Sydney
Page 19
Even in the early twentieth century the maritime association was inescapable. A much larger proportion of the population then lived close to the harbour, and almost everything in Sydney proper still looked down to the ocean, the wharfs, the Customs House and the warehouses. Whole families lived as seamen, dockers, ferry-men, fishermen or pilots. The wharfie, the Sydney docker, dominated labour affairs; suburbs like Balmain or Pyrmont depended upon the jobs of the quays and shipyards. The P. and O. liner service from London was one of the municipal institutions, giving rise indeed to a variety of local architecture called the P. and O. Style, and at the end of every shearing season dozens of wool steamers, lumpish successors to the windjammers, loaded their bales at the Pyrmont wool wharfs. In those days the central waterfront was a clutter of berths, ships docking all around Sydney Cove, round the point in Darling Harbour, and up the innumerable straits and inlets of the Parramatta’s mouth. Every old photograph shows the inner harbour gloriously crowded with riggings, and there were many Sydney houses whose gardens were overhung by the prows of ocean-going vessels. Even when international air travel began, before the Second World War, it was to Sydney as a seaport that the first fights came; the flying-boats of Qantas and Imperial Airways used a base at Rose Bay, on the south shore of the harbour.2
The old sense of jostled maritime intensity is lost now. For one thing only a few cruise ships dock at Sydney Cove’s Ocean Terminal, the rest of the quays being given over to ferry-piers, while Darling Harbour is dedicated to tourism. Most of the big container ships dock at a terminal in Botany Bay, and from Captain Cook’s original landing-place, marked by an obelisk and sundry plaques, their superstructures can be seen towering over the melancholy waters. In Sydney as everywhere the picturesque old finger-piers have mostly been demolished, or survive in rickety hazard, and the last of the regular P. and O. liners sailed for what was then still called Home in the 1970s.1
Nevertheless this remains one of the best of places to watch the ships go by, and when I walk out to my balcony at McMahon’s Point there are almost sure to be vessels passing. Sometimes they are nosing upstream to the oil berths and coal docks still tucked away in unsuspected coves west of the bridge. Sometimes they are negotiating the bends into the Pyrmont wharfs, where for the next couple of days I shall see their masts and upperworks protruding above the buildings. Often trim white Japanese fishery depot boats come by, and sometimes I am just in time to catch some gaudy cruise ship being nudged into the Ocean Terminal. A couple of tugs swing down the harbour to meet an incoming freighter. The pilot launch hurries towards Balmain to pick up a pilot for duty. Rusty Chinese container ships moor at Millers Point, opposite my window, gigantic vessels full of cars sometimes wake me with their sirens in the mornings and I was amused one day to observe that the crew of the Soviet freighter Byelo-Russia did not for a moment pause in their game of basketball as their ship steamed below the grand arch of the bridge, past the benedictory Opera House, past all the shine of Sydney to the sea.
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Hardly had Sydney been founded than a watchpost was established at the South Head, to communicate by flag or beacon with the Observatory above Sydney Cove, and from there to Parramatta. From that day to this, on the very same site, the port has maintained a signal station, now communicating by radio with a concrete control tower at Millers Point which is still, as it happens, in line of sight across the city. If you climb up its narrow nineteenth-century stairs you will find the duty man watchful as ever at his charts and radar screens, monitoring the movement of each ship in and out of the harbour (and sometimes exchanging signal light banter with passing warships, for he is almost sure to be an ex-Navy man himself). There has been a navigational light next door, too, since 1794, when they first hung an iron fire-basket from a tripod up there. In 1818 Green-way designed a lighthouse for the site (he was given his pardon on the strength of it), and when the present building replaced his in 1919 it was built more or less to the same pattern: for a time the two of them stood side by side, like a pair of queer white twins.
