by Jan Morris
1 Worgan might well be honoured as the Father of Australian Culture – he took a piano with him to Botany Bay.
1 Ambivalently defining the task, in their journal in 1901, as ‘the evangelization of the perishing people’.
1 A menu presented in A Difficult Infant, edited by Graeme Aplin, Sydney 1988.
2 ‘Some few degrees higher in the scale of civilization than the Fuegians’, was his final evolutionary assessment.
1 The first meaning ‘Stay Here’, the second ‘Stinking Place’, the third either ‘Head of River’ or, preferably to my tastes, ‘Place Where Eels Lie Down’.
1 I take this tale from Australians 1838, edited by Alan Atkinson and Marian Aveling, Sydney 1987.
2 Though Elyard, I am happy to report, recovered from his wife’s potions, lived to a ripe old age, and spent his last years painting windmills and cottages in the country.
1 Then the vice quarter of Sydney, and variously nicknamed Razorhurst, Gunhurst, Bottlehurst and Dopehurst.
1 And instantly recognizable anywhere in the world. Thinking I caught a snatch of it recently above the polyglot hubbub of the Piazza San Marco in Venice, I sought it out through the crowds for curiosity’s sake and found, sure enough, a woman in a T-shirt emblazoned SYDNEY YOU’RE BEAUTIFUL. Mr Pringle was writing in his book Australian Accent, London 1958.
2 And Sydney being Sydney, I could not help thinking, how perfectly possible that some of them might be going on that evening to the all-male show advertised in the morning paper as Australia’s Hottest Ladies’ Night Out – ‘They’re Australian, They’re Handsome, They’re Yours!’
1 All the same I suspect some of them still pine for lost luck of a different kind. ‘How grand you all were,’ I said when another Hungarian told me why he had never learnt to drive a car – in his youth they always had chauffeurs. ‘Yes,’ he simply replied.
1 Five of them returned to Greece when the Greek Governments questioning the legality of their transportation, agreed to pay their passages home: two preferred to stay.
2 But the man popularly supposed to have been Dickens’ model for Fagin himself, Isaac (Ikey) Solomon, was transported not to Sydney but to Tasmania, where he was eventually freed and became in his old age relatively respectable.
1 One member of which, the lawyer–dramatist Harold Rubinstein, a century later wrote a play, To the Poets of Australia, about the family’s early days in Sydney.
1 One of the two pitched battles between Europeans on Australian soil, the other being the affair of the Eureka Stockade in Victoria in 1854, which lasted only ten minutes.
CONSOLATIONS
IT IS A NICE PARADOX THAT SYDNEY, A CITY BORN IN MISERY, should be blessed with a true gift for self-consolation. In 1850 Charles Dilke was already commenting upon its high capacity for personal pleasure, and it long ago developed a very different communal ethic from that of the more religion-bound and work-obsessed cities of North America. Nowadays the arrival of Friday arvo is a Sydney institution – the sanctioned moment when, at noon on the fifth day, much of the populace subsides into hedonism; but no matter what day of the week it is, or what time of day either, more than most cities Sydney seems to enjoy itself.
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There were few Puritans, of course, on Australia’s First Fleet, and a general lack of religious zealotry or remorse has undoubtedly helped to foster the Sydney euphoria. It could never be said that religion is the opiate of the Sydney masses – I know of no city where it seems less obtrusive. A century ago it was recorded that orthodox Christianity had little hold on the local mind, ‘neither belonging to the country nor yet adapted to its peculiar requirements’: the 1986 census showed that apart from the faiths of immigrants, the fastest growing denomination was the one classified as No Religion. The Baha’i Temple stands proudly enough among the woodlands of the north, Greenway’s St James’s church is prominent, the Great Synagogue is resplendent, St Mary’s Cathedral is vast, but on the whole places of religion play an unusually minor part in the city’s aesthetic ensemble.
