by Jan Morris
As we shall later see, Frenchmen were the first foreign visitors ever to set foot in British Sydney, and they have often cropped up in the city’s life. One of the ablest of the convict artists was the Frenchman Charles Rodius, who had been fool enough to get caught stealing a suitcase while on a visit to London in 1829; in Sydney he produced a series of lithographs of Aboriginal notables – perceptive, compassionate and haunting, but actually intended for the information of phrenologists. Hunters Hill was founded by two French émigrés in the 1840s, as a speculative project, and was for years almost a French enclave – the French Consul had a house there. French chefs have always been in demand, of course, until recently French restaurants were always the most expensive, and it was a French valet who committed one of the most notable crimes of early Sydney. In 1845 Jean Videll, having quarrelled with his employer Thomas Warne, bludgeoned him to death, dismembered him with an axe, stuffed him into a sea-chest and tried to set the house on fire: failing in this intent, he enlisted the help of a couple of friends and took the chest down to the harbour, where he hired a boatman to row them into the middle of the harbour. But Mr Warne was smelling badly by then, his blood was oozing from the box, the boatman was disinclined to believe the French explanation that it contained bad pork, and’ Videll was hanged outside Darlinghurst Gaol, watched by a large and appreciative crowd.
Many Greeks and Maltese have been driven to Sydney by tough times at home, and of these the most historically interesting are the immigrants from the Greek islet of Kastellorizon, which lies a few miles off the southern coast of Turkey. Kastellorizon’s first contact with Australians occurred in 1915, when its entire fleet of caiques was sold to the British for the Dardanelles campaign and helped to carry the Anzacs to their beach-heads at Gallipoli. After that war the islanders so enthusiastically emigrated to New South Wales that there are more Kastellorizians in Sydney (‘Kassies’) than there are in Kastellorizon, and they have a famous club in the suburb of Kingsford. As for the island itself, most of its people are now Australian citizens returned home in their retirement and its economy is largely sustained by contributions from down under.
Some foreign settlers have added exotica all their own to the Sydney scene. It was a West Indian Creole named George Howe – ‘Happy George’ – who started the first Sydney newspaper in 1803, not only writing the whole of the often scurrilous Sydney Gazette, but editing it, setting it, printing it and personally selling it. Sydney’s Superintendent of Police in the 1830s was the romantic and mysterious Captain Nicholas Rossi, an anti-Napoleonic Corsican who was popularly supposed to have got his job in return for some unexplained secret service to the British State – perhaps (and it sounds his style) in connection with George IV’s divorce proceedings against Queen Caroline. Baron Carl von Beiren, a dubious nobleman variously described as Dutch, German and Dutch-American, turned up in the 1890s and founded the Australian Gunpowder and Explosives Manufacturing Company – the suburb of Inglewood is named after his ever-hospitable house, Powder Works Road after his factory; but though the words ADVANCE AUSTRALIA were inscribed upon the gates of Inglewood, no munitions ever seem to have been produced, people came to suspect that the Baron was a confidence trickster or even a German spy, and the last we hear of him he was in gaol for embezzlement.
Then there were the Chinese who started a fish-salting works at Barrenjoey in the 1850s, and the seven Greek pirates of Hydra (captured by the Royal Navy off Libya in 1827) who worked the vines at Elizabeth Farm.1 There was Mary Reibey’s formidable female Fijian bodyguard Foo-Choo, and the otherwise unidentified Dr Brandt who lived with his baboon on Garden Island in the 1790s, and the magnificently named Russian Nicolai Nicolaevich de Miklouho-Maklay who started a marine-biology station at Watson’s Bay in 1881. There were the brightly dressed Maoris and Portuguese who used to row the pilot boats, and there were any number of miscellaneous wanderers, dropouts, adventurers, deserters, mountebanks and beachcombers of every nationality under the sun, forever jumping ship, trawling Sydney for pickings, smuggling contraband or finding oblivion in the city’s tolerant taverns.
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Two minorities of un-British origin have played particularly fateful and permanent roles in the history of Sydney – the Irish and the Jews, both of whom have been represented here since the beginning.
