Sydney
Page 21
The city’s supreme political arena is the Parliament of the State of New South Wales, in its chambers on Macquarie Street, delightfully overlooking the Domain and lately fitted out with a roof-garden and a swimming-pool. Walking past Parliament House one carefree afternoon I decided on a whim to go inside and listen to the debate in the Legislative Assembly, the lower house. This was a shock to me. The chamber is small and intricate, and that afternoon it was jam-packed, both on the floor and in the galleries. Entering its confinement after the sunny liberty of Macquarie Street, I found that its sudden smallness, its artificial lighting and its feeling of intense privacy put me in mind of an eighteenth-century cockpit. There was a Rowlandson-like atmosphere in there. forget the subject of debate, but it had certainly raised grotesque passions. Sometimes even the gallery joined in, with shouts and sarcastic laughs, and down on the floor insults, vicious badinage and reproach flew this way and that across the House – ‘mongrels’, ‘long-haired gits’, ‘deeply deranged’. A Government supporter angrily alleged that members of the opposition were passing bags of sweets around. A Minister, complaining that somebody had stolen his notes, was told to get stuffed. Disconcertingly prominent among the combatants was a man I happened to know, and thought of as a civilized and benevolent fellow. He was transformed. He strode around down there like a mad prosecutor, he called his opponents madmen, cheats, scoundrels, he waved his papers like spells or menaces. His face was distorted with malignancy. He was a man possessed.
But when I later commented to a colleague upon this alarming metamorphosis, ‘Oh,’ was the reply, ‘he didn’t really mean it.’ Sydney politics is like that. So many interests are chafing against each other, such layers of authority are there to clash, that an archaic formalization of virulence seems more or less expected, as a kind of safety-valve perhaps. In few other cities of the west would it be said, as was said in Sydney in 1990, that voting for an opposing political party would be like a child knowingly accepting candies from a loony in a raincoat, or that an opposition candidate had as much charm as a used suppository. That debate in the Assembly was nothing special‚ and certainly nothing private. The chamber is open to everyone at all times, with a minimum of fuss, and it was really a family squabble, rather than a hole-in-corner sporting event, that I had wandered into so innocently.
The inflammatory urge in Sydney politics first arose, I suppose, when in 1808 the officers of the Rum Corps marched up to the Governor’s House and arrested Bligh on the grounds of his authoritarian behaviour.1 It has never again erupted into rebellion, but it has never been exorcized either. It has been institutionalized instead. Groans, laughs, hisses, hoots, boos, cheers, cries of ‘Shame!’ and sarcastic interventions have always punctuated reports of Parliamentary debates – Henry Parkes, in 1880, said of his fellow-Parliamentarians that they be-slimed the face of the earth with their unsightly and unclean carcasses. Visitors from Britain, inspecting the progress of this distant alter ego, were often quite taken aback. Not only were political proceedings in Sydney rowdy and unseemly, they also appeared to display an unstable tendency towards the radical and the democratic, not to mention the disloyal.2
In particular it was ironic to discover that in a colony founded upon such rigid principles of Authority, the voice of Labour was so disrespectful. Even in penal Sydney there was an element of labour power – convicts worked by task, rather than by time, and in their free hours they could sell their labour to anyone who would pay for it. The Masters and Servants Act of 1828 was severe indeed upon employees (up to six months’ gaol for negligence at work), but gave the employee rights of complaint too, and by the 1880s the formidable Mort, when he was building his dry dock, felt obliged to offer a freehold allotment to every labourer who completed his contract. In the 1930s the unions sometimes seemed all-powerful, and they still play a more subtly influential part in Sydney civic affairs than in most cities of the west: for example municipalities have lately been induced to pay their employees for sick leave they do not take, and the gravediggers’ union has recently been campaigning for a monthly day off.
The powers of the Lord Mayor of Sydney, in theory the supreme civic official, have fluctuated down the years, because owing to incompetence or corruption his City Council has repeatedly been superseded by Commissions. In any case his writ has been circumscribed. He is Lord Mayor only of the downtown area, containing 2 per cent of Sydney residents, which was constituted a city in 1841 – and even within that the Commonwealth and State Governments have enclaves under their own control. All around his fief other administrations hold sway in one degree or another, and attempts to create a Greater Sydney Council, on the old London pattern, have always failed. Greater Sydney makes up most of something called the County of Cumberland, but within it there are thirty-six municipalities and six shires, with territories ranging from just over a thousand square miles to less than three square miles.