For some years they played no part at all. An outdoor Anglican service was conducted on the first Sunday after the landing at Sydney Cove, the text of Chaplain Johnson’s sermon being taken from Psalm 161 – ‘What shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits towards me?’ No church went up, however, for another five years, until Johnson had one built at his own expense on a spot (in Johnson Place) now marked by a memorial. Its convict congregationalists were flogged if they failed to attend without good cause: wondering perhaps what they could best render unto the Lord for his mercies, they habitually spat, coughed and hiccuped throughout the services, and it was almost certainly some of them who burnt the building down in 1798. A second church was soon built – the one that looked like a prison – but in 1826 Barren Field was still complaining that Sydney was ‘a spireless city, and profane’. The first three Catholic priests, allowed into the colony at the start of the nineteenth century, were soon expelled on the grounds that they were inciting rebellion; the fourth arrived illicitly in 1817, began his underground pastorate under the protection of brave Mr Davis, and was thrown out in 1818. It appears to have been only in the middle of the nineteenth century that religion assumed the social role it played in most English-speaking cities around the world, and even then it was largely an instrument of class – English Anglicans on one side, Irish Catholics on the other. Today it is administered by a Catholic Cardinal, an Anglican Archbishop, and countless ministers, rabbis and mullahs; yet it seems to me, as an agnostic outsider, relatively muted still.
Like any great English-speaking city Sydney has its quota of cults and enthusiasms, encouraged here perhaps by the quasi-Californian climate, but it has never been a great place for revival movements or sectarian bitterness.1There was however one famous example of religious ecstasy in Sydney, and its improbable focus was on the beach promenade in the suburb of Balmoral, on the Middle Harbour. This is now a very model of suburban contentment. It has a little white pavilion, a bathhouse and a rotunda for a band. An ornamental bridge leads to a public garden on a spit, and there a club of local friends meets every day of the year to have breakfast as the sun goes up. This modest esplanade was to acquire unexpected prominence when the mystical Theosophical Society declared it a site of profound sacred significance. The Theosophists were convinced that a World Teacher would soon be coming to rescue mankind from its ignorance, and some of their seers also believed in the existence of the lost continent, Lemuria, which lay beneath the Pacific and would eventually give up its ancient secrets for the salvation of mankind. After the First World War they determined that Sydney was central to these truths. It was, they said, ‘the occult centre of the southern hemisphere’. They acquired a large many-gabled mansion at Mosman on the northern shore, and Theosophist pilgrims came there from all over the world – including the young Indian, Jiddu Krishnamurti, whom some of them believed to be the World Teacher in gestation. They established a school and a radio station, 2GB.2 They arranged publicity in the press. They attracted influential sympathizers, including Walter Burley Griffin up the road at Castlecrag. By the 1920s their Lodge in Sydney was said to be the largest in the world, and in 1924, on the unassuming beach at Balmoral, they built a great white holy amphitheatre. It could hold 2,500 people in twenty-six tiers of seats, and it looked magnificently across the harbour, through the Heads and out to sea. Here was a place of Coming, it was said, where the World Teacher would reveal all when the time was ripe; and through those mighty bluffs would flow the knowledge of Lemuria.
The conviction faded when, in 1929, Krishnamurti publicly declared that he was not the promised Teacher, and in 1939 the site of the Coming was sold – an apartment block stands on the site now. Today it is hard to find signs of religious fervour in Sydney. I once saw a shirtless boy march into St Andrew’s Cathedral and fall in passionate prayer before the altar, but it seemed forlornly out of character. I went to the lying-in of a much venerated Irish Catholic priest, expecting to fin
d scenes of histrionic distress, but the mourners were restrained, tearless and altogether devoid of black veils. A group of charismatic Christians recently fed their conceptions of Jesus into the Sydney Police Crime Unit’s Image Generator – its Identikit. He looked like a cross between the Bondi life-saver and a small-time crook, with short hair back and sides.
