Sydney

by Jan Morris

  More than in most cities, I think, in Sydney the state of the economy has a direct and immediate effect upon the citizenry. In good times almost everyone prospers, there and then; in bad times people go bankrupt all over the place, firms sack employees by the hundred, TV stars find their salaries devastatingly cut and suddenly Sydney realizes that it, like any other city, has its fair share of the homeless, the unemployed and the unhappy. This is nothing new. Australia’s economy depends to a dangerous degree upon world commodity prices, and throughout its history Sydney has been a place of capitalist ups and downs – in this respect if in no other, it has been said, the city was ‘born modern’. Its blue-collar workers have to fight hard for security, its money-manipulating classes live on the edge of their nerves. GREED IS GOOD, said an advertisement I cut out from a paper one day, RESULTS ARE BETTER – not a very relaxing philosophy. At night in downtown skyscraper windows you may see the young merchant bankers at their work; it used to be only the flower-pinafored cleaners, scarves over their heads, now it is young men sprawling shirtsleeved in their revolving chairs, drinking out of plastic mugs and keeping an eye on the constant green flicker of the computer screens – when it is midnight in Sydney it is three in the afternoon in Frankfurt, and the markets are just opening in New York.

  I imagine that, mutatis mutandis, similar young men have been similarly preoccupied in all Sydney’s periods of economic thrust, only to slow down rather, or invite Sotheby’s in for a valuation, when recession sets in. Easy come, easy go. In Sydney ‘riches have wings’, as a reporter for the South Asian Register reported in 1828, observing a former banker selling mutton pies in the street, and proper to the ambience, I think, is the text on the grave of Joseph Potts, infant son of an early bank manager of this city, who died in 1838 and is buried beside Botany Bay:

  Let us not murmur at thy

  Dispensations

  Oh Heavenly Father. They were but

  Loans.

  Anyway, in an environment so naturally nonchalant and benign as Sydney’s, the more impersonal kind of money-making can seem comically anomalous. One lovely gusty day in May, when the very spirit of libertarian hedonism was in the air, and I was on my way to some of those waterside oysters, I picked up a paper that came merrily blowing down the street towards me. This is what it said, word for word: ‘X doesn’t appear to offer the refined main DB-based market allocation we want. They only have generic drop down into Decision Support module.’

  *

  It used to be thought that in functions of the mind Sydney was a backwater even by Australian standards. Melbourne was the place for culture and intellect. Sydney was all brassy show. Perhaps it was true. The possession of a piano may have given George Worgan a special status in the Sydney of the 1780s, but for 150 years or so Sydney society does seem to have been terribly philistine. Times changed very gradually, and at first according to strict English precedents. When Sydney University was founded in 1852 it was inevitably equipped with a medieval-style Oxbridge quadrangle, and at its inauguration one of the learned founders, Dr John Woolley, prophesied that before long ‘the quiet bays of our beautiful harbour will mirror in their crystal depths many a reverend chapel and pictured hall and solemn cloister and pleasant garden like those which gem the margin of the Isis and the Cam’.1 Fitfully, though, a more Australian intelligentsia came into being, the arts became more generally welcomed, until at last, with the opening of the Opera House, with the presentation of the Nobel Prize for Literature to the Sydney novelist Patrick White, with the intercontinental fame of the Sydney opera singer Joan Sutherland (‘La Stupenda’), with the distribution across the world of Sydney writers, film-makers, painters and actors, in our own time culture became a civic function.

  The press began the process. Some of the cleverest Sydney people had always been connected with newspapers, if only as mouthpieces for their own political ambitions, and had brought elements of public wit and debate to the mostly unlettered city. For the more educated young immigrant journalism offered the nearest thing to an intellectual occupation, so that here as in New York the newspapers were nurseries of good writing and mental activism. The pyrotechnical young editor Edward Smith Hall, for example, who arrived in 1811, was a leader in the campaign for democratic system in New South Wales, and he maintained it with a torrent of editorials so fierce that he lived a life of lawsuits and imprisonments – he once characterized the Governor of the day Ralph Darling, as a tyrant outranked only by the Great Moghul, the Tsar and the Emperor of China. The Sydney Morning Herald, founded in 1831, became one of the best-known papers in the British Empire. The weekly Bulletin. founded in 1880, developed into one of the most outrageously brilliant magazines in the English language: its declared aims included a republican form of Government, the abolition of all private land ownership, a universal system of compulsory life insurance and an Australian entirely Australian – ‘the cheap Chinaman, the cheap Nigger, and the cheap European pauper to be absolutely excluded’.

