by Jan Morris
The pubs were open from six in the morning until eleven at night, and of course there were objectors to all this jollity. Temperance movements waxed and waned in Sydney – as early as 1837 the Quaker merchant John Tawell, whom we have met before, ostentatiously poured a large quantity of spirits into the harbour.1 The real blow to the city’s drinking habits, however, did not occur until 1916, when there was a mutiny among the troops at a training camp in the western suburb of Casula. Objecting to a new and demanding training programme, several thousand soldiers raided the camp liquor stores, looted some pubs of their drink, and set off on a dishevelled progress across the city, smashing windows, breaking up food stalls, seizing cars and wagons, attacking clubs and stores and terrifying civilians wherever they went. There was no denying that drink was the cause of this rampage, and so there came into force one of Sydney’s most depressing institutions, ‘the six o’clock swill’. For nearly forty years every legal pub in the city shut its doors at six in the evening, leading not only to a plethora of speakeasies, but also to a headlong consumption of liquor in the last moments before closing time, when people came out from work. The Sydney pubs acquired a new reputation for lavatorial crudity, and were mostly re-decorated accordingly, with tiled walls for the easier cleansing of spilt beer and vomit. Everything most philistine, provincial and misogynist about Sydney was epitomized in the six o’clock swill: at the end of each working day (as citizens of vivid memory have described it for me) a tide of inebriated men came rolling out of their ghastly taverns, staggering into railway stations, barging on to buses or being sick over ferry rails.
The rule was mercifully abandoned in 1955. Nowadays the pubs have mostly softened their ambiences, and welcome women with more or less good grace. Although beer and Sydney still go together in the world’s mind, the per capita consumption of alcohol has lately declined, perhaps because of the new proportion of abstemious Italians, Greeks and Asians. Despite the neighbourhood problems of that former Premier a couple of chapters back, for the most part public drinking in Sydney is temperate enough – even rather apathetic. I looked at one pub across a suburban street on a summery Friday, and this is what I saw: upstairs, in a window with a wilted potted plant in it, and a faded awning outside, an elderly shirt-sleeved man with spectacles, all alone with a pint of beer; downstairs, through the open door of one bar, four slump-stomached workmen over the tankards at the counter, through the open door of another, two women watching an American chat-show on television. The general decorative impression was of a faded yellow. The television flickered dimly. A chalked blackboard offered Beef-and-Mushroom Pie or Chops with Mushroom Sauce. Catching sight of me scribbling these notes across the road, the man upstairs allowed his gaze to rest upon me for a moment or two, but soon lost interest.
On the other hand Friday evening down on the Rocks, traditionally the quarter of chaos, can still be sufficiently rumbustious. Then the young people come into town from the outer suburbs, determined to live metropolitan life to the full, and the mounted police regularly move in to keep things in check. I was at a reception one evening at the Regent Hotel, the most luxurious in Sydney, which was a paragon of discreet conservative elegance. The older people were dressed expensively but not gaudily, the younger ones were in properly tempered derivations of street fashion. The music was provided, as is habitual at the Regent, by an elegant flute-and-piano duo. The refreshments were suave. Needing a breath of fresh air I took a couple of sandwiches and wandered through the foyer into the street outside; and there, not a hundred yards away, in the shadow of the expressway, I found Saturnalia in full swing. A couple of dozen young people, reconditely dressed and impossibly drunk, were singing obscene songs in the half light. There were beer cans in their hands, beer cans lined up for future consumption, empty beer cans rolling over the sidewalk. A youth in a wild and scraggly beard played the guitar. Three or four girls danced an abandoned go-go on a ledge. The men were husky and flushed, the women looked half-crazed, and they were all singing, shouting, waving their arms about, sloshing their beer and sometimes breaking into hilarious dizzy dances, like people in a dream.
I was rather sorry to leave this Bosch-like gathering and return to the reception in the hotel, where a waitress instantly offered me a small shrimp canapé, and the flautist was into a Telemann sonata, I think.