There is a biographical dictionary of Australia’s earliest Jews, and thumbing through its pages is a moving experience. Most of the first Jews were petty thieves from Fagin’s world, the underworld of London.2 They had usually been tried at the Old Bailey. Very few had been charged with anything violent, and most of them were from the poorest of the poor – pedlars, fruit-sellers, old-clothes dealers, chimney-sweeps, hawkers, errand boys, slop-sellers, though we see an occasional silversmith and engraver, and at least one dentist. They were generally small dark people, and were likely to be well tattooed – Lewis Joseph, for instance, a moulder and founder, transported for theft in 1829, sported the tattoos ‘Love’, ‘Hope’, ‘Love me little, love me long’, an anchor, a sprig, a heart, and the initials EK and LJBK. Often they lived out their sentences in obscurity, eventually disappearing into the Sydney populace, but often enough they never submitted. Here is Samuel Lyons, a well-known pickpocket transported in 1815, twice trying to escape and once trying to rob the Government Stores (200 lashes, four years in the Newcastle coal mines). Here is Lewis Lazarus, tailor, transported for theft in 1818, further convicted in Australia of robbery, absconding, assault, receiving stolen property, drunkenness, absconding again, theft again – 136 lashes, six weeks on the treadmill, speared five times by Aboriginals. Bernard Levy, transported for robbery with assault in 1813, was described as ‘the most notorious thief and pocket picker the colony has ever produced’ – so beyond redemption that when he was pardoned at last in 1862 members of the Sydney synagogue suggested the congregation should raise the money to ship him back to England.
Turn a page or two of the biographical dictionary, though, and here we find James Simmons, convicted in 1813, aged seventeen, of having broken into the home of the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, in very short order the owner of an inn and a store, a prosperous auctioneer, a charterer of ships and an alderman of the City of Sydney. Remember Sam Lyons, who tried to rob the Government Stores? Only twelve years later, home and free from the coal mines, here he is a spectacularly successful property developer, active in the synagogue, well-known for good works, driving around Sydney behind a pair of his Arab thoroughbreds. Esther Abraham, a London millinery apprentice transported for attempted theft, had attached herself and her baby to a ship’s officer, George Johnston, even before she reached Australia; he became one of the colony’s best-known citizens, she became mistress of a mansion and a great estate. Solomon Levey, transported in 1813 for accessory to theft, was pardoned within four years and became one of Sydney’s most respected capitalists, purchaser of Piper’s Henrietta Villa, pioneering patron of West Australia and founder of a distinguished dynasty in Australia and in England.1 And sometimes if the Sydney Jews failed in their lifetimes, their descendants made up for it: Michael Davies, for instance (false pretences, 1839) came to nothing himself and saw one of his sons hanged as a bushranger, but his grandson became Speaker of the Tasmanian House of Assembly, while Cashmore Israel (theft from his own family’s house, 1817) was father to the Auditor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia.
The convicts were soon followed by free Jewish settlers, and the very first male among these is perhaps the most celebrated. Barnett Levey came to Sydney in the wake of his immensely successful emancipist brother Solomon. He is remembered chiefly as the founder of Sydney’s first theatre, but he had many other interests too. He started a lending library. He issued bank notes backed not by gold or sterling, but by Indian rupees. He launched a housing project. He owned the Royal Hotel, a grandiose buildings designed by Francis Greenway, which was in its day the tallest in Sydney – a ‘frightfully lofty temple’ is how George Howe described it in the Gazette. Levey was freq
uently in trouble, legal or financial, but after endless altercations with officialdom, and repeated financial setbacks, in 1833 he achieved his chief ambition and opened the Theatre Royal; there he put on a racily eclectic repertoire of operas, operettas, classic plays, melodramas and sometimes bawdy farces. Alas, he squandered his profits away in drink and extravagance, and died poor but ever-mourned in 1837, aged thirty-nine – the Father of the Australian Theatre.