The suburban administrations are often prickly in their independence, and critics have always complained that Sydney has no civic loyalty, only a multitude of separate local prides. One suburb at least has declared itself a Nuclear-Free Zone. Time and again I have been told I really must come to Lansvale, or Lindfield, or Engadine, if I want to understand what Sydney is all about, and people in the outer suburbs still talk about ‘going to Sydney’, as their forebears did in the days when Bankstown was an unfrequented patch of bush, and Penrith a rustic outpost. In the 1860s one municipality, Waverley, actually came to blows with the city of Sydney, concerning rights of access to the land that was later to become Centennial Park: led by a fiery Welsh mayor, its people pulled down fences, burnt bushes, and finally, men and women alike, physically attacked the city representatives – and ‘palsied’, according to a contemporary newspaper, ‘they fled’.
The general assumption is that Sydney people are endemically anarchic. Nowadays it does not often seem so, and the city gives the impression of being fussily over-governed. A little brief authority goes a long way in this town, and people clad in it are two a penny. Some of the women traffic wardens in particular – Grey Ghosts in the vernacular – have become almost caricatures of petty officialdom, as they strut pouter-chested along the pavements: when I was in Sydney last one notoriously bossy traffic warden was reported to have booked a police car for illegal parking, and scolded the driver of a postal van for stopping too long at a post-box. If you drive a car at random around the city you will constantly come across centres of Authority. The whole city has its symbolic headquarters downtown, of course, in the Town Hall. It is, however, only a Town Hall, not a City Hall, and is only one of many which supply similar intimations of pomp to the different quarters of the place.
Generally speaking the Sydney suburbs run indistinguishably into one another.1 There often comes a momenta though, as one meanders through the unmemorable streets and innumerable traffic-lights, when the place opens out a little, a few trees or municipal flower-beds appear, and there stands the local town hall. It often has a tower; it sometimes has a court room attached; there may be a police station beside it, or a post office, a memorial of some kind, even a statue perhaps; it speaks of a long tradition of municipal dignity stretching back to the civic aspirations of Victorian Britain. The complicated tower of the North Sydney courthouse-cum-post-office-cum-police-station was for years the tallest structure on the north shore, looking across the harbour to Sydney Cove like a declaration of independence – and indeed, as Bradfield prophesied, the modest suburb it once commanded is now almost a twin city to downtown Sydney across the bridge. The town hall of Balmain has survived successions of scandals and disenfranchisement to provide an elegant centrepiece still for its scrambled suburb. Even in the most formless districts the municipal buildings provide some promise of cohesion, and some probably specious promise of organization.
For despite this proliferation of mayors, aldermen and clerks across the vast metropolis, a strong sense of the slovenly pervades the Sydney system. ‘No worries’ – ‘It’ll do,
mate’ – these dear old Sydney mantras have all too often cast a spell upon the running of the place: the most unconvincing notice I know in Sydney is the one that says TOTAL PROJECT CONTROL above a door at the central railway station. Phillip’s original Sydney was inevitably makeshift. Very few people in the First Fleet knew how to build a house or even plant a potato, and the most efficient officers of the Royal Navy were amateurs when it came to the business of organizing a colony. For the first thirty years there was no currency, and the economic system was based upon barter, debt, bills of exchange, military paymasters’ notes, miscellaneous foreign coins and the Holey Dollar – a Spanish coin whose centre was punched out, the ring having one value, the centre another. Nearly everything had to be improvised, from the mortar (made from crushed clam shells) to the treatment for dysentery (using the leaves of the red gum tree) or the beer (brewed from the remains of the maize milled for the convicts’ porridge, flavoured with gooseberry stalks). Government House leaked and stank. The first Sydney-made ship could hardly move.
