Sydney

by Jan Morris

  Built into this language is a caustic humour that Is as old as the city Itself. Sometimes it shows itself in pungent Invective – a politician may be likened to a human suitcase, characterized as an archetypal son-in-law or be accused of having ‘all the menace of a tea-urn’. Sometimes it is just gently sardonic. When there was a search for an official tourist slogan for Sydney, someone suggested SYDNEY – SUN, SIN AND SEWAGE: and the pupils of one of the Sydney schools have themselves translated their school motto, ‘I Hear, I See, I Learn’, into the Latinism ‘Audio, Video, Disco’.1

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  Donald Horne the political scientist called Australia the Lucky Country, and except during the city’s cyclical periods of depression most Sydney people would probably accept the description. They are lucky and they know it, to live upon this generous and generally even-tempered shore. ‘No worries’, is Sydney’s habitual nonchalant assurance, ‘not a problem’. Fortunately the consciousness of good fortune has not made the people smug, and even now they are innocently anxious to cast a happy Impression, to show their city In the best light and prove it World Glass.

  The chief people-watching site in Sydney is unquestionably Circular Quay, which offers a kaleidoscopic view of the generic Sydney style, leavened by coveys of tourists, but representative of most kinds and classes. Here we may see the last of the Dinky-di Aussies, in their shorts and long socks, sometimes wearing bosh hats and bearing themselves with a touch of bravado, like the kilted and sporraned Scotsmen who parade the streets of Edinburgh. Here we may see the Sydney office population en masse – on the whole a healthy, good-looking population, moving vigorously, laughing a lot. There are workmen with majestic beer-bellies, sitting on their haunches eating fruit, and ladies who are dressed as for royal garden-parties, but are probably just going shopping. Groups of semi-punks sometimes meander through, with yellow hair, silver-buttoned jackets and T-shirts incomprehensibly sloganed. A postman lopes past in bush hat and shorts, with a rucksack of mail on his back. Here and there along the quay solitary fishermen, in anoraks and baseball caps, bait their hooks with chunks of fish from plastic buckets. Around the corner at the oyster-bar businessmen are getting slowly and pleasurably sloshed on wine, beer, prawns and sunshine.

  It is a great place for buskers. There is a Japanese playing Danny Boy on a kind of zither, and a very slow-motion go-go dancer in a yellow straw hat. A serious young woman plays Bach on her clarinet. A black comedian raises a burst of laughter along by Pier 4, and an evangelist maintains that One Cannot Live Without God (‘quite untrue’, loudly and briskly retorts a man in a dark suit as he hastens by without a pause). Somewhere somebody is winding up his bagpipes. Towards the Opera House we may see a dark-haired girl, ten or eleven years old perhaps, playing Waltzing Matilda earnestly on her violin; her even smaller brother waits to turn over the page of her music (bound, we may note, in the Australian flag) while looking up into her face in just the pose of a small Renaissance cherub, in the foreground of a masterpiece.

  All around us people are pottering about, or enjoying a late breakfast with the morning paper, or consulting their guide-book maps, or exchanging computer files over omelettes and white wine, or strolling with beach gear and snorkels towards the Manly ferry. Except at rush hours, when waves of commuters come pouring through the ferry turnstiles, people are not half so agitated here as they are at most such city hubs. If they miss one boat they can always get the next. There isa train every few minutes. Another coffee? Why not, the office can wait. All through its history Sydney has been characterized as essentially easygoing, and easygoing it remains. it is a metropolis of the lucky country – lucky to get away with it.

  1 Though the local folklore and guide-books have him serving out this nightmare sentence, in fact the punishment went too far even for penal Sydney, and after some weeks Anderson was unchained from his rock; he was sent in the end to Norfolk Island, where he spent a few mercifully peaceful years as a cattle-guard and signal-man, before fading from his vale of tears.

  1 Instead, since he was by then an admiral, he was allowed to go and live in France, where he died in 1833.

  1 Though Somers did eventually rent Torestin, and the house that Lawrence himself rented at Thirroul, some thirty miles south of Sydney, was called Wyewurk.

