by Jan Morris
Then there was Sir Henry Browne Hayes, an Anglo-Irish squire transported for fourteen years in 1801 for having abducted an heiress. As one of life’s irrepressible rebels Hayes did endure hardships during his sentence, spending some time in the penal coal mines at Newcastle, 100 miles up the coast from Sydney, and some on Norfolk Island; he once complained querulously that St Patrick took no more notice of his prayers than if he were ‘some wretched thief in a road-gang with manacles on my legs’. For the most part, though, he was allowed to live as a gentleman should, attended by the valet he had brought with him from Ireland. He bought some land on the southern harbour shore, used the labour of fellow-convicts to build an agreeable stone house upon it, and filled a ditch all around with 150 tons of specially imported Irish peat, to keep the snakes out. Pardoned in 1812 by the intervention of the Prince Regent, Hayes returned none the worse for his experiences to live happily ever after at his delightful family mansion in County Cork.1
On the other side of the legal fence, but equally advantaged by his rank, was Sir Frederick Pottinger, Baronet, a Pottinger of the Berkshire Pottiegers, whose father was the first Governor of Hong Kong and whose cousin Eldred, ‘Pottinger of Herat’, was a celebrated hero of the Indian frontier wars. Sir Frederick seems to have been a true-born failure. Getting into money difficulties in his late twenties, in 1860 he resigned his commission in the Coldstream Guards and enlisted as a trooper in the New South Wales Mounted Police, employed in rounding up the outlaws known in Australia as bushrangers. Although very soon promoted to sub-inspector, when his baronetcy was inadvertently discovered, he was famously ineffective in this role, his failure to catch one popular villain being immortalized in a Sydney ballad:
Sir Frederick Pott shut his eyes for the shoot
And missed in the usual way.
But the ranger proud, he laughed aloud,
And bounding rode away!
But if Pottinger seldom succeeded in shooting a bushranger, in the end this hapless toff succeeded in fatally shooting himself, accidentally with his own revolver while boarding a coach. Through it all he remained the patrician anyway, and Sydney recognized it. His deathbed was in his own room at the Victoria Club, and his funeral was attended by the Premier of New South Wales.
Some of the colonial gentry were bemused by English social pretensions. It was wonderful how many of the early free settlers in this remarkably uninviting colony seem to have been related to lairds and baronets at home, or had grown up on grand family estates. In 1853 William Charles Wentworth, one of the colony’s most forceful politicians, actually proposed the establishment of a formal New South Wales aristocracy, with its own ranks of nobility (‘Botany Bay Barons’, his opponents mocked); and when in the following year a Voluntary Artillery Corps was formed ‘among the young gentlemen in the service of Government’, it was assumed that paid help would be found to clean the guns. Landowners, in particular, very soon acquired lofty airs. In 1838 a new church was opened at Cook’s River, four miles from Sydney Cove, the celebratory buffet was served in three sessions, just as in Old England – the first for the carriage folk, the second for the local farmers, the third for the workmen who had built the church.
Many shoots of snobbism took root, from a general toadying to visiting nobility to a preoccupation with suitable dress. The apparatus of visiting cards and proper introductions was rigorously upheld. The Bank of Australia (founded by graziers) was the bank for gentlemen, the Bank of New South Wales (tainted by convict association) the bank for the people. It was not the done thing to walk in the Domain on Sundays, because maidservants and their boyfriends went there. In 1838 a citizen was ejected from the Queen’s Birthday Ball at Government House on the grounds that during his military service he had been only a sergeant-major: he argued in vain that he had married the daughter of a lieutenant. When in 1843 the first Lord Mayor of Sydney threw a popular fancy-dress ball on behalf of his newly formed City Council, many of the city fashionables declined to come – they were, as a contemporary satirist wrote,
All pure merinos, trained to keep
Their distance from your coarse-woolled sheep.