Spiritually the most rewarding place in Sydney seems to me Rookwood Cemetery, which is one of the largest in the world, and includes graves of every denomination. It was founded in 1867, and by the end of the century was the very latest thing in cemeteries, eventually embracing 777 acres of land (well away from settled areas, we read, ‘so that adjoining land would not be devalued’).1 It had its own railway stations, and twice a day trains from Sydney stopped at stations en route to pick up ‘corpses, mourners or clergymen’, the mourners and clergymen having to buy tickets but the corpses travelling free. It was splendidly landscaped, with gazebos and canals, and was famous for its flower-beds – a green rose used habitually to blossom there. A park ranger lived in a lodge with a tower, wore a peaked cap with RANGER on it, and carried a revolver for the extermination of stray dogs and goats. People of all sorts were buried in this ideal necropolis. The very first was an eighteen-year-old Irish pauper, and among those who followed him were politicians, artists, bushrangers, entertainers and tycoons.1
The trains stopped in 1948.2 The showplaces fell into decay, and today Rookwood is a more realistic allegory of the natural condition. In its centre it is still well-kept, and the adherents of many creeds lie there in trim oblivion – disciples of Shintoism, or Assyrian Catholicism, or the Salvation Army, or Hinduism, or Judaism, or Islam – Greeks and Latvians and Hungarians and Assyrians and Italians – all in their own clearly demarcated and appropriately scripted plots. Joggers and cyclists pass among them, here and there are people tidying up graves, or laying fresh flowers, but as you wander away from the heart of the place an organic decay sets in. Obelisks become more tottery, gravestones are cracked, iron balustrades stand bent and rusted, until finally the great place of death is regenerated at its edges into life. The remotest parts of Rookwood are pure bushland, and there snakes, frogs, tortoises, ginks and geckos flourish, hares and foxes hide, figbirds and honey-eaters flutter vivaciously among the gums.3
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Secular consolations have been more boisterously pursued. Sex in Sydney, for example, began with a bang on the night of 6 February 1788, when the female convicts were disembarked to join the males already ashore at Sydney Cove. No doubt in the fortnight since the raising of the flag the married officers and wives had comforted each other in their beds, and perhaps a few people of initiative had already found comfort among the Aborigines. For the mass of the convict population, though, the barriers were lowered when the women at last came down the gangplanks on to Australian soil. It was a rough night. Violent winds and rain swept the settlement, lightning streaked across the harbour, but the moment the women stepped ashore the penal community threw itself into orgy. After eight months at sea, cooped up in sexual segregation and cruel confinement, both men and women were ready for it. The officials and marines were unable to control them – perhaps they did not even try – and the diarists seem to stand back aghast, as they view the commotion beside the Tank Stream. Tench preferred not to mention it at all. Arthur Bowes Smith, surgeon on one of the transports, said it was beyond his abilities to give a just description of the scene. We can only imagine it, reading between the lines and remembering human nature: around the soggy tents and shacks of Sydney Cove that night, watched from a cautious distance by officialdom and the less impetuous of the felons, several hundred couples writhing and twisting in the mud, while oaths, drunken songs, laughs, groans and the clankings of irons compete with the thunder.
It is a scene not at all appropriate to Sydney. This is not a very orgiastic city. In modern times the relationship between men and women here has traditionally been self-conscious, while homosexuality, though prevalent among the convicts and common now, has only recently become socially acceptable. It is true that the history books are full of licentious suggestion: ‘detestable vices’ that could be satisfied in the Sydney of the 1790s, ‘scenes of immorality beyond description’ in the Domain of the 1860s. However when in 1838 rumour said that Richard Davies was ‘doing something improper with a pig’, his neighbour Mrs Holland retorted indignantly that he was ‘not a man of that description’, and most Sydney males today are not of that description either.1
Wowserism has never been as powerful here as in Melbourne – its name, indeed, was invented by a Sydney man of permissive instinct, John Norton the editor of Truth.2 Still, the city has had its share of killjoys, and anyway the general delight in the sun, the sea and the sand has perhaps kept libidos in restraint. I recently analysed a column of twenty Strictly Personal advertisements in one of the suburban newspapers, and found that twelve of those seeking soul-mates required a commitment to sailing, bush-walking, surfing or simply the beach: the Cultured Lady, 49, who admitted that she was chiefly fond of anything fattening, expensive or sedentary seemed to me to be casting her bread upon unpromising waters. When the magazine Tracks asked its readers which was better, surfing or sex, 62 per cent said surfing. To be sure 80 per cent admitted they thought about sex when surfing, but then 51 per cent said they thought about surfing during sex.
