Sydney

by Jan Morris

  The best of these people are fluent, idiomatic, friendly and enthusiastic. They are also delightfully accessible. Cherishing a romantic but purely frivolous desire to see the actual botanical specimens collected by Joseph Banks during Cook’s visit to Botany Bay, I called the Botanical Gardens and asked if I might. In no time at all two devoted botanists were producing from their drawers those aged plants and flowers, with no sign of resentment at my jejune motives.1 I scarcely had to mention an interest in inner suburban arrangement, than I was the guest of a lively lawyer at his own suburban house. Hardly had I met my first Sydney politician than I was eating oysters with him in the restaurant of Parliament House. I expressed one day my curiosity about Sydney social mores, and In a trice I was being entertained by a group of academic sociologists – two young research fellows of progressive views, a scholar of Russian origins and a fluent command of the Cantonese language, a veteran head of department dressed, in speckled scarf and safari suits more or less as for the Battle of Britain.

  If there is a generic failing to this class of Sydneysider, it is perhaps a tendency to the omniscient. What a lot they know, and how they talk about it! Do not even try to raise the subject of abstract expressionism – your host is certain to have just returned from the current de Kooning exhibition in Manhattan, and is very likely the author of a monograph on Jackson Pollock, You think you know Roussillon well? Not half as well as the woman at the cocktail party, who will very soon put you right about the origins of Catharism. Just back from Prague – great chum of Gore Vidal – living in Paris then – not as good as the Connaught – bumped into Tom Wolfe – surely it should be pronounced Portmyrion, should it not? – bottomless is the experience, liberal the advice, of the Sydney intelligentsia. I kept a note during one stay in the city, and found that in two months I had been helpfully instructed on the rules of cricket, how best to cook rice-pudding, the Sykes–Picot Agreement, the architectural accomplishments of the Royal Navy, bats, post-modernism and the role of the Privy Council in the Common Law.

  Of course there are some very conservative families in this varied milieu. The private schools of Sydney seem staunchly traditional still, and produce alumni of ordered and stoic mould. On a very hot day I once overtook a long line of girls from one such school labouring up the steep track to South Head, wearing thick school blazers over their cotton dresses: breathless but uncomplaining they climbed, too well-disciplined to remove their jackets, until I heard a lady-like call come winging up the hill behind – ‘You can take your blazers off – pass it on – You can take your blazers off – pass it on’ – up the line and past me, speeding on its way like a watchword, while one by one the girls dutifully peeled off their blazers in its wake.

  There is also, though, a potent stratum of the unorthodox. if not the anarchic, among this bourgeoisie. A sizeable proportion of it is homosexual, which gives it an agreeable element of the raffishly defiant, and there is much of the exhibitionism which has always been endemic to this city. One of the most extraordinary houses I know is an unassuming small villa in Neutral Bay whose flamboyantly individualist owner has turned it into a kind of grotto, its walls painted all over with trompe-l’oeil and tomfoolery, where an apparently constant succession of casual, unannounced and sometimes it seems totally unknown guests drops in at random for drinks or meals, at all hours of the day, heartily welcomed by the owner, his dogs, and unidentified acolytes.

  *

  No need to find individual precedents for the Sydney proletariat. Its founding antecedents were a social condition and a historical phenomenon. Far more than the Establishment or the rentiers, it is still the blue-collar working people that set the tone of the city. Their bounding but indolent optimism strikes almost all visitors, and this is surely a legacy of old trials. To endure the road-gangs without losing one’s spirit, to emerge as so many convict families did into competence and respectability, to have overcome the old unfairnesses of life, to feel oneself the equal of one’s former gaolers, to have defied the law by surviving the worst it could do, to be able to sit back at last without being bullied or flogged – just to have achieved all this, the common experience, was surely to achieve a permanent spirit of euphoria, No other populace on earth has grown out of such handicaps, and survived them with such panache.