There is plenty of snobbery still, too, whether it be expressed in footling dress codes at jumped-up pubs, or in the parade of bigwigs in medals, orders and tiaras which preens itself whenever royalty is around. It is not entirely a desire for an excellent education, we may be sure, which ensures that the great Sydney private schools have waiting lists of thousands, and anyone who thinks this is a city beyond convention should read the ten-page dress code issued to women lawyers in 1990 by one of its best-known firms. Long-sleeved blouses, says this ineffable directive, ‘convey the most credible image’, and with them suits must be worn, preferably navy-blue, black or charcoal-grey (their jackets to be buttoned when standing, unbuttoned when sitting) together with anti-static slips five centimetres shorter than their skirts …
One of the sillier Sydney modes, copied like many another from Manhattan, divides restaurants into fashionable and unfashionable segments – some tables desirable and frequented by the famous, some (collectively nicknamed Siberia) absolutely unacceptable if you have any geese of status. On the face of it one table generally looks to the uninitiated very much like another, and it was fun when a mischievous journalist published table-plans of the trendiest Sydney eating-houses, clearly demarcating their Siberias, and puncturing not a few complacencies.
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Where one lives is also more socially important in Sydney than in most cities of my acquaintance. It was a long time before an emancipated convict, however rich, was able to build himself a house on the harbour front, and those sprawling suburbs are largely identified by class.1 I am told the districts used to be less homogeneous, most communities including people of all ages and all kinds. Now sociologists say that to a degree unexampled elsewhere they specialize in old residents or young, rich or poor, immigrant or native-born. Social maps of the city, delineating its character by blodges of colour, show heavy concentrations of blue (the rich colour) in the northern and eastern suburbs, wide examples of red (‘relatively poor’ is as far as the sociologists will go) in the south and west. Even within the blue there are differentiations – the north-shore suburbs are the place for high earning power, the eastern suburbs for great assets.
Some suburbs are of course still socially mixed: opposite an attractive row of small villas in Newtown I noticed one day a graffito saying GARBAGE-SUCKING SCUM LIVE HERE. Others are in a state of fierce social flux, as the energy of the market shifts their condition: the sociologist Peter Spearitt wrote in 1986 that ‘when Sydney gentrifiers invade a working-class Sydney suburb they know no mercy’.1 Others again maintain their social reputations more or less inviolate down the generations. La Perouse, down on Botany Bay, has never been able to escape its multiple social disadvantages (an Aboriginal settlement, a prison, toxic inductions and an unlovely setting) while any Sydney citizen has a mental image of the kind of person you are likely to be, if you say you live in Double Bay, St Ives or Granville.2 ‘This is not a baby area,’ an acquaintance of mine was told decisively by a shop assistant, when she asked for bottled food in North Sydney.
A charmer among these perennials is Hunters Hill, one of the most self-contained and gentlemanly of the suburbs. It is not on the flashier reaches of the harbour, but lies west of the bridge, where the Lane Cove River meets the Parramatta, and is compactly tucked away on a spit of land between the rivers. It is ranked only twenty-eighth in the suburban-opulence roster, and is the smallest local-government area in Sydney, but it is said that hardly anybody moves out of the place, so stable and village-like is its character. It has a town hall, and a tea-shop, and a post office with a postmaster in blue shorts and spectacles. It has lots of trees, verandas, cats, garden-seats and narrow bosky lanes, together with a bowls club and, inevitably, CRUSH – Concerned Residents Under Siege in Hunters Hill. In Hunters Hill you see very old ladies being helped through garden gates by solicitous sons, and high
-spirited children with trim satchels being met at school by personable young mothers in Volvos. After the Beijing massacre in 1989 the municipal council of this civilized community predictably declined to endorse a planned visit to China by one of its staff members: the People’s Republic of China accused Hunters Hill of interfering in Chinese affairs and being friendly to criminals and lawbreakers – charges received with perfect equanimity, I would imagine, by its burghers, and described by its Mayor merely as being ‘a little harsh’.
Nothing much changes in Hunters Hill. Everything has changed in Balmain, which occupies another peninsula not far away across the harbour. Balmain began life as the first commuter suburb, to be reached by boat from the city centre, and in mid-Victorian times it was a favoured residential area for the bourgeoisie. In the 1850s, however, a shipyard was opened there, with a dry dock and large repair yards, and Balmain was proletarianized. Hundreds of workers’ cottages were built, dozens of pubs arose. By 1920 the Balmain Council was ambiguously declaring that Balmain’s ‘industrial qualifications far surpass those of its residential claims’ – which meant that it had become dirty, smoky, over-crowded and of low taxable value. By 1953 all the aldermen of the local council had been removed from office because of corruption, and a powerful criminal underworld had set up shop in the place.
