by Jan Morris
The beach culture has slipped a little lately. The Bondi Life-Saving Club, where son traditionally followed father into the rituals, finds fewer competitive members these days. Family loyalties are weaker now, people have more and easier distractions, the object of young ambition is not so often to parade high-stepping along the sands holding a flag at a life-savers’ carnival, or to be immortalized upon a clubhouse wall. Fears of skin cancer and pollution have reduced the magnetic pull of the beaches. Nevertheless on a fine weekend afternoon Sydney’s ocean shore is still joyously crowded from the mouth of the Hawkesbury in the north to Botany Bay in the south – one of the world’s supreme hedonistic spectacles. I suppose there is no other great city with quite such a gift: the beaches of Los Angeles or Rio de Janeiro have none of the domestic appeal of these Sydney ocean fronts, which are like sand-and-surf extensions of the family suburbs behind them.
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A passion for sport is part of Sydney’s escapist talent – just look at the space devoted to it in the papers. They say the city has never been so sports-crazy as Melbourne, where crowds at fixtures are far greater: but Sydneysiders suggest this is because in Melbourne there is nothing else to do, and certainly by any other standards Sydney’s devotion to racing, cricket, football and tennis would be hard to beat. It is a non-sectarian, extra-class devotion, shared by nearly everyone.
The Sydney racecourses have their posh enclaves, in club stand and champagne bar – the Randwick course, in the southern suburbs, is the headquarters of the Australian Jockey Club – but the races are as popular as family jaunts as they are as social events or financial speculations. Horses became a Sydney preoccupation very early in the city’s history. In the National Trust’s Ervin Art Gallery, on Obsevatory Hill above the Rocks, there is displayed the pedigree of a famous local racehorse, Merriwee: it was drawn up in 1896, but traces the animal’s descent through eight named generations back to Haphazard, in 1797. The first horses were mostly imported from South Africa, the first racecourse was laid out at the north-west corner of Hyde Park in 1810 and the first race meeting was attended by all the civic swells and celebrities, Lachlan Macquarie to Simeon Lord.1
By the 1880s racing enthusiasms were so infectious that hansom cabs bringing punters home from Randwick used themselves to race each other hilariously back to the city. By 1990, however, when I went racing one afternoon at Canterbury, another of Sydney’s four courses, it seemed to me an unexpectedly relaxing experience. Perhaps I stumbled upon an especially quiet afternoon, but I was struck by a general lack of excitement. The stands were not overcrowded. Children hopped about the green playing ball and eating ice-cream. Grandmothers had spread newspapers on the ground for picnics. The red-coated stewards rode around the track in a languid and easy way, as though they had all the time in the world, before scooting nonchalantly back in front of the field when a race began. The bookmakers, in the yard behind, seemed possessed by no urgency. Even the races themselves appeared to arouse little emotion, and though of course there was the usual gallimaufry of threadbare gamblers haggardly studying race cards, considering odds, and greeting the finish with shouts and bitter oaths, half the people there seemed to take no notice of the horses at all.
It is another matter, I know, at Sydney rugby matches, and it is certainly another matter with cricket. ‘Leave our bloody flies alone, Jardine,’ a Sydney cricket-goer shouted when, in 1932, the unpopular English captain D. R. Jardine slapped an insect on his cheek in the field. In Sydney cricket has traditionally been fiercely played, rudely watched and spectacularly fulfilled, and the Sydney Cricket Ground is one of the historic sites of the game. It was here in 1929 that Don Bradman of New South Wales made 452 not out, the greatest score in first-class cricket, here in 1932 that England’s bodyline bowling tactics almost split the British Empire, here in 1940 that another of the Sydney Morrises, A. R., made his unique debut in first-class cricket by hitting a century in each innings.1 The ground is also home to The Hill, the most famous barracking stand anywhere, whence an entire anthology of insults has at one time or another been shouted across the pitch, so I assumed that if I went to a match there at least I would not be bored.