  Often the convicts were heroically scornful of the authority that had them so terribly in its grasp, I am proud to say that the only Morris who arrived in Sydney with the First Fleet (seven years for stealing a pair of breeches and a waistcoat) absconded within five days and was never seen again, giving me the tantalizing fancy that somewhere among the Aborigines there may be cousins of mine. Many others escaped too – it was easy to abscond from this prison without walls. Some just wandered hopelessly about the bush for a few days, but a few got away in epic style. In 1808 a gang of convicts seized a trading-brig that was lying in Sydney Cove itself, beside Campbell’s Wharf and in full view of Government House; they got as far as the South China Sea before they were caught. More inspiringly still, one night in 1791 Mr and Mrs William Bryant, with their two small children and seven other convicts, stole the Governor’s own cutter and rowed it down the harbour past the sentries, through the Heads and out to the open sea. Mary Bryant, a sailor’s daughter from Cornwall, was the captain of this desperate enterprise. It took them ten weeks to sail 3,000 miles in one of the great open-boat voyages of history – repeatedly blown helplessly off-course, once stranded on the Great Barrier Reef, once pursued by cannibals, only to be arrested in the end in Dutch Timor and shipped back to England. Mrs Bryant lost her husband and both her children in the course of the adventure, but lived herself to be unconditionally pardoned, and became a seven-day wonder In Britain as The Girl from Botany Bay.1

  We read of marvellous courage in the suffering of punishment – men and boys who had been mere hooligans In Britain became stoic champions in Sydney, enduring year after year chainings, floggings and every kind of bullying. Their insolence could be indomitable. Maurice Fitzgerald, for instance, an Irishman sentenced to 300 lashes for his part in an insurrection in 1804, knocked both of his warders down the moment he was unstrapped from the triangle, inspiring his namesake the poet Robert David FitzGerald to write:

  Could I announce

  That Maurice as my kin I say aloud

  I’d take his irons as my heraldry, and be proud.

  When in 1834 John Jenkins, an absconded convict, was found guilty of murder and asked if he had anything to say before the death sentence was pronounced, he told the judge that ‘he did not care a bugger for dying, or a damn for anyone in court, and that he would as soon shoot every bloody bugger in court’.1

  To be obedient or to be intractable were alternatives, to be fatalist was almost obligatory. You could keep your head down and count the years, you could spit at the system and suffer the consequences. Either way, an acceptance of destiny must have been part of the communal ethos. The convict Matthew Eberingham, transported for the most forgivable of all crimes, obtaining books by false pretences, died in 1817 after twenty-three years of exile, and expressed it on his Sydney tombstone:

  Farewell vain world i have had enough of thee

  and am Carless what though canst say of me

  thy smiles i court not nor they frowns i fear

  beneath this turf my head Lies quiet hear.

  Doubtless all these miseries bred jealousy, treachery and sycophancy, but they also bred in a few people an irresistible determination to win, however rotten the hands life had dealt them. A handful of convicts, almost the moment they had served their terms, launched themselves into careers of full-blooded capitalism, and became extremely rich.

  For example they called Sam Terry the Botany Bay Rothschild, so wonderfully did he prosper after his time with the labour gangs (for theft, the records say‚ though his descendants preferred to think it ‘for political offences’). Emancipated in 1809, Terry began his free life as a publican, having married a usefully endowed wife. He went on by astute
usury to be a landowner, with scattered properties all over Sydney and 19,000 acres in the country, worked for him by 100 assigned convicts. He was a rough crude man, only just literate, plain of appearance and miserly of instinct, but he built himself one of the largest houses in Sydney – it had stables, a coach house and a central courtyard, and somewhere within it, so legend said, Terry kept much of his vast fortune locked away in hard cash. Into it the Botany Bay Rothschild (by then himself proprietor of several convict transport ships) withdrew when he was paralysed by a stroke in 1834; from then until his death he could move only with the help of two servants, making rare excursions, ‘pale and bloated’, through the streets of the wondering town. Although his business methods were decidedly shady, if not actually criminal, Terry was burled with Masonic honours, and a regimental band played a funeral march for the old rascal.