  1 When asked what had happened to the last of them, a titled New Zealander, she said sweetly that he had gone down the plug-hole, back where he came from.

  1 A consummation I myself thought would most satisfactorily celebrate the 1988 Bicentennial.

  1 In The Sydney–Melbourne Book, edited by Jim Davidson, Sydney 1986.

  1 Edward Hargraves, discoverer of the goldfields, told his partner as they panned their first dust: ‘I shall be a baronet, you will be knighted, and my old horse will be stuffed, put in a glass case, and sent to the British Museum.’ None of it came true.

  1 In Mort’s Cottage, by Jill Buckland, Sydney 1988.

  2 By C. E. W. Bean, in the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–18.

  1 Into which Lord Mountbatten later married.

  1 Vernon Mount, more recently the headquarters of the Monster Motor Cycle and Car Club.

  1 Hence the old Sydney nicknames for first and tourist sections on aircraft – ‘Vaucluse’ and ‘Woolloomooloo’.

  1 In his contribution to Jim Davidson’s The Sydney–Melbourne Book.

  2 Double Bay very glitzy; St Ives very conservative; Granville – well: Q. What’s there to do in Granville? A. Go up to the Parramatta Road to watch the cars go by.

  1 Its name is pronounced Bon-dye, and is said to be an economical Aboriginal word meaning ‘the sound of waves breaking on the beach’.

  1 In Let’s Stalk Strine, Sydney 1965, a book described in its foreword as ‘above all, minatory and warmly human’. The Professor’s alter ego is Alastair Morrison.

  1 It also included, of course, lots of homely English idioms. When in the 1890s the infant son of the British commanding admiral in Sydney heard a coachman say ‘Ups a daisy’ as he lifted a bag, he asked his elder brother what it meant, ‘He told me, with a certain scorn at my not knowings that it was a very nice thing to say & you always said it on such occasions.’ (From the unpublished memoirs of Sir David Montagu Douglas Scott, 1985.)

  2 Semanticists believe it to have been influenced recently by the presence of so many New Zealanders in the city, so that Sydney people are more likely nowadays to drop their Ls, saying ‘miuwk’ for example instead of ‘milk’, and to flatten their vowels in some special way, so as to pronounce ‘six fat fish’ as ‘six fat fish’. These are permutations too subtle for my ear.

  1 Although the farmers share this enthusiasm with the Aboriginal people – and emphatically with me.

  1 Though to be honest I suspect the most truly contemporary Sydney phrase I came across during the writing of this book was displayed on a board by a girl waving goodbye to a departing warship: LUV YA BRUGIE.

  PEOPLE

  1. Majorities

  THE PEOPLE OF SYDNEY ARE SOMETIMES CALLED SYDNEY-siders. Nobody is quite sure why. Some theorists believe it originally meant people living on the north or Sydney side of the Murray River, as against the south or Melbourne side, while others think it merely referred to transported convicts – they were sent to the Botany Bay side of the world, and later the Sydney side, as American servicemen went home Stateside. Whatever its origins, it suits them. The word is sturdy, explicit and satisfied, and so on the whole are the people. Sydneysiders en masse are more easily recognizable, I think, than the inhabitants of most big cosmopolitan cities. Stylistically, historically and topographically theirs is a town of potent personality, and two centuries of settlement have created a citizenry to match.

  Once almost entirely of stock from the British Isles, now embracing Greeks, Italians, Yugoslavs, Vietnamese, Maltese, Thais, Turks, Lebanese, Russians, Hungarians, Syrians and scions of almost every other race you care to mention, homo Sydneyaticus, whether male or female, has been moulded generation by
generation into a species of its own. Sometimes I think it is the natural successor to the New Man travellers thought they found in the North America of the nineteenth century; perhaps it is even the celestial race that the poet Bernard O’Dowd hoped might evolve in Australia.1 The climate of this city, the food, the fresh air, the space and the general ease of living soon mutates peoples of very disparate roots into a recognizable kind – small island Greeks become husky, women whose parents lived wan in Lancashire become marvellous golden girls, and it seems to take no time at all for a slender Italian to become a whole-hog beer-swilling Aussie. If I spend too long in Sydney I sometimes develop recognizable Sydneyside symptoms myself.

