almost into hysterics’ because all night long she could hear the clank of chains as the convict labourers stirred in their sleep. And the writer Louis Becke, who lived as a child near the convict stockade on Cockatoo Island, at the mouth of the Parramatta River, remembered with compassion all his life the clanging of the bell on a foggy day that meant a convict had escaped, together with ‘the sound of someone panting hard in his swim for liberty’.
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Long after the ending of the penal system it remained a characteristic of Sydney that the genteel lived in intimate neighbourhood with the disreputable. For years the Domain itself, whose centrepiece was Government House, was infested by ne’er-do-wells, and the gentry of Darling Point were neighbours to miscellaneous ruffians living among the reeds of Rushcutters’ Bay. The prime example of such cheek-by-jowl propinquity was the Rocks. In the upper part of this small peninsula, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the Sydney bourgeoisie had built itself those agreeable terrace houses, that pretty village green, which tourists are still taken to see at Argyle Place. Just over the ridge, though, the rest of the Rocks fell away towards the harbour in almost indescribable squalor. At Argyle Place, any evening in the 1850s, the children said their prayers before bed, the ladies did their embroidery, the gentlemen came home from the office in their spanking carriages. A few hundred yards away the pubs and stews were warming up for business in a bedlam of drunkenness, foul talk and illicit transaction. Goats, whores and footpads indiscriminately wandered the back alleys of the Rocks, whale-hunters and seal-killers thronged the taverns, rats were fought, opium was smoked, violent gangs flourished, drunken seamen were kidnapped, there was a rip-roaring Chinatown and a colony of destitute Maoris, and all down the steep lanes open sewers tumbled, ‘maint
ained in a constant state of moisture’‚ as was graphically reported in 1858, ‘by new accretions of liquid filth’.
With violent contrasts went violent shifts of fortune. Suddenness always seems to have been a Sydney characteristic, and sudden wealth especially. Almost from the beginning an explosive capitalism erupted here. Although the original settlement was ostensibly a bureaucracy of the most absolute kind, the officers of the New South Wales Corps very soon made themselves masters of its economy. They established corners in rum and many other commodities, and one at least opened a retail store; most of his customers were his own soldiers, and if they ventured to complain about his extortionate prices (he worked to a 100 per cent profit) he merely threatened to have them flogged. In no time the cleverest of these moonlighters had been transformed from officers in perhaps the least fashionable regiment in the entire British Army to rich landed gentry. Taken out to Sydney at Government expense, paid Government salaries, given land by Government, assigned convict labour by Government, they sold their produce to the Government commissariat and became immediate aristocrats.
Speculators of other kinds made equally quick fortunes. Ships’ captains, their holds crammed with goods from England, easily doubled their money on each voyage, and it is said that in the 1820s Sydney was a favourite and profitable outlet for stolen goods, smuggled from London for sale by George Street jewellers. Some of the emancipated convicts became very archetypes of nouvelle richesse. One year they were poor bondsmen, the next they were bosses of great concerns. We hear of one emancipist, in the 1850s‚ leaning stately on a gold-headed cane in a phaeton drawn by four ponies and driven by liveried postilions; of another, aged and illiterate, ‘dashing along in a perfectly appointed tandem, with a lovely girl beside him’. Sometimes they threw vastly expensive parties: at a dinner given for the emancipated forger John Tawell, in 1831, one of the guests took a moment off to calculate that thirteen of his fellow-diners possessed between them property worth £437,000 – perhaps A$30 million each by today’s standards. The origins of great fortunes were well-recognized. One mansion was frankly known as Frying-Pan Hall, because its owner had made his pile in ironmongery. Another was Juniper Hall, expressing its proprietor’s indebtedness to gin. Sydney doubtless laid a collective finger along the side of its nose when J. G. N. Gibbes, Collector of Customs, found the wherewithal to build the splendid villa at Kirribilli that is now the Sydney residence of the Governor-General of Australia, and it probably surprised nobody to hear that the well-educated and gifted Bradley of Bradley’s Head, who had gone home to such a distinguished naval career, had been sentenced to death in London for his fraudulent practices, and very nearly shipped back to Sydney as a convict.1
From our distance of time it seems astonishing how quickly the struggling penal colony turned into a rich man’s elysium. Everywhere comfortable houses sprouted – not vast English-style mansions, but agreeable neo-classical villas that fitted very well into the vaguely Mediterranean environment. All around the harbour they presently stood, and among the farmlands of the interior, with names like Curzon Hall or Tusculum, with terraced gardens and avenues of Norfolk pines, with elaborate outbuildings where the convicts toiled, with imported silver and furniture of polished cedarwood and even, whether by inheritance or imagination, family portraits. By the 1840s, when one sailed up the harbour, these pretty buildings ornamented almost every bay and promontory of the southern shore. They looked urbane, but they all too often represented no more than crude opportunism. The early commerce of this city was elemental, and no-holds-barred. Its first industries were whaling and sealing. The booms that later enriched it were based upon wool and gold. These were abrupt, un-creative sources of wealth, and convinced Sydney people, perhaps, that they might thrive not by the old-fashioned means of making things, or even growing things, but by snaring, catching, grazing, swapping digging things out of the earth or even, in later years, imagining things.