Since those days Jews have become ubiquitous in the business, artistic and financial circles of the city, and in general they have thrived. There have been occasional spasms of anti-Semitism – in recent years particularly, the vandalizing of graves – but it has not been one of Sydney’s habitual bigotries. Today the community is 6o,000 strong, its rabbis are prominent civic figures, and it is worthily represented by the magnificent Great Synagogue in Elizabeth Street, consecrated in 1878. A grand structure in mingled Gothic and Byzantine manners, this has two towers, fine wrought-iron gates, and a big rose window overlooking Hyde Park. I went there for a guided tour once, and a most relaxed and entertaining member of the congregation led us into the fane, whistling as he went, while a video of the presiding rabbi, projected hugely on a screen above the pillars, told us all about it. On another occasion, in an alfresco restaurant beside Sydney Cove, I happened to sit at the next table to a party assembled for a wedding at the synagogue next day. Some of its members had not met each other for years, if ever, and as I eavesdropped over my John Dory fillets I thought the snatches of conversation I heard – ‘he lived for a time at Breslau’ – ‘You must be Reuben’s daughter! My!’ – ‘Between Hampstead and Shepherd’s Bush’ – ‘That was before 1939, of course’ – ‘Do tell us, did you ever hear what became of Ruth?’ – I thought it seemed like a very orchestration, at once tragic and exhilarating, of the Diaspora itself.
And what can I say of the Irish? They have been in Sydney since the beginning too, and they have remained as Irish here as they remain anywhere outside their own island – weakening in their style a little now, I think, as memories fade, religion falters and organized labour loses its predominance, but exceedingly Irish still. About a third of the convicts transported here were Irish, and they were often different in kind from the rest – older, more likely to be married, more rural, the women thought to be better-behaved than the English, the men more often politically charged. Ireland was endemically in turmoil during the transportation era, and many a young Irish patriot found himself sent to the other side of the world for waving the green too exuberantly.
Some of the Irish convicts were extremely simple. They were leading progenitors of the theory that China lay just out of sight over the hills, and that a quick walk through the bush would get you there; the most ingenuous carried with them a home-made compass chart without a needle, believing that the compass points themselves would give them magic guidance. But there were some able and remarkable people too, especially of course among the political prisoners. The nearest Sydney can claim to a saint is William Davis, an Irish rebel transported in 1799, who for more than a year sheltered an illegally immigrated priest, Father Jeremiah O’Flynn; secret masses were held in his cottage on Church Hill, perilously close to the George Street guard-house, until in 1818 O’Flynn was discovered and expelled, Irish ex-soldiers led the only concerted armed rising of convicts at the Sydney settlement, the so-called Battle of Vinegar Hill in 1804.1 They were mostly men transported after the Irish rebellion of 1798, and put to work clearing forest and building roads north of Parramatta; they hoped to raise a general convict insurrection, but were deceived by a false flag of truce and put down with many casualties, floggings and hangings.
You can still be very Irish in Sydney, if you want to be. There are Irish pubs. There is Irish music. There is a Blarney Street on Killarney Heights, and though it is true that Irishtown is no longer called Irishtown, it is still called Kellyville. The fifteen directors of the Australian Ireland Fund include two McGraths, two Burkes, two Cosgroves, two O’Reillys, one O’Neill and the Earl of Portarlington. I went once to a St Patrick’s Day breakfast, held in a big marquee outside a pub in the Rocks, and saw the Sydney Irish at their jolliest. Pipes played, flutes tootled, stout and Gaelic coffee flowed, all the best-known Irish citizens were caught by the TV cameras tucking into a hearty ham and eggs or dancing vigorous jigs. ‘Is there anyone here from Belfast, now?’ rang the band-leader’s inquiry fruitily across Sydney Cove, or ‘Here’s a little song for all you good people from County Waterford,’ I had intended, since the breakfast cost $50 a head, to watch these proceedings economically from the outside, peering through a flap in the tent, but a couple of cheerfully tipsy waiters soon pulled me inside and gave me a Guinness.