  Then as now, it was a dangerous thing to cross the Sydney press. The Empire said of a politician in 1853 that his oratory was reminiscent of a dredger, ‘slowly and laboriously jerking out deliberate buckets full of slush’. The Bulletin called the improvident Sir Henry Parkes, in 1887, ‘a cold-blooded, ungrateful old vendor of mortgaged allotments’. Truth said of the generally idolized Melba, in 1903: ‘Many a stage star has shot an erratic course, but none has done it with such vicious vulgarity, such bourgeois bumptiousness and such indiscriminate cruelty.’ The art critic of the Triad, reviewing two nudes painted by Tom Roberts in 1920, said of them that ‘barring an occasional contour that would intrigue a cheese merchant, they were hardly worth undressing’. Patrick White was told in 1956 that he wrote ‘pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge’. Sidney Nolan’s paintings were described in 1958 as possessing ‘a decadent, inbred, hilly-billy flavour of tenth-rate German expressionism’. An American film was described in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1990 as ‘an egregious pile of mindlessly violent idiot fodder’, and a restaurant was said to offer ‘indifferent food, nonexistent atmosphere, appalling noise levels and Keystone Cop service’. Libel actions have naturally been incessant, and in recent years even architectural and food critics have found themselves in court, having rashly maligned lobster salads or mocked housing developments.1

  Artists flourished in early Sydney, when they were the indispensable memorialists of history. Later they were treated with less respect, and Sydney more rumbustiously than most cities has gone through the usual phases of artistic prejudice and reappraisal – now sneering at Impressionism, now deriding Cubism, now laughing at abstracts and finally realizing, late in the day but with a particular gusto, that there was money in them all. An indigenous Sydney school of painting did not really come about until 1886, when the Melbourne artist Julian Ashton came to the city and founded an art school. He was followed by many of the leading Australian painters of the day – Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts, Norman Lindsay, Lloyd Rees, and for the first time Sydney and its harbour were interpreted not as reflections of European ideals, but as sources of beauty in their own right. It was the lure of the southern climate that attracted most of these artists, with its suggestions of mauve seductive twilights, Whistler-like nocturnes, languid dalliances in dappled gardens, bohemian liberties and classical echoes: as the poet J. A. R. McKellar put it in a poem about a ferry-trip through the harbour:

  The lips of ocean murmur at delay,

  The lovely moon no longer will refuse,

  And from the arms of darkness slips away

  To tryst with young Ephesians on Vaucluse …

  It was also relatively easy for an artist to earn a living in Sydney. This might be an uncultured place still, but it always had its eye on the main chance, and an alliance between art and commerce was presently arranged. The carriage-trade Sydney department stores established art galleries of their own, and eventually Sydney became one of the most calculatingly art-minded of all cities. Nowadays the n
ames of fashionable local artists are household words, and there is a lively sub-culture of art dealers, inhabiting parts of inner suburbia generically known as ‘the gallery belt’. Some galleries flourish perfectly frankly as centres of investment rather than aesthetics, some are focal points of social networking, some make great fortunes for their owners – when the most prominent of contemporary dealers retired from the scene, he bought the billionairess Barbara Hutton’s former house in the Kasbah at Tangier. But there are highly civilized dealers too, and however mixed the motives, Sydney has become a city unusually concerned and familiar with art. Where else would one see advertised on the backs of taxis, as it might be a rock concert or a revival meeting, a forthcoming competition for a portrait prize?