Nor was I. I chose a match of floodlit cricket, Sydney’s own particular contribution to the contemporary game, and it was terrific. It was the old charm of cricket with all the young thrill of football. Australia were playing New Zealand, and as evening fell upon Sydney feelings ran very high. The stadium glowed and throbbed in the dark. Bright beneath the floodlights the players themselves, colourfully dressed and using a white ball, were as much like performers on a stage as sportsmen on a pitch, and the mostly young audience behaved much as they would at a rock concert. Sometimes a vast tide of cheers, orchestrated by some invisible conductor, swept from one end of the stadium to the other, to break like a wave and return again as an ebb of boos. Sometimes, as a bowler began his run, he would be accompanied by a vast crescendo of banging feet. If a wicket fell, or a catch was missed, the crowd burst into instant and magnificent displays of emotion, throwing hats, paper cups and balloons into the air, banging the barricades, shouting, whistling, clapping, booing and cheering. Much beer and Coke was drank, many chips were eaten, and as the match approached its last climax I felt a tremendous sense of restless and perhaps slightly menacing excitement – rather as one might feel it, I thought, in the hours before a revolution.
Nothing very terrible happened, of course (Australia won), but at one period of the evening I chanced to look over the balcony into an open space outside the stadium, and there I saw a succession of young men being hauled in handcuffed by plain-clothes policemen – briskly questioned, photographed there and then with Polaroids and shoved into a windowless van from whose interior emerged muffled thumps of protest. I don’t know what they were to be charged with, but I did notice that a few yards away, within sight of the police but on the safe side of a high wire-mesh fence, three small boys were getting their own kicks by sniffing aerosol cans …
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But it would be wrong to end a chapter of consolations with scenes of squalor. Let me end instead with a Saturday afternoon I once enjoyed, doing nothing in particular, in the park at Parramatta, the wide expanse of rolling green, intersected by the river, that was originally the demesne of Government House. A fair was happening just outside the park, so that everything was permeated by thumping music and the smell of hot-dogs, and for the most part the goings-on were thoroughly traditional. There were people playing bowls, riding bikes, knocking golf balls about. There were the inevitable Sydney picnickers. There were jolly volunteers working on the Parramatta Steam Tram, an ancient prodigy which itself sometimes came snorting along its track beneath the trees. Small boys scrambled down the steep bank to the muddy Parramatta at the bottom. On one sward the Pike and Musket Society of New South Wales was practising its tactics, marching and counter-marching with gleaming breastplates, while in a glade nearby its ladies rehearsed a pavane dressed in becoming combinations of farthingales and cut-down jeans.
In a little gazebo, built in 1823 as a bathhouse for the Governor and his guests, I came across another of those Sydney school reunions. Summer frocked and gleamingly dentured, young Ockers and Sheilas of long ago sat in a circle inside the building, finishing off a buffet. They all seemed very fond of each other. ‘Didn’t you have any enemies at school?’ I asked one beaming lady, as she pressed me to a cup of tea. ‘How could anyone be an enemy to someone like him?’ she replied – and she pointed to a benignly gap-toothed, red-faced old codger nearby, who sat on a chair with his knees apart and gave me a wink.
1 Though the nineteenth-century Welsh sculptor W. Lorando Jones must have felt at home in Sydney when, refused commissions because he had been convicted of blasphemy, he was reduced to making tombstone pedestals.
2 The GB standing for Giordano Bruno, the sixteenth-century philosopher who was claimed as one of Theosophy’s progenitors.
1 It was clearly modelled upon Brookwood Cemetery, outside Lond
on, which was opened in 1854 – and sorely named after it too, though the Sydney theory is that it got its name from a local prevalence of crows, this city’s second-best substitutes for the rooks of the old world.
1 Not to mention, since this is a passage about religion, Jacob Pitman, died 1890. He was a religions pioneer whose brother was Isaac Pitman, the spelling reformer, and his epitaph at Rookwood says he woz the ferst Minister in theez Koloniz ov the Doktrinz ov the Sekond or Niu Kristian Church.