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And all these people are immigrants, every one, if only by descent – even the Aborigines have come from somewhere else. Thirty years ago it was easy enough to forget the fact, so settled and homogeneous was Sydney’s population. Now reminders are everywhere. Kilioni Uele, charged with the attempted murder of Haumomo Uepe of Homebush outside the Tonga Taboo nightclub, is arraigned before Mr Alex Mijovich, Her Majesty’s Justice of the Peace. Passionately defending the wearing of tartans on behalf of Comhairie Oighreachd Albannach (the Scottish Heritage Council) is Mr R. Nicolson Samios. A back shoeshine boy in the Queen Victoria Building struts around his stand like a dancer in a musical. Multi-racial larrikins race their bikes hilariously through the Botanic Gardens, Rahmat Ullah, seventeen, defects from the Bangladesh National Dancing Group and vanishes into Sydney, leaving a note for his producer: ‘Uncle, my luck in Bangladesh is very poor. So, I am out to search for my fortune.’
I hope he has found it by now, and become a New Man like all the rest, or one of the Sun-God’s race.
1 Last sea-thing dredged by sailor Time from Space,/Are you a drift Sargasso, where the West/In halcyon calm rebuilds her fatal nest?/Or Delos of a coming Sun-God’s race?
1 Later he relented, and said that two should be shot and four sent to Norfolk Island; but the only native the Marines of the expedition could find was an old friend of theirs, so nobody was punished at all.
1 Certainly he is not buried in his own parish church in Bath (he lived in Bennett Street, near The Circus), but at Bathampton on the outskirts of the town, now the site of an annual Australia Day pilgrimage.
2 And his eulogist – ‘His glowing Hearty at Mercy’s Pleadings mov’d,/Shares, as He yields the Boon to Worth approv’d:–/Wipes the big Drop from Sorrow’s glittering Eye,/And opens the blest Path to Liberty …’
1 The lovely Wanderer sailed on without him, to be wrecked off Port Macquarie, north of Sydney, and coveted by putative salvagers ever since.
1 From David Marr’s biography Patrick White, London, 1991.
1 During my research on this book I came across the following quotation: ‘There is no modesty, no attention to one another. They talk very fast, very loud and all together. If they ask you a question, before you can utter three words of your answer, they will break out on you again – and talk away.’ It might well have been somebody writing about Sydneysiders, 1991; it was really John Adams writing about New Yorkers, 1774.
On the other hand I read about a Sydney man who put this message on his telephone-answering machine: ‘They say life comes down to a few moments. This is one of them. Let’s see what you can do.’ Hardly any of his callers, he reported, could think of a word to say.
1 At Bathurst, New South Wales, in 1851, supported by the charity of friends.
2 In his poem ‘Five Bells’, 1939, Kenneth Slessor put a prayer of thanksgiving into the mouth of this cruel hypocrite, engraving his own Testament upon the bloodied backs of miscreants: Not, mine, the Hand that writes the weal/On this, my vellum of puffed veal,/Not mine, the glory that endures,/But Yours, dear God, entirely Yours.
1 True to form they built themselves a little Glasgow around Clyde Street, in the midst of the Irish Catholics of the Rocks, with McAusland’s General Store on the corner.
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nbsp; 1 The plants looked to me perfectly fresh and new, and would be as useful as specimens now, the botanists told me, as they were 200 years ago.
1 A £10 annuity was settled upon her by a particularly enthusiastic fan, James Boswell. One of her comrades in the escape celebrated his survival and pardon by volunteering for the New South Wales Corps and becoming a Sydney gaoler.
1 ‘The judge sat,’ reported The Australian convincingly, ‘in mute astonishment.’
1 Another just says STREWTH.
2 Even now it is claimed that every fourth Sydneysider has had a Scottish grandmother.
1 Ocker: the archetypal uncultivated Australian working man (The Macquarie Encyclopedic Dictionary, Sydney 1990).
2 As long ago as 1825 he was described as ‘making no efforts beyond what [is] necessary to supply [his] own animal needs’. This is how Anon. put it, in a contribution to A Book of Australia, edited by T. Inglis Moore, London 1961: Me and my dog/have tramped together/in cold weather and hot./Me and my dog/don’t care whether/we get any work/or not.