*
Except for that brief grim period in the 1780s, almost nobody has gone hungry in Sydney. The Iora were always capably self-sufficient, the convicts were quite well fed. Perhaps it was this tradition of general plenty that made the city for so long indifferent to cuisine. Even twenty years ago the food, whether private or public, was a desperate approximation of English provincial cooking, its one famous dish being the Pie Floater – a meat pie floating in pea soup which has been sold since 1945 at the Woolloomooloo food stall called Harry’s Café de Wheels, Fish generally turned out to be fish and chips in the old greasy style, few Sydneysiders were keen on oysters and the cooking of kangaroos was illegal.
It is illegal still, innumerable patriots holding that to eat a national symbol would smack of treason, or perhaps sacrilege, but by now food has become almost a national symbol itself, and is certainly one of the prime Sydney consolations. The influx of foreign restaurateurs has changed everything – starting with the tea, now generally metamorphosed into espresso coffee. The restaurants have burgeoned sidewalk tables at last, besides climbing several hundred feet up the Sydney Tower and spreading themselves all around the harbour front. I can think of no national cuisine which is not represented somewhere in the city nowadays, and at private tables the food may be anything from roast beef to couscous. For a time the nouvelle cuisine in its silliest forms seduced fashionable Sydney, and everything was stuffed with artichokes or grilled over herb-scented charcoal. Today the fad is over, and the best of the restaurants have come to realize that the true Sydney speciality should surely be fresh fish and shellfish, simply served. At Watson’s Bay, on the harbour, the Doyle family restaurant has been preaching this gospel for several generations; now it has been joined by dozens of others, to be dropped in at while waiting for a ferry at Circular Quay, or flown to by seaplane on the Hawkesbury River, and serving Moreton Bay Bugs, Mud-Crab Salad, Sydney Rock Oysters and all manner of fish washed down with good New South Wales wine beside lovely watery prospects.
It is sadly true, however, that to many foreign palates even the freshest and most straightforward Sydney food, even the juiciest Bug or most perfectly steamed Hawkesbury River Teraglin, seems disappointingly flavourless. It is glorious in the idea, enticing in the appearance, but it tastes as though it has been cooked in unsalted water – or in the case of the sea-fish, caught in unsalted oceans. Only the Sydney Rock Oyster, surely the best in the world, lives up to its promise. I am sorry to say this, because I first learnt the pleasure of gourmandcy in Sydney, thirty years ago. Until then I had been as indifferent to the subtleties of food as any six o’clock swiller, but I was given lunch one day by a friend in his apartment on the south shore, with a glorious view up the harbour to the city. The food was nothing elaborate – a crusty roll, as I remember, some pâté and salad, perhaps a cheese, a glass of white wine – but my host served it all with such sensuous grace, broke the bread with such crispy decision, drank the wine with such an almost lascivious slurp, that suddenly in Sydney I realized what a transcendental delight eating and drinking could be.
For years I remembered every detail of this seminal occasion – the food itself, my stalwart epicurean host, the blue Australian sky above us, the olive-green of the trees, the white sails of the harbour yachts and, crowning it all like a benediction upon the experience, the soaring white wings of the Opera House. Only quite recently did it dawn upon me that the Opera House hadn’t been built yet.
*
‘Seven Miles to Manly’, it says above Pier 3 on Circular Quay, ‘A Thousand Miles from Care’ – or, as an earlier publicity tag put it, ‘Fourpence Spent on the Trip to Manly is Better than a Pound
on Medicine’. Essential to the full enjoyment of Sydney is a taste for the out-of-doors. The climate may not be as perfect as foreigners generally suppose it to be, but it is never really cold, and every year contains days of such unsurpassable beauty, such glory of freshness and stimulation, that they colour all perceptions. For myself, though I have experienced this city in moods surly, dismal and almost alarming, when I think of a Sydney day I think immediately and deliciously of a rather northern kind of brilliance, as though the pale white clouds have drifted across the blue up there from Iceland or Helsinki.