The pilot station is not far away. It stands on Watson’s Bay, which is named for one of the first pilots – Robert Watson, harbourmaster too until he was sacked for theft in 1815. For years the pilots were taken out to ships in whale-boats and small schooners, but their first steam-cutters became the pride of the harbour. Named one after the other after Captain Cook, they were lovely rakish ships with tall funnels and bowsprits, like rich men’s yachts, and their scrubbed decks and varnished wood, their deck-crews swanky in wide straw hats and braided collars, would perfectly have satisfied a J. P. Morgan or an Edward VII. It was the last of them, Captain Cook III, that welcomed Charles Causley’s aircraft-carrier on the crystal morning of his poem. She survived until 1959, and until then the pilots were still transferred from cutter to ship in rowing-boats. Today they go out in diesel launches, boarding their charges directly from them four miles out at sea; but when I once paid a visit to their base at Watson’s Bay, and found the duty pilot eating his lunch over the Sydney Morning Herald, I thought he might easily have been waiting for one of the old steam-cutters, or even for a whale-boat rowed by Maoris, so timelessly seaman-like did he seem in the all-but-lost British kind.
From the start the harbour was tightly organized, like all British imperial harbours. The waters of Woolloomooloo Cove were always a naval preserve, and various inlets of the northern shore were reserved for particular purposes. In Sirius Cove warships were overhauled, it being sufficiently remote, it was thought, to keep idle seamen out of trouble. In Neutral Bay foreign merchantmen were obliged to drop anchor; in the days when it took months for news to arrive from Europe, nobody could be quite sure whether a foreign flag was friendly or hostile. And when a whaling industry was started it was confined to what is now Mosman Bay, where the atrocious smells of the processing plant could not offend the citizenry.
Mosman Bay is surrounded by houses now, of course, and Mosman is one of the most desirable of all the harbour suburbs. Yet the ferry from Sydney Cove still noses its way around the bay’s crooked entrance as into a lonely fjord somewhere. The bustle of the harbour is left behind, and there is a sense of old seclusion. The city noises are extinguished – no road runs around the bay. The banks are steep, so that the wind dies down as you enter. The inlet is heavily wooded, and at its end there is a thick green park, giving it to this day a bushland feel. On the eastern shore, half hidden by trees, a solitary sandstone building, now belonging to the Boy Scout movement, is a last relic of Archibald Mosman’s old whaling station, and powerfully suggests to me still the steaming and the bubbling and the hacking, the grease and the stink, the clatter of chains and the shouting of foremen, the dark hulks of the whales on their slipways beneath the bush, that I would have found here 150 years ago.
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Eldorado was ever the goal of Empire, and in Sydney from the start men dreamed of gold and other treasures of the earth. If the Blue Mountains beckoned some as a hint of liberty, they enticed many others as possible mining country. In the very first year of the settlement, in the very first of Sydney’s celebrated frauds, a convict named James Daley (seven years for theft) momentarily galvanized everyone by producing a lump of gold he claimed to have dug up: he had made it by melting down a guinea and a brass buckle, and got 100 lashes for the deceit.1 They really did find coal in Sydney, and it was briefly mined at Balmain, but in the end the city turned out to be Eldorado by proxy, as it were. For a time it was vastly enriched by the Bathurst goldfields, for which it provided not only so many of the speculators, but also the financial services, the supplies and the exchange. More permanently, it has prospered by the woolly gold of the sheep herds, grazing in their countless thousands beyond the hills. Sydney’s first great magnates made their money in the sheep business, the huge wool warehouses of the nineteenth century were proclamations of the civic function, and to this day the bush (as Australians indiscriminately call both farm country and wilderness) plays its important part in the Sydney
consciousness.
‘Sydney or the bush’, used to be a Sydney catch-phrase, meaning all or nothing. Most Sydneysiders prefer to live, nevertheless, in the suburban no-man’s-land between town and country, and I often fancy in their city collective yearnings for more rural, more organic arrangements. There is, for instance, the preoccupation with gardens. Almost everyone in Sydney has a garden, or wants one, and one of the city’s seminal sites is the green expanse of the Royal Botanic Gardens in the Domain, which was the first of them all. Gently inclining in a scatter of palms and gums down to the water’s edge, rich in lush or spiky foliage and haunted by esoteric birds, it forms an exhibition at once of nature cultivated, of nature wild and of nature mutated – for it is also full of the trees and shrubs imported from England, South America and South Africa to vary the impact of the indigenous flora, and in 1991 a colony of 600 fruit bats settled in its palm grove. It occurs to me too that Sydney has more than the usual quotient of memorials to animals. Behind Circular Quay a fountain commemorating the old Tank Stream is decorated with sculptured lizards, snakes, crabs, a spiny anteater and a turtle, recalling, a plaque says, ‘mankind’s past dependence on this flowing stream and our links with life around the region’. A memorial to Matthew Flinders the navigator has beside it a smaller memorial to his cat Trim, with Flinders’ own epitaph to the animal: ‘To the memory of Trim, The best and most illustrious of his race, The most affectionate of friends, Faithful of servants, And Best of creatures’. In 1950 they erected a memorial to the horses killed with the Desert Mounted Corps in the Middle East more than thirty years before – ‘They did not come home,’ says the text. ‘We will not forget them.’