2 One of the burial stations was turned into a restaurant, another now forms the beguiling Church of All Saints at Ainsley, Canberra, where its congregation is summoned to worship by a bell taken from a railway engine – sustaining the motif, as it were. In previous years passing the Redfern mortuary station was the signal to railway travellers that they were approaching Sydney Central. ‘No hurry till you see the mortuary station’ – how many people had made that remark, wondered Kylie Tennant in her novel Ride On Stranger, 1943, as they folded up their newspapers ready to leave the train?
3 More than a million people are thought to be buried at Rookwood, and in 1981 the Society of Australian Genealogists transcribed all their surviving epitaphs on to microfilm. It took ninety people seven years to do the job, and their labour is recorded in a book, The Sleeping City, edited by David A. Weston, Sydney 1989, to which I am much indebted.
1 Though Mrs Holland was wrong, unfortunately: Davies was later caught in the act in his peach orchards and sent away to life imprisonment on Norfolk Island,
2 Supposedly, I learn from The Macquarie Encyclopedic Dictionary, as an acronym for his ironic slogan ‘We Only Want Social Evils Remedied’.
1 He is quoted by Ruth Park in The Companion Guide to Sydney, Sydney 1973.
2 And still to be enjoyed in a new home at the Sydney Hilton Hotel: as a pamphleteer wrote in 1893, ‘the globe-trotter who visits the bar for his glass of whisky looks round him with astonishment’.
1 A watching seaman cried out ‘That’s real murder,’ and this was a curious form of prophecy, for when the pious Tawell went home to England in 1838 he poisoned his mistress, and was hanged for it.
1 Yearning for the old days may be moderated, all the same, by reading a list of the objects hauled out of the harbour by scavenger boats in the single year 1914. They included the corpses of some 3,500 rats, 2,000 dogs, 1,500 hens and chickens, 1,000 cats, 200 rabbits, 29 pigs, 20 sheep, 13 calves, 9 goats, 8 lambs, 8 wallabies, 7 hares and a monkey.
2 And such embarrassment, too, when in 1984 the forty-eight-year-old ferry-boat Karrabee, having done its best in the race, returned to its pier at Circular Quay and sank.
3 ‘Wanted’ (says a perhaps apocryphal small advertisement in a Sydney shop window), ‘woman to cook, clean fish, dig for worms and make love. Must own boat and outboard motor. Send photo of boat.’
1 Most people like Manly, but one disappointed visitor was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (who came to Sydney to lecture about spiritualism). Having heard about the wonders of its rolling surfs, its beach crowds and its pines, he took the ferry there to see it for himself, but supposing that the tame little harbour beach around the ferry station was itself the resort, did not bother to disembark and returned to Sydney without seeing the ocean front at all.
2 At least this is how Gocher himself remembered the occasion: according to Alan Ross (Australia ’55, London 1955), a policeman on duty at the time said the editor had gone into the water wearing a frock-coat, striped trousers and a hard hat, with an umbrella under his left arm. ‘I can see It all quite clearly,’ said the cop.
1 But then as the Manly News pointed out when he died in 1912, his action had ‘added pounds to every foot of land in value’.
1 It was a 6 foot 6 inch champion of Bondi, indeed, who was chosen to play the invincible extra-terrestrial hero in the Japanese TV series Ultra-Man. The Iron Man cult began in California, but the first Sydney people to be called Iron Men were convicts who could withstand without a murmur the torture of the lash. In 1990 first place in the Narrabeen Iron Man Triathlon was won by the three pastry-cooks of the Paris Cake Shop, Bondi.
1 Ignoring the water-down-the-bath-plug analogy, the horses ran clockwise, as in England, and in New South Wales they still do: elsewhere in Australia (except in Queensland) they go the other way round.
1 Fortunately it was not the scene of another memorable event in New South Wales cricket history, the game in which (at Melbourne in 1926) Victoria made 1,107 in two days, beating NSW by an innings and 656 runs.