  By now this is a self-generating species. Immigrants still come, but since 1981 more than half the people of Sydney have been Australian-born to two Australian parents. Short of some cataclysmic ethnic convulsion or climatic reverse, the young native-born Sydneysider of today is likely to be, so to speak, definitive. The mutation is, however, as much temperamental as physical. Sydney’s origins have influenced the city’s style, and I suspect they have profoundly influenced its psyche too. It took guts to get to Sydney in the first place, whether you came free or manacled in a convict ship. It took patience or cunning to endure captivity, and spirit to defy it. Force of character, if nothing better, was necessary to administer the convict community, and a thick skin, if nothing worse, to act as its gaolers. Complex feelings of rivalry, scorn and rejection governed early relations with the Aborigines. Only a keen eye for the main chance could exploit Sydney’s early disadvantages, and a fine discrimination between anarchy and discipline was necessary to evolve a free society out of a prison. All these characteristics are still apparent among the mass of the Sydneysiders, passed down the generations through the collective unconscious.

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  D. H. Lawrence said that Sydney had no rulers. He meant that it had no hereditary élite, but of course it always had a governing stratum of rich and powerful people. In the very beginning they formed a military oligarchy – the first nine Governors of New South Wales were all naval or military men – and later they evolved into a tough civil Establishment of officials and private citizens. They were the recognizable progenitors of contemporary Sydney’s upper crusty and they are often honoured in retrospect, at least by the more old-fashioned popular historians, with the sobriquet Father of This or That. Here are half a dozen examples:

  ¶ The unchallengeable Father of Sydney was Arthur Phillip, RN (1738–1814). His power over the original community was absolute, thousands of miles as he was from the nearest superior authority, and his commission was described at the time as ‘a more unlimited one than was ever before granted to any governor under the British Crown’. He could be arbitrary when his temper was aroused; when one of his servants was murdered by Aborigines he ordered a punitive expedition to behead ten natives in reprisal, bringing the heads back to him.1 On the whole, though, he exerted his autocracy temperately. A small man, with a small, sensitive, melancholy face, childless from two marriages, he was the son of a German language teacher and his English wife, and during periods of half-pay in his long naval career had twice been seconded to the Portuguese Navy. This perhaps gave him a wider perspective than most of his contemporaries (and experience as it happened of transporting convicts– to Brazil). From the start he saw Sydney as potentially ‘the most valuable acquisition Great Britain ever made’, and, sticking to this conviction against all odds, he went home to London sick and exhausted after four years on the job. When he died in Bath in 1814 Sydney was well on the way to a fine future, but he seems to have died a sad man anyway, by crashing his wheelchair through an upstairs window, perhaps on purpose.1 ‘A good man’, is how Lord Nelson simply described the Father of Sydney, and 200 years later Sydney generally agrees.

  ¶ Lachlan Macquarie (1761–1824), the first soldier-Governor, was a Hebridean with a sufficient conceit of himself: there are twenty-three streets named either Lachlan or Macquarie in Greater Sydney, together with nine Roads, seven Avenues, five Places, two Groves, a Drive, a Close, a Terrace, a Circuit, a University and a Shopping Centre. He had served in the American War of Independence and for many years in India, and sounds a pompous but generally kindly man, of relatively liberal views, who believed that the future of the colony lay above all in the hands of the emancipated convicts. He invited ex-prisoners to functions at Government House, he patronized the forger-architect Francis Greenway, and a blackmailer-poet named Michael Massey Robinson became his unofficial poet-laureate.2 Macquarie was sporadically sympathetic to Aborigines and beautified the colony with his building programme. Nevertheless he made many enemies – among the free settlers and the military officers, who thought him soft on criminals, sentimental about blacks and a threat to their own fortunes, among his superiors in London, who thought him irresponsible and extravagant. In the end he was accused by an imperial Commissioner of unwarranted expenditure on public works, and went home bitter and disappointed, though fulsomely remembered in modern Sydney: he looks from his portrait a Scotsman through and through, and he lies on the Isle of Mull beneath the appositely presumptuous inscription FATHER OF AUSTRALIA.