Perhaps all this animism is folk-memory. By the nature of things Sydney, though a place chiefly of townsmen from the start, was born countrified. Cows, pigs, sheep, goats, horses and poultry were fellow-migrants with the convicts, and Phillip, who had farmed himself during periods of half-pay in England, did his best to make an agricultural go of things. His original Government garden is preserved as a kind of shrine within the Botanic Gardens, planted with the same cabbages, carrots and beetroots: it was not much of a success in 1788, and the cabbages still look pretty mouldy to me. Most of the original cattle soon ran away into the bush, but were discovered years later generated into flourishing wild herds. Lesser farm stock infested the streets of early Sydney; hens were all over the place, goats were a pest, pigs roamed the town as licensed scavengers. The surrounding countryside was a disappointment at first, and dreams faded of a plantation colony, reclining among palms and bananas in the West Indian kind. Soon enough, nevertheless, the first agriculturalists were flourishing, some of them military men and officials farming on the side, some free settlers and ex-convicts.
The first of them all, and the first man to receive a land grant in the colony, was a convict from Cornwall named James Ruse (seven years for breaking and entering). He was one of the few farmers on the First Fleet, and Phillip gave him thirty acres at Parramatta. This was the beginning of Experiment Farm, whose house is now one of the two oldest houses in Australia, and whose acres are represented by a small rubbish-strewn park adjacent. It was also the real beginning of Australian agriculture. Ruse failed in the end, and became someone else’s farm overseer, but he was evidently conscious of his status as the Father of the Australian Farm, because he wrote in his epitaph, carved on his tombstone at Campbelltown:
My mother reread me tenderly
With me she took much paines
And when I arrived in this Coloney
I sowd the forst Grain
And Now With my Heavenly Father I hope
For ever To Remain.
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By the early 1800s farm settlements were spreading far into the bush. Although the free farmers and emancipees had convicts to work for them, still they were true pioneers, in the kind that were later to become emblematic of the imperial and American frontiers, and the whole tradition of the Australian outback, its squatters, its pastoralists, its homesteaders, its stockmen, its shepherds and its swagmen, was really born in Sydney town.
There were two kinds of agriculturists. The grazier, dealing chiefly in sheep, was the smart kind, the country gentleman, putatively evolving into the landed magnate. The cocky was the simpler sort, and was roughly sub-classified as a cow cocky, a scrub cocky or a fruit cocky. The grazier’s ambition was achieved when he found himself master of a couple of thousand square miles with a few hundred thousand merino sheep upon it. The fulfilment of the cocky’s hopes was surely symbolized by the moment when, one day in the 1860s, Maria Ann Smith of Eastwood, near Parramatta, threw the remains of some Tasmanian apples out of the back door, and found them apotheosized into the Granny Smith. Both kinds of farmer looked to the city of Sydney for their markets and their urban needs. The driving of the herds into the Sydney slaughterhouses was part of Sydney life; many an inn along the Parramatta Road depended for its trade upon the cockies coming to market; shearers and farm labourers were familiars of the Rocks taverns; the more fashionable of the graziers would travel a couple of hundred miles rather than miss a Sydney ball.