PURPOSES
1. Function
SOMETIMES, UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF DRINK OR TOO MANY oysters, I feel a sense of amiable unreality to Sydney. It is after all a most unlikely place. Born a concentration-camp thousands of miles from the next town, maturing so improbably on the underside of the world, more than most cities it seems artificial of purpose. It really need not exist at all. No ancient crossroads or trading routes make sense of its location, it is not the centre of anything, its indigenes did not demand it and its annihilation tomorrow would not deprive the world of anything essential to the well-being or the heritage of mankind. It is in short, say I to myself as I order another half-dozen, a self-indulgent place, created solely to be itself. Sometimes I even find it possible to fancy that it has never happened at all, and that I am resident in an agreeable hallucination; for as the writer Colin Wills once observed, on a Sydney evening one can sometimes feel ‘a sympathy for the strangest experiences of the spirit’.
Two centuries ago this great city was nothing but an idea in a few London heads – a wild intent, to establish a settlement upon an unsurveyed shore, visited only once by Europeans, and that only for a stay of a few days. No reconnaissance party preceded the First Fleet. Sydney was an ad hoc kind of place from the beginning, and for me it retains a sense of permanent improvisation, making itself up as it goes along, and edging as I say, when the mood and the circumstances dictate it, headily towards illusion.
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The city’s first seal, struck in 1790, succinctly expressed its official purposes. It showed Industry sitting on a bale of goods receiving the convicts to their tasks, and is all too reminiscent of the slogan above the gates of Auschwitz – Work Shall Make You Free. Almost at the same time, however, Josiah Wedgwood of Derby, England, struck a commemorative medallion, modelled in Sydney clay sent to him by Governor Phillip. He based its design upon a poem by Erasmus Darwin – Charles Darwin’s grandfather – which was called ‘The Voyage of Hope to Sydney Cove’, and was itself vatically inspired by the reports that came home from the penal colony:
There shall broad streets their stately malls extend,
The circus widen, and the crescent bend;
There, ray’d from cities o’er the cultured land,
Shall bright canals, and solid roads expand.
There the proud arch, colossus-like, bestride
Yon glittering streams, and bound the chasing tide;
Embellished villas crown the landscape-scene,
Farms wave with gold, and orchards blush between.
There shall tall spires, and dome-capped towers ascend,
And piers and quays their massy structures blend;
While with each breeze approaching vessels glide,
And northern treasures dance on every tide!
Fired by this prescient verse, Wedgwood produced a medal far more cheerful than the official seal. Hope presided over it, and bestowed her blessings upon Peace, Art and an unshackled Labour; and sure enough Sydney’s original purpose was very soon overtaken by all the opportunities of a free society. Before long, in one of the more blessed of historical ironies, no city on earth less deserved images of restraint upon its escutcheon.
Just to be seen behind Hope’s skirts, in the Wedgwood medallion, were the blades of an anchor, and very proper too, for Sydney’s most obvious function is the function of a sea-port.1 At the very beginning, before the Blue Mountains were crossed by Europeans, the sea offered its settlers not only the one wa
y into Sydney, but the one way out. Even when its hinterland was opened, the city remained primarily an outpost of a maritime Empire, looking to the ocean for its commerce and profits. Seals and whales, sandalwood and Tahitian pork – these were some of the first of the Sydney commodities, and for years this was one of the archetypal Conradian schooner ports of the south Pacific, where every captain came some time or other to sell his cargo, to look for charters, to repair or victual his ship, to replenish his crew.2 In 1841 a newcomer counted 140 ships in the harbour – deep-sea sailing ships, coastal brigs and schooners, paddle-steamers serving the Hunter River settlements, colliers from Newcastle, grain lighters down from the Hawkesbury River. It was to Sydney that the wool clippers came, in the epic days of sail. Sometimes eight or nine were in port at the same time, and for seven consecutive years in the 1880s and 1890s the most famous of them all, the Cutty Sark and the Thermopylae, sailed together through the Heads in a pageantry of canvas at the start of their long races home to Britain.3 The passage of such beautiful ships through the harbour was a glory of the place; one of Sydney’s worst tragedies was the midnight wreck of the clipper Dunbar at South Head in 1857, when 121 people were drowned, and only one man was found alive next morning, huddled in a crevice of the cliff.1