  A civic interest in literature is less apparent. A handful of internationally celebrated authors are resident in Sydney, but the great city hardly seems to realize their presence; and anyway with one or two very visible exceptions they spend much of their time either abroad or plunged in hermit-like withdrawal, periodically emerging into the local limelight to be tall-poppied by reviewers or obituarists. There is no shortage of good bookshops, and an astonishing variety of literary prizes appears to be available, as one can see from the curricula vitae of Sydney authors, almost all of whom seem to have won one or another (not to mention the two authors, at least, who have won the Booker Prize in London). Literary people of the academic kind evidently fare well enough, if I am to judge by social encounters, and know all there is to know about structuralism, minimalism, contextualism, post-Marxist formalism or pluralistic imagery. Nevertheless this has often been stony ground for littérateurs. The balladeer Barcroft Boake, in 1892, hanged himself with his own stock-whip in the scrub at Cammeray, beside Middle Harbour. Henry Lawson, slowly staggering down the ladder of alcoholism, died in the suburb of Abbotsford sotted, impoverished and all alone in 1922, and wrote selfpityingly of himself:

  In the land where sport is sacred, where the labourer is a god,

  You must pander to the people, make a hero of a clod.

  Many another Sydney writer, from his day to our own, has felt the need to run away abroad – it was the Sydney magazine Truth, after all, which observed in 1906 that if Australia had not been propitious to poets, it had to be remembered ‘what a drivelling, drunken lot most of them have been’.

  As to the theatre in Sydney, it has been for the most part thoroughly populist. The very first play ever put on was Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, presented by a cast of convicts before Governor Phillip in 1789. This seems to have been a great success: ‘I am not ashamed to confess,’ wrote Tench about it, ‘that the proper distribution of three or four yards of stained paper, and a dozen farthing candle-sticks stuck around the mud walls of a convict-hut, failed not to diffuse general complacency.’ Restoration comedy hardly proved the norm, though. The Sydney taste was more for melodrama, farce and burlesque, and in later years the theatrical trade obliged. Barnett Levey gave the public just what it wanted, and the impresario who presently came to control most of the downtown theatres, the American J. C. Williamson, was above all a showman for the people – like the Harbour Bridge and the Manly ferry South Steyne, his firm proudly boasted itself The Biggest in the British Empire.

  Sydney was a music-hall town, an extension of the British vaudeville circuit, and if ever a classical performer came, it had to be a star of stars whom everyone knew. Jenny Lind came, for instance, the Swedish Nightingale who seems to have been ready to play to any audience anywhere. Lola Montez danced her celebrated Spider Dance, leaving behind her a reputation for heavy drinking and a cocktail called the Lola Montez – rum, ginger, lemon and hot water. Sarah Bernhardt came accompanied by two dogs, a bear, possums, parrots, a tortoise and 250 pairs of shoes. In earlier times the theatres themselves were full of democratic vigour, frequented alike by gentry and by workmen, with larrikins hanging around their doors looking for mischief to perform, and prostitutes roaming the stalls during intermissions.

  There are three much-admired professional dramatic companies in Sydney, ranging in their work from the familiar classical to the incomprehensible avant-garde, but as a whole the theatre is still dominated by big musicals from New York or London, and more serious plays are generally confined to fringe houses outside the downtown quarter. It is a theatre, wrote the Melbourne playwright Jack Hibberd in 1986,1 ‘obsessed with colour and movement, voluptuous effects, whimsy, corn, and sybaritic romps’ – or as one critic more recently put it, ‘sweaty, sexy, fast and furious’. Television entertainment too is mostly razzmatazz, or what the local industry calls ‘kid-led’, but some distinguished films have been born here, enough of them to justify Sydneysiders talking about ‘our film culture’, and there is ballet to see, and opera of course, and live rock music is everywhere, and it is a pleasure of the city that one often comes across theatre people and theatrical events. In 1990 part of the Oscar Award ceremony was telecast direct to Hollywood from one of the restaurants of the Opera House in Sydney, and I went along to press my nose against the windows, joining a handful of fans or groupies there. Oh, the glamour of the showbiz scenes within! Through the windows on the other side of the restaurant I could see a fireboat spouting its hoses beneath the Harbour Bridge, and against this spectacular background the Sydney Stardust glittered. Among the potted foliage were semi-familiar figures of TV or cinema, sweetly waving to friends at other tables, applauding lavishly when an Australian name cropped up in the ceremony, smiling all the more adorably, chatting all the more vivaciously, whenever a camera swivelled their way. There were hats, and many bracelets, and a pair of orchid earrings as big as soup-plates. ‘Oh my God,’ cried one of the girls beside me, ‘isn’t that Craig McLachlan?’ ‘Oh my God,’ I echoed, ‘could it be?’