  His contemporary Simeon Lord was a more sophisticated entrepreneur, and looks back at us from his portrait with a disturbingly calculating gaze. Lord was transported for theft in 1791, aged twenty. At the end of his term he set up a retail business, dealing in everything from soap to sheepskins, and became one of Macquarie’s token emancipists. He was appointed to the board of magistrates and shown off at Government House receptions. In time he came to have a hand in almost everything, every kind of business, every category of import, export, production or Investment. He owned 18,000 acres of farmland and eighteen blocks of Sydney town. He had a mill at Botany Bay. He managed a fleet of whalers, sealers and transport ships. He manufactured beaver hats, he experimented in paper production, and he built himself a house which outdid even Sam Terry’s – a three-storey building, with verandas on two floors, which towered above everything else like a portent of things to come.

  Most formidable of all, among these felon-plutocrats, was Mary Reibey. If it was hard for a male convict to become a millionaire in penal Sydney, it must have been almost inconceivably difficult for a female, yet Mary Reibey did it. When she was thirteen. in 1790, this Lancashire girl was sentenced to seven years’ transportation for stealing a horse (or borrowing it without permission, as she preferred to say). When she was seventeen she married a free businessman, and opened her own retail store. When she was thirty-five she was a comfortably-off widow with seven children and a thriving general business. When she was fifty she owned two ships, eight farms, many houses and a very large bank account Indeed (the Bank of New South Wales was one of her tenants). When she was sixty she was one of the best-known people in Sydney, often to be seen driving stylishly around town in a carriage drawn by two white stallions. When she was seventy she had built herself a mansion and could be characterized by the Anglican Bishop of Sydney as being ‘praiseworthy in the highest degree for her exertions in the cause of religion’. When she was seventy-five she died, a round-faced, pink-cheeked, bonneted, bespectacled and beribboned old matriarchy leaving heaps of money and a grandson to become, in the fullness of time, Premier of Tasmania.

  Could such careers be paralleled anywhere else on earth – not just rags-to-riches, but actually manacles-to-millionaires?

  *

  More fundamentally, the penal experience gave rise to an egalitarian staunchness that has become traditional to the Sydney character. Volumes have been written about the Australian condition of ‘mateship’, the male bond of working-class camaraderie which is thought to have been born in those penal days, and was certainly strengthened in war. To foreign sensibilities it always sounds a little sickly, but alongside it there did grow a philosophy of simple loyalty which was articulated by many a colonial poet and balladeer, most nobly for my tastes by Adam Lindsay Gordon:

  This life is mostly froth and bubble,

  Two things stand like stone:

  Kindness in another’s trouble

  Courage in your own.

  The sentiments survive in Sydney still, if not always in comradeship, at least in commonality. Trade-union power is greatly diminished in Sydney nowadays, but fishermen, surfers, bowlers, policemen, criminals, yachtsmen, gamblers – all seem to work and play together with an uncommon intensity, as though they are kith and kin. The club spirit is strong, and so is the sense of brotherhood. BE READY, MATES, THAT’S ALL, says an epitaph I admire in Sydney’s Rookwood Cemetery.1

  For modern mateship at its most vigorous one need only go to one of the innumerable working-class social clubs – Rugby League Clubs, Workmen’s Clubs or clubs of the Returned Services League. Originally, I imagine, these were much like British Legion clubs in Britain, or Veterans’ Posts in the United States, but in 1956 the legalization of gambling machines in New South Wales fabulously transformed them. They became extremely rich, and around the batteries of poker machines that became their cores they built themselves lavish new premises, with excellent restaurants, glittering bars, dance floors with resident bands and every manifestation of popular hedonism. Some of them have splendid sports facilities too, and swimming-pools. Hardly a rock star is too expensive to be beyond the fees of these clubs, and though they often stand in dingy streets in dingy suburbs, and sometimes look from the outside pretty dingy themselves, inside they greet you with a most hospitable verve. They are the Workers’ Paradise sublimated, offering history a lesson in what Communism might have achieved, if it had not been so priggish.