This slipshod survives. ‘Sorry, our computer’s down’ is one Sydney cri-di-coeur, and ‘Lift out of order’ is another. When I went to board the McMahon’s Point ferry once they had forgotten to bring the gangplank, so that elderly passengers had to be manhandled aboard, and one constantly hears of more extreme examples. A cat falls through the ceiling of an operating theatre at the Prince Henry Hospital. A Vietnamese man rings the emergency number, ooo, after four youths ransack his house and threaten his family with knives and a gun; he fails to make himself understood, so is told to fuck off. A lady, buying a bag of garden fertilizer, finds upon it a telephone number to call for advice about its use; she does so, and gets information about AIDS in the Macedonian language. When Sydney trains are running late, it is revealed, they are told just to ignore a scheduled stop or two, to make up time. Far more dreadfully, between 1963 and 1979 a private psychiatric hospital in the northern suburb of Chelmsford used a system called ‘Deep Sleep’, which put patients Into a lengthy coma often without their knowledge: twenty-six people died, many more were permanently maimed, but although patients often had to be admitted to public hospitals for recovery, it was years before Authority took any action.1
The most famous example of bumbling tergiversation was the building of the Opera House. No city ever undertook a task more daring or more admirable – to create as its architectural centrepiece an opera house and concert hall, designed by a foreigner in a style almost unexampled and to techniques altogether unproved, on the most prominent of all city sites. An international competition had found the architect and the design, much of the money was raised by lottery, but from first to last nothing went right in the construction of this lovely thing. It took five years to discover how to build the flying roofs. The cost rose from an estimated A$7 million to a paid-out A$102 million. The interior design was drastically altered. The schoolboy son of one of the lottery winners was kidnapped for ransom, and suffocated in the boot of the kidnappers’ car. The opera stage proved so inadequate that performers have been complaining about it ever since. There was no provision for car parking. The original begetter of the idea, Sir Eugene Goossens, conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, was caught with his pornography and left Sydney in disgrace.2 The architect Jøern Utzon quarrelled with everybody and left too.3 State Governments rose and fell around the issue of the Opera House, and when it was at last finished Utzon understandably refused to return for the opening, and has never been near Sydney since.
One might suppose that in this vibrant sparkling city all arrangements would be up-to-the-minute. On the contrary, in some respects the place has been astonishingly slow to move. Until the mid-1970s several suburbs had no sewerage, and in one, Leichhardt, horse-drays were used to sweep the streets. At Revesby in 1991 a milkman (‘Milko’) does his rounds with a cart-horse named Stumpy. Arthritic telephone poles totter anachronistically across town. As I write some of the signals on the suburban railway lines are still lit with kerosene lamps; their wicks are trimmed once a week.
*
Trimming the wicks is vital, for few cities of the world have to depend upon such extended and multifarious lines of inner communication. These offer a general impression of genial and fairly energetic chaos. Ferries were the original vehicle of public transport, and to the outsider they set the tone of it still (though far more people commute by bus or train – and even, it is claimed, by bicycle). Sydney’s topography means that it is the second busiest ferry port in the world, outclassed only by Hong Kong, another metropolis divided by the waterway that is its raison d’être.
The very first Sydney ferry was a punt that took people extremely laboriously up the river to Parramatta, and it was followed by rowing-boat services across Darling Harbour to Balmain, and then by the Old Commodore’s trans-harbour enterprise. The first Sydney-built boat was also used on the Parramatta run: she had oars and sails and was nicknamed The Lump, partly because that was what she looked like, and partly perhaps because she sometimes took a whole day to make the fifteen-mile journey. Sydney took a brave step towards mechanical water-transport with the Horse Boat Experiment, which was propelled by the energies of four horses and carried 100 passengers, but it was the arrival of steam that altered everything. Steam opened up hitherto inaccessible corners of the harbour, and allowed daily commuting from the more distant suburbs. Manly indeed was really the creation of the steam ferry: until the service opened in 1848 it could take days to get there from the city centre, and only twelve lonely families had settled there – even as late as 1928, when the first road bridge was built across the Middle Harbour, Manly’s freight went from Sydney by sea.