It says something about the survival of innocence in Sydney that its people are so touchingly proud of King’s Cross. Originally called Queen’s Cross, in honour of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the suburb was renamed when Edward VII came to the throne, and it used to be the centre of bohemia in Sydney, the one cosmopolitan part of town before the New Australians arrived. It was given a sleazy reputation by the American servicemen who flocked there during the Second World War, and later during the Vietnam War, and at night nowadays it suggests a red-light quarter in some kind of sociological exhibition, so compactly assembled are its strip shows, its pornographic bookstores and its upstairs massage parlours. The necessary hard-looking unshaven men hang around the Alamein fountain, a whirling floodlit device like a dandelion head. The essential emaciated prostitutes parade the shadowy sidewalks of Victoria Street. There is the statutory scattering of drug-addicts, transvestites, tourists, drunks, sailors and miscellaneous layabouts from around the world. You would have to be very unworldly to be surprised by the all-too-familiar sights of King’s Cross; yet Sydneysiders habitually recommend it to foreigners as a prime metropolitan spectacle, not on any account to be missed.
Anyway, if you go back to the Cross in the morning you will find it charmingly village-like. The GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! signs are out, the adult movie houses are closed, those jowly men are still in bed, and now you find flower shops and grocery stalls, pleasant houses in back streets, one of the best bookshops in Sydney and some of the most agreeable coffee shops. Along Victoria Street, now revealed as a delightful leafy thoroughfare, dropouts and addicts of the night before sit demurely beside the blistered Volkswagen campers they are trying to sell, before going home to be chartered accountants.
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Far more than sex, the delight and the despair of Sydney has been strong drink. Hardly a passage of this city’s history is without a reference to it, from the very earliest days when convicts always seemed to be able to get hold of it, to the fearful drunken-driving records of today. So far as I can discover the Australian Aborigines, almost alone among the peoples of the earth, never learnt to make fermented drinks – or perhaps never needed to, their elaborate otherworld of dreams, song and legend being quite intoxicating enough. Hardly had the British arrived, however, than alcohol became an essential adjunct to life, and rum, a generic name for hard spirits of all kinds, assumed the importance of money itself. Goods were bought in it. Labourers got their wages in it. Chaplain Johnson paid for his church in it. The rebellion against Bligh was named after it. The 44th Regiment mutinied for it. The New South Wales Corps, its officers having acquired their monopoly in it, becam
e known as the Rum Corps, and for years the Sydney general hospital, which was largely financed by it, was called the Rum Hospital.
The original rum was all imported, from England or from India, but the settlers were soon making their own, together with wines, beers and more peculiar liquors. A spirit made of fermented sugar bags soaked in buckets of water proved popular among the Aborigines. The leaves of the Sticky Hop-bush, chewed by the Iora as a cure for toothache, were adopted by the Europeans to flavour their ale. A beer sampled at the Parramatta fair in 1824 was said to be so strong that ‘reason was de-throned and madness and folly reigned in its stead’, while an early settler of the North Shore, experimenting with fermented peaches, reported that ‘one glas put parson in the whelebarrow’.1
In the nineteenth century there was a proliferation of pubs (called hotels in the city to this day). They were socially important in the early years because so many men were without families or decent homes, and later they became nests of mateship, being generally out of bounds to respectable women. With their quaint inn-signs and particular reputations, the taverns greatly enhanced Sydney’s sense of picturesque antiquity, and they often had piquant names: the Help Me Through the World, the World Turned Upside-Down, or the Keep Within the Compass (kept by a former policeman). Sometimes they had resident fiddlers, often they were frequented by gambling schools and haunted by whores, and they came in many specialities. There were pubs where soldiers were not welcome, and pubs where convicts were not liked, and snug pubs that catered to the country trade, and rough pubs popular among the boxing fraternity. The massed taverns and sly-grog houses of the Rocks were so uproarious in their heyday that their cumulative noise could be heard miles out to sea. The bar rail of the Shakespeare Tavern, in the 1880s, had an electric wire running through it, enabling its puckish landlord to galvanize his customers. The Marble Bar at Adams’ Hotel was a prodigy of coloured marble from France, Italy and Belgium, supplemented by American walnut panelling, chandeliers, stained glass and lubricious wall paintings.2