And the setting is perfectly matched, providing the citizens of Sydney with unbeatable pleasure-grounds. The harbour itself might almost have been designed for recreation, and there has probably been hardly a daylight moment, for 200 years, when there was not somebody fishing somewhere on its shores, sailing on its waters or having a picnic around its perimeter. The first registered owner of a Sydney pleasure-boat was Robert Campbell the merchant, back in Macquarie’s day, and in 1827 the Royal Navy officially sanctioned the delights of the harbour, as it were, by holding the city’s first regatta: all the local worthies were among the guests, quadrilles were danced on board the warships in the harbour, and the Sydney professional watermen had their own race. By the mid-nineteenth century people of all ranks were out in boats, and swimming and rowing contests had become great Sydney spectator sports; 30,000 people went to the funeral of ‘Varney’ Kieran, a champion swimmer of the fin-de-siècle, and an obelisk on a rock in the Parramatta River still honours Henry Searle, a star of late Victorian sculling.
Fleets of excursion boats now indulged the Sydney penchant for a day out on the water. Even the ferry commuters often made a pleasure of necessity; for many years a society called the Hot Potato Club, formed by businessmen using the late-night ferry home to Mosman, kept a supply of pies and potatoes warm near the ship’s engines, and washed them down each evening with a convivial drink. The Sunday harbour picnic became an institution, too – Kipling called this ‘a city of picnics’. On especially picnickable days the path to Yurong Point, in the Domain, was lined with stalls selling boiling water for tea-making, and there are innumerable pictures of the populace spreading its cloths on green swards, or hanging expectantly with wicker baskets over the rails of steamers. Picnic dances were popular too, and came to be known as Gypsy Teas; a favourite spot for them was Rodd Island, the exotic-looking islet we glimpsed from the planned suburb of Haberfield. All around the harbour there are reminders still of those period delights, in little parks, and gazebos, and old landingstages. The memento I like best is the pavilion–café in Nielsen Park, on the south shore; a nostalgic curio of cream, brown and stained glass, decorated with potted ferns, it looks out over a bathing beach where even on the windiest day elderly Victorian-looking gentlemen are quite likely to be stimulating their circulations with heavy breast-strokes, or paddling like dogs along the sand.1
The harbour remains the greatest Sydney consolation. The weekend sight of it, with its thousands of yachts, is a very epitome of pleasure; the start of the Sydney-to-Hobart Race, and the spectacular passage of its yachts through the Heads, is one of the prime occasions of the Sydney year; the Australia Day ferry-boat race, direct successor to that original race of the watermen in 1827, must be one of the most entertaining of all sporting events – such a chuffing and foaming and lurching, as the tough little ships strain themselves along the brief course from Pinchgut to the Bridge!2 For many Sydney people a boat on the harbour is still the best of possessions, even if it is only for lazing about on, drinking beer, in the shelter of some placid cove.3 The harbour picnic may not be quite what it was, the Gypsy Teas are over, but Kipling would certainly recognize the spirit of a Sunday lunchtime at Watson’s Bay – crowded white-clothed tables of restaurants, old ladies on benches eating seafood off plastic trays, families strolling beneath the palms of the little park, bright umbrellas everywhere, scavenging gulls, launches foaming in, yachts and tourist coaches, and away in the distance the flags on top of the Harbour Bridge just showing over Bradley’s Head.
Excursion boat-trips are still perhaps the most popular of all Sydney outings. Sometimes they can be rowdy disco charters – ‘hose-down trips’, they are called, because the boats so often need a good wash the morning after, and there were some disreputable cruises during the Vietnam War, when American servicemen interpreted Rest and Recreation as a synonym for sex afloat. Mostly, though, the excursion boats are as innocuous today as they were a hundred years ago, and one of my own sweetest memories of the harbour is of a wedding reception which came floating past my balcony one fine day in March. In the cabin of the boat I could just see the bride, a shimmer of satin happiness among a shirt-sleeved, summer-dressed crowds and in the prow one of the bridesmaids stood alone and contemplative like a figurehead, her long pale dress fluttering, one hand holding the jack-staff, the other a glass of champagne.