  Not long ago the Sydney proletariat was altogether homogenous, being almost entirely of Anglo-Saxon or Celtic origin.2 This was the citizenry that made the reputation of Sydney – to this day, when the world imagines this city, it imagines your cheerful, boozy, prejudiced, lazy, brave and disputatious Ocker male (your Ocker female is somewhat mistier in the mind).1 He still exists. You see him a thousand times a day, in his stubby shorts and singlet, heaving crates about, mending telephone wires, reading the tabloids at ten in the morning with his feet up in the cab of his delivery van, or squatting on his haunches with his mates outside pubs at dinner-time.2 In him the Sydney male physique reaches its excelsis – no longer tall and stringy, but more solidly powerful – the thick-set brawn of the surfer or the rugby player, the drinker’s pot-belly. His accent is rank and twisted. He can be horribly oafish and ill-educated, especially when young, and is not always much fun on holiday in Bali, but in general his manners are blunt without being discourteous, and his humour is agreeably caustic. He seems, whatever his years, more or less ageless, and he possesses still a certain crude charisma that D. H. Lawrence attributed to another generation of Sydneysiders – ‘that air of owning the city that belongs to a good Australian’. In many other great cities the populace has outlived its old sterotypes: the Sydney masses remain just as we expect them to be.

  2. Indigenes

  Here since the beginning of Sydney, likely to be still hanging around If it ever conies to an end – here stand the indigenes, Today’s Sydney Aborigines are not people of the Iora tribe, which may well have been living here before there was a Sydney Harbour, but was extinct within half a century of the British arrival They are migrants from other districts, drawn here like everyone else by the magnetism of the big city, and often by now with strong infusions of white blood. Australian Aborigines they are, nevertheless, by conviction and by perception, and thus spiritual and historical descendants of the original inhabitants. They are at the heart of Sydney’s meaning, they bring out the worst and the best in it, and they have a right to an allegorical position in this book – a central position, that is, in its central chapter.

  I did not always think like this. I used to consider the Aborigines a marginal people, empty, pathetic and almost irrelevant, and I remember two episodes in particular which seemed at the time to sustain this sad conviction. One occurred at La Perouse (‘La Per’ to the locals), the suburb on the north shore of Botany Bay which contains Sydney’s oldest Aboriginal settlement. I drove out there one morning just to look around the place and, finding myself in a decidedly unwelcoming cul-de-sac, where mangy dogs bit at my tyres, and groups of young blacks stared at me with a kind of listless suspicion – turning hastily around at
the end of the street with a less than confident grinding of gears, I was just in time to see something that I had never anywhere in the world seen before. One Aborigine knocked another out, there and then, with a massive punch to the jaw before my very eyes. The man went down like a log, the attention of the bystanders was momentarily but still apathetically diverted, and I got out of the place before anything worse happened.

  The other occasion, years ago, was an Aboriginal rally at Alexandria Park in Redfern, where many of the black people live. This was to have been the conclusion of an Aboriginal Rights march through town, but it went sadly awry, and by the time I reached Alexandria Park seemed to have fizzled out altogether. All I found was a huddle of dark-skinned people around an open bonfire, surrounded by rubbish on the edge of the park, They greeted me with concern, offering me beer out of an ice-bucket, sidling around me and occasionally winking. A small thin boy with cotton wool stuffed in one ear wandered here and there with a black puppy on a string. Others kicked a football about in the gathering dusk, and around the fire a handful of old women looked sadly into the flames. A strong smell of alcohol hung over us, and the man with the bucket repeatedly urged me to have one for the road. Had the rally been a success, I asked? ‘Yeah,’ they said, and looked into the fire.