  Better still, walking around the little park at Blue’s Point one day I came face to face with an actor pacing the path with a script in his hands, silently rehearsing his lines – an extremely actorial actor, too, with presence and a flashing eye.

  *

  Visitors (and Sydney expatriates) still sometimes profess to find Sydney philistine, and it certainly has its yobbo elements, but for myself I am astonished by the energy of its cultural appetite. It is rather like Chicago half a century ago, brilliantly striving to catch up. The five Sydney universities burst with eminent scholars. The Sydney publishing industry is fertile. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra is very polished. The Sydney Dance Company is indefatigable. The State Art Gallery is crowded out every weekend. The State Library is superb. The Powerhouse Museum of Applied Science, occupying the former power station of the Sydney trams at Darling Harbour, is really a museum of nearly everything, and is generally agreed to be one of the best of its kind in the world. In an average year the Opera House offers sixteen different operas, almost nightly in the winter season. Every year a thousand people apply for the twenty-five places at the National Institute of Dramatic Art.

  In the Sydney pantheon, among the sportsmen, the millionaires, the crooks and the politicians, the hero-clods that Lawson so resented, people of intellect are readily recognized now. John Anderson, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney from 1927 to 1958, crops up repeatedly in conversation as a kind of presiding guru of the Sydney Renaissance. Martin Place, the city’s very hub, is embellished by that incongruous memorial to William Dobell. Patrick White the novelist, now that he is dead, is sure to be municipally canonized before long. Joan Sutherland the opera singer, though still alive, is more or less sanctified already. And one of Sydney’s honoured sons is the city’s most celebrated applied scientist, Lawrence Hargrave, who died in 1915 and is not only indisputably the Father of Australian Flight, but one of the world’s great innovators of aviation.

  We could do worse, in fact, than end our survey of Sydney functions with a remembrance of this gifted citizen, for he was an inventor in the classic mould, a draughtsman, an astronomer, an archaeologist and a bit of a crank. Sometimes to be seen walking on the water of Double Bay on
inflatable shoes, he believed strongly that Spanish seamen had landed at Sydney long before the British, and claimed to have found rock inscriptions proving it. He was the inventor of the box kite, an immediate precursor of the aeroplane. In 1894 he was lifted sixteen feet off the ground by an assembly of four such kites, and this success seems to have been a seminal influence upon the Wright brothers when they came to make the first powered heavier-than-air flight seven years later.

  Hargrave never patented anything, freely publicized his ideas and shared his conceptions with anyone who asked. He sounds the perfect Sydney functionalist. He looks back at us now not only benignly eccentric in the city’s memory, walking the water, flying his kites or arguing about those Spaniards, but with a visionary gleam from the back of the $20 note.

  2. System

  This immensely sprawled and complicated metropolis, held together physically by such elaborate means, must be the very devil to administer. It is hardly surprising that Sydney is heavy with bureaucracy. From the Federal Government at one end, by way of the State Government, the City Council, all the local administrations and multitudinous boards, trusts and commissions to the Hunters Hill Municipal Council at the other – from top to bottom the city festers with governmental and political activity. Perhaps this helps to foster Sydney’s traditional contempt for the whole process. The general election of 1990 seemed to me to be followed in this city with the utmost cynicism; the graffito POLITITIONS ARE GANGSTERS appeared to express the public attitude very well.