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And how much of this old rawness, abruptness, bitterness of experience, keenness of opportunity, lack of scruple and abundance of gusto is really apparent in Sydney in the last decade of the twentieth century? One can only generalize, and I must start by saying that at its best the style of contemporary Sydney is delightful. Almost every foreigner thinks so (although almost every Sydney citizen is likely to say, as citizens say everywhere, that it’s not like it was in the old days …). To my mind it still displays the ‘open sturdy manliness’ that Alexander Harris, writing in the 1840s, thought characteristic of the plainer emancipists. Nine times out of ten the Sydney person in the street, in the shop, on the bus, will be friendly, polite and remarkably frank, and young people coming from Britain, in particular, immediately feel a sense of euphoric hope and liberty. The supranational, supra-ethnic fraternity of kind, educated, open-minded people, which exists like a freemasonry in every city of the world, is powerfully represented here, and a palpable sense of fellowship is apparent, too, in the camaraderie of pubs and clubs, and in a penchant for reunions. There was a reunion recently of mothers, babies and grandchildren at one of the city’s maternity hospitals, and there are often gatherings of descendants of particular nineteenth-century settlers, or immigrants from some Greek islet, or survivors of a destroyer crew from the Second World War: the reunion of the Anzac soldiers of 1914–18 is by tradition the one occasion of the year when the police turn a blind eye upon the old soldiers’ gambling game of two-up, and the little band of veterans takes the chance, encouraged by all, to throw a bet or two in Hyde Park.
There is much goodness in Sydney. Every kind of charitable and altruistic organization flourishes here, bat-defenders and seal-supporters, environmental protest movements and Aboriginal protection leagues. Sydney people are hospitable to strangers rather in the way Americans used to be, before worldliness set in, and in most matters the city is outspoken and un-shockable. I always admire the impeccably lady-like shoppers who buy their groceries so imperturbably among the porn shops, strip shows and general scatologicals of King’s Cross. Startled though I was, I was impressed when, pausing in Martin Place to sympathize with a young woman who seemed to have difficulty in getting up from her bench, she thanked me courteously but added confidingly that ‘it was a good lay, anyway’. I liked the sound of the man who wrote in a Letter to the Editor: ‘I always read Gittin’s column, sometimes I wonder why I bother. I think February’s effort was probably the biggest load of crap he’s written so far.’
‘Melbourne people come as you are,’ said a Sydney card inviting people to a party in 1930s dress, and the joke exemplified this city’s cocky and lighthearted self-regard. Most Sydney people seem immensely proud of their city, immensely proud to be its citizens, and this happy confidence is contagious; it makes the outsider, too, feel proud to be there – when I look out from my balcony across the harbour I feel positively possessive, and nobody is more invariably moved than I am, I swear, by the two floodlit flags that fly so bravely in the evening above the Harbour Bridge.
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At its worst, on the other hand, the Sydney style can be disconcertingly nasty. This city is still more hardened to the brutalities of life than most of its peers. Can one imagine people in Copenhagen or Vancouver looking up, as breakfasters at a King’s Cross café did one day in 1990, to see a man with a baseball bat clubbing a barking dog to death across a street? Would Le Progrès of Lyon include among a celebratory group of city worthies, as the Sydney Morning Herald recently did, a rugby player convicted of smuggling heroin from Thailand? Are there many opera houses, besides Sydney’s, where a conductor in the pit has been seen pulling an imaginary lavatory chain when a soprano concludes an aria? On a single Sydney day the following local items find their way into my notebook:
¶ A television advertisement for a pick-up truck shows two louts hitting each other with crowbars, butting each other’s heads and kicking each other in the testicles, until one clinches the dispute by applying an electric sander to his opponent’s face.
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A sixty-two-year-old woman is accused of murdering her husband, binding his corpse from head to foot and concealing it in a brick crypt below her rumpus room.
¶ A former Premier of New South Wales having expostulated about the behaviour of the clientele at his local pub, who go in for vomiting, urinating, copulating and self-injection in the streets around his house, a gentle acquaintance of mine wonders what he is making such a fuss about.
¶ The mother of a recently murdered homosexual millionaire throws herself under a train.
¶ Walking through the suburb of Newtown in the afternoon I hear a girl call to her lover on the other side of the street, as she might remind him not to forget the mayonnaise: ‘I work my fucking arse off for you, you don’t even pay the fucking rent.’
¶ A private detective complains to the Press that policemen have been searching for a dead body under his tennis-court. ‘It absolutely repulses me,’ he says, ‘that they would even suggest I have some poor soul buried in my back yard.’
There can be poison to this crudity, too. The unfortunate Danish architect Jøern Utzon, returning home in despair after months of controversy concerning the building of his Opera House, thought the débâcle as much malignant as incompetent and called it Malice in Blunderland. He was by no means the only eminent alien to feel himself savaged by Sydney, and there are still suggestions that when in 1956 Eugene Goossens the conductor was caught at Sydney Airport with pornographic literature in his suitcase, he had been shopped by ill-wishers. I was amused to watch the exchanges when one of the most celebrated of London newspaper harridans ran the gamut of the TV interviews in Sydney. Asked once why she was so unpleasant about people in her column she replied, ‘I tell the truth, and that’s why I’m famous, and not a little television reporter like you’: but into the eye of that little television reporter there crept a gleam of loathing so pure, so well-honed, so evident and so rooted in history that we all knew who had won.