The wealthy New South Wales grazier is still a potent figure of the Sydney social scene. He lives on his wide acres somewhere, in his ample station, but he perhaps has an apartment in Sydney, he probably has a club there, he sends his children to Sydney boarding-schools and he shows up aristocratically at grand functions now and then. Together with the cocky, he comes most visibly into his own on the occasion of the annual Sydney Royal Show, the Easter junketing of the Royal Agricultural Society, which is one of the great events of the civic calendar. Then, for ten days, the country comes back to Sydney. The show-ground is part fun-fair, part exhibition, part show-ring, part shopping mall, and to Go to the Show has been part of the Sydney family tradition for a century. There are judgings of horses, sheep, cattle and farm produce. There are competitions of steer-riding, show-jumping, wood-chopping. There are displays of cats, needlework, jams or tractors. There are bands and roller-coasters and big dippers. There is the old Sydney custom of the show-bag: shops and companies put together small samples of their goods and sell them in plastic bags – the Bertie Beatle Show-bag, for instance, contained in 1990 four Bertie Beatles, one Violet Crumble, one Smartie and one Hooly Dooly. There is a monumental display of country produce, laid out in intricate patterns of apples, honey-pots, oranges, pumpkins, corn-cobs, reaching from floor to ceiling in meticulous design – even onions occupy their pickle-jars ornamentally. Everywhere are the farmers, unmistakable rurals, with rubicund bulldog faces, with sticks as often as not, preferably wearing moleskin trousers and a wide-brimmed kind of hat called an Akubra, and stumping around the place with an agricultural gait. They seem to me like people from an earlier Sydney altogether, a Sydney without an Opera House or a single Vietnamese bistro, and indeed when I once told my acquaintances that I had been to the Show, some of them sneered a little, and said it was no longer relevant.
I would not have missed for anything, though, its greatest spectacle, the Grand Parade of exhibitors around the big oval show-ground. This is likely to be attended by the Governor of New South Wales, who arrives in a coach and four, and by nearly everyone who is anyone in the Sydney Establishment, but it is dominated by people from the bush. In the background the fun-fair proceeds, a big dipper rises and falls and an aerial cable-car comes and goes. In the foreground the countryside presents itself in an astonishing crescendo of pageantry. The exhibitors parade in concentric circles. Dashing rodeo players on their ponies, tent-peggers with lances, impeccable dressage competitors, lolloping cattle led by sturdy men in boots, immense Shire horses, sheep trundled round on the backs of trucks – all revolve at a steady pace which, as the arena becomes increasingly crowded, and the circles tighten, and the excitement rises, and the dust billows, begins to look more and more like the movement of some beleaguered caravan – a huge ceaseless swirl of men, women and animals. On its perimeter, giving the scene a final thrilling touc
h of laager, scores of spanking pony-traps whizz round and round, much faster than anything else, constantly outlapping the assorted livestock and driven by stern-faced, tight-lipped Australian gentlefolk, tweedy and bowler-hatted, who time and again race unsmiling past as though they are circling for the kill.
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Heavy industry has never dominated Sydney, and is not much apparent in the central city now. A poet celebrating the International Exhibition of 1879 could suggest, as New South Wales’ own contribution to the grand display of produce, only minerals, gold, wine, lusty herds and merry maidens, and it would be more or less true if Sydney were mounting an exhibition today. Cars were assembled here for a time, but the factories closed. Ships used to be, but are not so often now. Reference books mention textiles, machines and transport equipment, but you would not know it. Although the statistics say that more than 300,000 Sydney citizens work in manufacturing industries, when I asked several informants what all these people made, nobody could suggest anything in particular.
The native Sydney industry is the industry of the entrepreneur, the middle-man, and he came into his own with a vengeance during the boom years of the 1980s. All the service industries gave a new vigour to Sydney then, the dealers in futures and options, the real-estate people of course, the publicity and marketing people, the computer kids, the brokers, the bankers, the art dealers, the lawyers, the auctioneers – and when boom turned to bust ‘new links were forged’, as a Sotheby’s spokesman smoothly put it, ‘between auction houses and the liquidation industry’. Here as everywhere tourism, the ultimately unproductive industry, burgeoned, preened and was given its own Sydney manner. The facts and figures of Sydney tourism are happy-go-lucky, if not actually impromptu, and so is the manner. ‘Shoot me in the head if I know the answer,’ I heard one tour-guide answer without a moment’s hesitation when asked a question, and I was not surprised to read that two of the Opera House guides had lost their jobs after ‘psychological testing’; it seemed to me that the trade as a whole might perform oddly in a Rorschach test.1