  ¶ The first, most thrusting and most unappealing of the Sydney tycoons was John Macarthur (1766–1834), Father of the Australian Sheep Industry. Son of a Plymouth draper, he came to Sydney in 1790 as paymaster of the New South Wales Corps, and soon made himself a fortune on the side. He became a landowner, a hugely successful businessman and a pioneering sheep-breeder. He built Elizabeth Farm, which we visited at Parramatta two chapters back, naming it for his much more engaging wife Elizabeth Veale, and he had visions of himself as a dynastic gentleman – the Macarthurs considered themselves descendants of King Arthur. He behaved all his life, though, like a vulgar parvenu. He quarrelled constantly, fighting a duel with his own commanding officer, leading the rebellion against Bligh, plotting against Macquarie and calling those he disliked Reptiles, Bloodsuckers or Cockatrices. He himself was nicknamed The Perturbator. Abnormally splenetic always, he went mad in the end, estranged from his unfortunate wife but able to fulfil his last ambition by supervising the building of the great mansion, Camden Park, which he envisaged for his descendants – a properly Sydney denouement to an archetypically Sydney life.

  ¶ Benjamin Boyd (1800–51), who might be called the Father of the Sydney Takeover, breezed into the city terrifically in 1842, sailing his magnificent armed yacht Wanderer through the Heads with an escort of four less glamorous vessels carrying his supplies and possessions. He had launched a bank in London to finance development in Australia, and he fell flamboyantly upon the New South Wales economy, acquiring thousands of acres of farmland, promoting whaling and export–import businesses and importing South Pacific islanders as indentured labour. For a few years he was one of Sydney’s heroes, like one of the fabulously successful corporate raiders of the 1980s, but before long his whole showy construction began to unravel. Of course he turned out to have been cooking the books, his ventures were spectacularly in debt, his bank presently collapsed, his indentured-labour scheme was exposed as the next worst thing to slavery, and he sailed away again in the Wanderer for the California oilfields. Sydney never saw him again, for in pursuance of a later dream to establish a private kingdom among the Papuans he vanished without trace in the Solomon Islands, very likely eaten by cannibals.1

  ¶ Robert Campbell (1769–1846), very Scottish, very canny, very pugnacious, very efficient, was the Father of Australian Commerce. Campbell arrived in Sydney in 1798. He had family interests in Calcutta, and based his fortune upon the growing trade between Sydney and British India. His ships became familiar throughout the eastern seas, and his warehouses and fine house on the western arm of Sydney Cove were dominant buildings of early Sydney – Campbell’s Cove it remains to this day. Campbell bred Arabian horses, imported Brahman cattle, kept peacocks, supported Bligh in his squabble with the officer corps and was in general an unimpeachably useful citizen, besides being enormo
usly rich – the sort who gets honorary degrees nowadays from the University of New South Wales, and attends gala performances at the Opera House.

  ¶ Thomas Mort (1816–78) celebrated his twenty-first birthday on the ship coming out from England. ‘Of a truth,’ he wrote then, ‘the sun had put on his most splendid and magnificent attire to grace my manhood’s dawn. I hoped it was a bright omen of future Success.’ He gave it a capital S, and it came true. Mort became the Father of the Australian Meat Industry by introducing refrigerated ship services to England, and he built the dry dock at Balmain, and founded sundry marine repair companies and engineering works and auction houses and real-estate concerns, and built himself a mansion at Darling Point. He had advanced ideas for the welfare of his workers, and was considered a model Sydneysider – there is a grateful statue of him in downtown Sydney still. For myself, all the same, I am rather haunted by his report on a visit to the Destitute Children’s Asylum in the suburb of Randwick, which he contemplated as the convenient nucleus of a silk industry. The Asylum offered three great advantages, he told his fellow-promoters: ground for the planting of mulberry trees, a big room for the silkworms, and ‘the labour of the children free’ – three very important items, emphasized the philanthropist.