*
For years the harbour was enough. The ocean beaches came later. In 1857 Henry Gilbert Smith, a rich emigrant from Sussex, England, decided to turn the fishing hamlet of Manly, which straddled a spit between the harbour and the open sea, into an ocean resort for the city. Perhaps he was remembering Brighton, after which he originally intended to name it. Certainly he made of it an emblematic pleasure place, still a kind of blueprint of your ideal seaside town. From the ferry station on the harbour shore (which has its own small beach, fun-fair and shopping plaza) you walk down a wide pedestrian street, called romantically the Corso, until there opens out before you the wide surf-ranged crescent of the ocean beach, lined with now raggety Norfolk Pines planted by Smith himself. There is an aquarium and a museum, there are innumerable ice-cream shops and pizza parlours and fish-and-chip places. Manly calls itself a village, a rare usage in a country where every huddle of shacks is a township; and what with the homely satisfaction of it all, and the green headlands, and the level sweep of sand beneath the pines, and the terrific surf pounding the beach, it remains everything that a Victorian entrepreneur could want of a populist watering-place. High above it, as a kind of logo, stands a large sandstone kangaroo, placed there by Smith in 1856, and surveying the whole lively scene from its plinth on Kangaroo Road.1
It was at Manly, in Edwardian times, that Sydney consummated its affair with the outdoors. Bathing had not always been a universal pastime here. In the earliest of days genteel people thought it a practice only for convicts, who bathed to get clean, and in 1838 it was forbidden between six in the morning and eight in the evening ‘near or within view of any public wharf, quay, bridge, street, road or other place of public resort’. People swam in the early hours, or after dark, or on secluded beaches, and there were inspectors to enforce the law –at Manly a man with a big dinner-bell came around each morning to signal the end of bathing-time. On 2 October 1902, the proprietor and editor of the Manly and North Sydney News, William Henry Gocher, put this preposterous law to the test by openly, and with full publicity, donning his neck-to-knee swimming costume and entering the Manly surf at midday.2 The police declined to prosecute, the case aroused much hilarity, and finally the law was ridiculed out of existence. Sydney’s obsession with sand, surf and sea, later to be dignified as the Beach Culture, began with Mr Gocher’s act of defiance, and five years later he was presented with a gold watch and a purse of fifty sovereigns as an expression of public gratitude.1
The beach culture almost instantly exploded, in a splurge of new tram and ferry services to take the populace to the sea beaches, and Sydney appropriated it as peculiarly its own. The side-stroke, hitherto used by all the fastest swimmers, gave way to the Sydney speciality called the Australian crawl. The-great Duke Kahanamoku from Honolulu introduced the city to the art of surfing. Life-saving teams, stylizing their techniques into a strutting kind of pageantry, succeeded the old Volunteer Fire Companies as expressions of local pride, and as vehicles of working-class comradeship. The world came to think of Sydney people as beach people, and they themselves propagated t
he notion in posters, brochures, jokes and slang. The name of Bondi in particular, the most popular of all surfing beaches, went into the vernacular in many contexts. To go like a Bondi tram means to go as fast as the trams which, urged on by enthusiastic customers, used to rocket across town to the Bondi beaches; and when in 1973 Ruth Park, writing the Companion Guide to Sydney, searched for an idiom to describe the fizzily eclectic architecture of Sydney Town Hall, she called it Bondi Renaissance.
Needing a lavatory one day, importunately I entered the premises of the Bondi Surf-Bathers Life-Saving Club, a very ark of the beach culture. The cavernous club-house was entirely empty in the middle of the afternoon, but from its walls there looked down upon me a grand gallery of old members, ranked there arms folded in their swimsuits – or rather, I suppose, their Bathing Costumes. They were an older Sydney in excelsis, bronzed, resolute, Dinky-di Aussies every one. Attended by triumphal trophies, secure in their tradition, they looked down at me, I felt, as they might have looked down upon an effete non-swimming Pom of long ago, or declined to salute some weedy officer. The beach culture is often collated with philistinism, and of course it is true that there is nothing very cerebral to Sydney’s weekend rush to the ocean. It is an instinctive escape to an environment where several Australian ideals can be fulfilled – perfect social equality, perfect freedom, perfect chances to display yourself, perfect idleness combined with strenuous physical exercise if you want it. They are homely ideals really. I am told that the sands after dark have conventionally been the places for young love’s first experiences, but compared with beaches elsewhere in the world the more decadent pleasures are rarely apparent at Manly and its peers along the Sydney coast. The few nudist beaches are said to be remarkably chaste. The declared ideals of the life-savers are almost unctuously altruistic. The competitions of the Iron Men, stupendously demanding contests in swimming, running, rowing and jumping, are karate-like in their asceticism.1