Now the dry dock is only a memory, the Balmain Mafia is said to be dispersed, and the suburb has once again been transformed. It is still an untidy congeries of hilly streets, pub-speckled and poor in parts, but long ago the lift-off of gentrification occurred. Little workmen’s cottages are pretty with trellis-work and bougainvillaea. Pubs are popular with young accountants. Authors write novels, and at the bottom of steep lanes down to the water handsome launches stand on slipways. Chic invests the town centre, where there are Japanese restaurants and real-estate offices and gourmet shops and alternative-medicine surgeries and a Float-Tank Centre. When I looked in one morning to catch an assault case in the magistrate’s court, in this once notorious hive of criminals, the victim failed to appear, the defendant could not be found, the police had no evidence to offer and I was the only spectator in court.
Bondi, on the ocean, is another readily categorized suburb.1 Densely clustered around its celebrated sand and surf, a mass of red-tiled bungalows and modest high-rise apartment blocks, it has long been strongly Jewish and is now popular with New Zealanders, especially Maoris. Its famous promenade is dull and shabby – to most foreigners, one of the great disappointments of Sydney – but it remains on the whole a frank, hail-fellow kind of place, where fundamental Oz survives the assaults of gentrification, cosmopolitanism and changing morality: middle-class, middle-income, middle-of-the-road, and for all its plethora of faces and languages, unmistakably Australian.
On the other hand Chippendale, an enclave near the University of Sydney, is decidedly un-classifiable. This a small oblong bounded by four noisy city streets, and though its own main street is called Myrtle Street, and is crossed by Rose Street, and bounded by Pine, it is uncompromisingly urban. Originally industrial, its architecture is unnoticeable, but its atmosphere is famously tolerant and eclectic. Chippendale is very tight-knit, very much its own place, coloured on those maps a poorish red but in fact housing people of all kinds. I went to dinner there one evening at the house of one of Australia’s most distinguished authors. My fellow-guests, all near neighbours, included a politically active lawyer, another writer and two artists, and the food was brought in from the take-away Lebanese restaurant around the corner. After dinner my host took me a little way down the road to show me the site, perfectly located between a side alley and one of those busy boundary highways, of a well-publicized recent murder.
The name of Mount Druitt, in the west, has lately been adopted by the press as a synonym for working-class Sydney – distinctly red on the social map, where the poor bloody taxpayer lives, where the archetypal voter waits to be polled, where the cannon-fodder would come from in a war. It is quite a pleasant place on the way to the Blue Mountains, but has an obscurely makeshift feeling to it – something messy, something temporary, with muddled shacks here and there, and more rubbish than is usual in this city. I take this to be because it is out here in the western suburbs that Sydney’s newcomers generally settle, on their way they hope to bluer parts. Some such western suburbs have been utterly metamorphosed by the latest waves of Asian immigration. Cabramatta in particular seems for the moment at least to have been altogether detached from the rest of Sydney. Its centre is an ordinary enough commercial fulcrum in a lightly modernist style, but walking through it is precisely like walking through a provincial town in one of the more stable and prosperous countries of east Asia. Hardly a face, young or old, is not oriental Whole classes of Vietnamese schoolchildren pass by. Vietnamese housewives emerge from every shop. There are smells of Asian cooking, sounds of Asian music. The population is very young, scrupulously clean, and impeccably tidy, as though it has been expressly selected to inhabit a model town. Here and there one sees elderly white Australians bewilderedly wandering, as if in foreign territory.
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Still, when all is said, on the whole this is a naturally sociable and egalitarian city. There is a statue of Burns in the Domain, and though he might have laughed at Sydney’s streak of social sycophancy, and would probably have been shocked by its racism, I think he would have agreed that here a man generally is a man for a’ that. ‘Now girls, remember they’re not all for you,’ said a waiter at an excessively modish Sydney banquet, placing a box of dessert chocolates between me and an even maturer and far grander dame. Before very long those Cabramatta Asians will doubtless be talking Sydney English, and stylistically this famous dialect is the great binding force of the city. To foreign ears its sinewy sounds perfectly vocalize the place, and also seem more absolutely Australian than any others. The Australian vernacular was born here, after all, and it was Professor Afferbeck Lauder of Sinney University who first codified it.1 Sydney English is strong, strident and lively – not as creative as the street-talk of California or black America, but still always on the move.