The ferries became essential to Sydney’s functions. They have been blamed for delaying the coming of the railways, but for generations they offered the only sensible way of travelling around the harbour – even along its southern shore, which was corrugated by many creeks and inlets. Pictures of the 1920s show the Milson’s Point ferry wharf, the busiest on the harbour’s northern side, looking very like one of the Manhattan piers in the heyday of the Hudson River ferries: a cavernous shed with a clock-tower, tall funnels belching smoke around it, hurrying crowds coming and going, and on the road behind a line of waiting trams. In the single year 1928 more than 46 million passenger journeys were made on the ferries, and D. H. Lawrence wrote of Sydney people ‘slipping like fishes across the harbour’, so accustomed were they to jumping on a ship somewhere. Most of the regular passengers were middle-class people, but there were busy workmen’s services to and from Balmain, and there were always pleasure services too, so that the ferries were almost as busy at weekends as they were on working days.
Tales and images of the ferries went into the literature, the art and the folklore, and into the books and pamphlets of innumerable ferry buffs. Who had not heard of the bisection of the Greycliffe by the liner Tahiti in 1927, or the capsizing of the Rodney in 1938, or the time the Baragoola collided with the whale, or the farcical affair when the Dee Why went aground with 700 passengers on Christmas night, 1946? The tall-funnelled steam ferries of the nineteenth century the big double-ended craft between the World Wars, which sometimes look to me like drawing-board mistakes – the rushing hydrofoils of today – all have become in their time municipal symbols, prominent in lithograph or colour printing wherever Sydney has been publicized.
The boldest and biggest of them have always been the boats to Manly. This service demands of its vessels an average daily sailing of about 100 miles, and entails crossing the unprotected water just inside the Heads. It can be a rough ride – there are photographs of waves, sweeping in from the open sea, towering high above the ferry decks – and the ships have always been potentially ocean-going vessels, some of them sailing out to Australia under their own steam from shipyards in Britain. In former times they were often heavily overloaded, too, and sometimes wallowed precariously into their piers with passengers clinging like limpets all over them, gunwale to superstructure. The long li
ne of these ferries, starting in 1848, stood high in Sydney affections, and even their names could stir the susceptible exile – Bingarra, Kuringai, Burrabra …1
The ferries reached a majestic climax in the massive South Steyne, the last of the steam ferries and, as they said when she appeared in the harbour in 1938, The Biggest Ferry in the British Empire – 17 knots, propellers fore and aft, 1,780 passengers, 1,200 tons (nearly twice the size of the Cutty Sark)! Very heavy-looking, like a bulldogs or perhaps a London bus, with two squat bolt-upright funnels and bridge-houses at each end, the South Steyne was a sight to see: she flew flags at prow and stern, and she stormed through the harbour for thirty-six years with a characteristic Sydney air of mingled toughness and festivity. When she left the scene in 1974, leaving only diesel-engined ships and hydrofoils, many were the lyrical words written about the lost smell of the grease and the steam, the pounding of the pistons, the warmth emerging from engine bays on winter evenings and the clang of engine-room telegraphs. It was sad to think of such grand old ships scuttled, as several of them were, in the deep water off the northern beaches.
Still, their successors are bright and bustling, and the hydrofoils are always exciting to watch (though earlier ones, built in Italy, ran at a deficit, frequently broke down, and were sometimes to be seen forlornly progressing to their yards high out of the water on lighters, propelled by tugs fore and aft). The hustle of the ferries is part of the fun of Sydney, and Circular Quay has always been a place of recreation as well as transport; for a time one of Its piers was actually an amusement pier, and I can remember myself when deck musicians travelled back and forth on the Manly boats. The ferries are nearly all municipally-owned now, but a private company runs a service between McMahon’s Point and Circular Quay, including stops according to a complex timetable at two or three places along the way. This is usually maintained by a venerable launch, blistered of paint, creaky of woodwork and recognizably descended from the old river boats, whose water-insect progress here and there, looking rather as though it has lost its way, gives the scene a piquant touch of frailty. Sometimes there hurtles across its prow a speedboat taxi, and I love to see the contrast: the ferry so quaint and elderly, the taxi like a crazy glass beetle scudding and bouncing over the water with an angry buzz of engines, driven most probably by a cheerful youth in a singlet.