It began with Cockney thieves’ slang of the eighteenth century, the half-secret argot of the English underworld. This was brought out in many varieties and in full flow by the convicts of the First Fleet, and was doubtless crossed en voyage with elements of Anglo-Irish and English provincial dialects. Tench called it the ‘flash’ or ‘kiddy’ language. It was ‘infatuating cant’, he thought, so obscure that it was sometimes necessary to have interpreters in courts, and its eradication among the convicts would ‘open the path to reformation’. Not a hope! The language of their origin, craft and brotherhood was the one possession the convicts inviolably held, and they bequeathed its vigour and its potency to the free generations that succeeded them – perhaps its guild qualities too, for when in 1990 a crooked doctor and a bent solicitor were taped talking to each other about criminal ventures, they were found to converse in a semi-illiterate underworld jargon. In earlier years the Sydney dialect included cryptic elements of rhyme, like the East End slang of London: to go to the barber was to go down to Sydney Harbour, Jimmy Grants were immigrants.1
Sydney English has never lost its Cockney twangs though its vowels have grown broader as the generations have passed, and its inflections have shifted.2 The language is perhaps not so witty as Sydney citizens often suppose it to be. Much of it consists of an infantile preference for cosy abbreviation‚ so that a can of beer is a tinny, a bathing-costume is a cozzy, a U-turn is a U-ie, sickles means sick leave, a pollie is a politician, a lippie is a lipstick, a westy is someone from the western suburbs, a Greenie is somebody supportive of natural conservation, a ute (short for utility) is a pick-up truck, Darlo is Darlinghurst, Paddo is Paddington, and brekkie, bikey and boaty are perhaps sufficiently puerile to be self-explanatory. Nor is the vocabulary of man-in-the-street discourse very striking, its chief characteristic being an ineradicable fondness for the endearment ‘Mate’. The humorist Nino Culotta (
alias John O’Grady) published his book They’re a Weird Mob in 1957, but his reported greeting between two working men still rings true today:
‘’Ow yer goin’ mate orright?’
‘Yeah mate. ’Ow yer goin’ orright?’
‘Orright mate.’
Nicknames and idioms are far better. Sydney has always loved them. Long ago immigrant girls used to be given the names of the ships they had arrived on, like Matilda Agamemnon, or Susan Red Rover, while for years Sydney policemen were nicknamed Israelites because most of them had sailed out from England on board the Exodus. Criminals, hermits and general originals have always been given colourful sobriquets, too, from old ones like Whaler Joe, Sudden Solomon, the Earl and Rock Lizard to Tom the Terror, Abo Henry or Disco George today. I like the words ‘bubbler’ for a drinking fountain, ‘bludger’ for lazy, ‘chock’ for a chicken, ‘hoon’ for a street hoodlum (formerly ‘larrikin’), ‘Cocky’ (short for cockatoo) for a small farmer, and hence ‘Cockies’ Joy’ for golden syrup.1 I am intrigued by the use of ‘identity’ to mean ‘personality’ – a TV identity, a Colourful Racing Identity. A sly-grog shop beautifully describes, it seems to me, premises illegally selling alcohol. Nine Nuns in a Rugby Scrum nicely sums up the Opera House, the Coathanger is perfect for the Harbour Bridge, the Sydney Tower really does look just like a Plunger. To perve almost onomatopoeically expresses looking at someone libidinously. Silvertails is a good word for the well-heeled, rorting is horribly expressive of fiddling the accounts, dobbing someone in is better than telling tales on them, Pom really does fit many kinds of Englishmen, Dinky-di encapsulates the purest kind of Australianness, and I know of no handier way of explaining your daughter’s resident boyfriend than calling him her de facto – a euphemism which seems to have been in use since the first days of convict registration. Often and again Sydney citizens surprise one with a quaint or apposite usage. ‘Take a squiz,’ says the shopgirl, inviting you to look around. ‘She’s a rural,’ says a schoolgirl of a friend visiting from the countryside. ‘It’s ticking like buggery now,’ says a patient after a heart operation. ‘Sydney’s going down the gurgler,’ says a businessman complaining about interest rates. ‘Rugby’s getting a bit robust,’ says a sportsman who disapproves of violence on the field. Sometimes such turns of phrase are given sanction, if not permanency, by the news media – weather forecasters prophesying a beaut, a bonzer or a bottler, or the Sydney Morning Herald reporting on the problems of bikies In city traffic.