Sydney

by Jan Morris

We’ll wander over valleys, and gallop over plains,

  And we’ll scorn to live in slavery, bound down with Iron chains.

  The most celebrated of all the bushrangers was the Irishman Jack Donaghoe, transported for life in 1825, who was sentenced to hang in Sydney for robbery but escaped between the courtroom and the condemned cell. For eighteen months he ranged the countryside west of the city, sometimes, so local legend said, appearing bold as brass in the city itself, suave in a blue coat and laced boots. Donaghoe appealed to many atavistic Sydney instincts, not just as a dashing defier of Authority, but as an Irishman cocking a snook at the English, and he was to live in the folklore long after he was caught and shot. He was the real hero of the ballad which has perhaps affected the Australian psyche more than any other:

  He was scarcely sixteen years of age when he left his father’s home,

  And through Australia’s sunny clime busharanging he did roam.

  He robbed the wealthy squatters, their stock he did destroy,

  A terror to Australia was the Wild Colonial Boy!

  The Wild Colonial Boy – still perhaps, somewhere deep in the civic unconscious, a Sydney cynosure!

  After the bushrangers came the Pushes, gangs of young hooligans, mostly based in the Rocks, who infested the whole downtown area and at once fascinated and appalled respectable citizens. Some of these were just groups of thugs, and their style was captured by a poem, attributed to Henry Lawson, in which one of their captains anathematizes an enemy:

  May pangs of windy spasms throughout your bowels dart;

  May you shit your fucking trousers every time you try to fart;

  May itching piles torment you, and corns grow on your feet,

  And crabs as big as spiders attack your balls a treat;

  And when you’re down and outed, a dismal bloody wreck,

  May you slip back through your arsehole and break your fucking neck.

  Other gangs aspired to dandyism. They wore pearl-button jackets and cocky narrow-brimmed hats, and their high-heeled boots were sometimes inlaid with mirrors, reflecting the finery above. Most Victorian memoirs have something about the goings-on of these tiresome but distinctive youths – knocking people’s hats over their eyes outside the theatre, indulging in noisy internecine fights, hitching rides on the backs of carriages or making curses of themselves at pleasure-places of the harbour – ‘He put a rock in the heel of a sock / And went down the bay to Chowder’. In them the bushrangers’ heritage was transmuted into the urban tradition of the larrikin, and if little else about them was very engaging, their disrespect for the established system perhaps still touched Sydney hearts. The word Push, which the gangs invented for themselves, went into the language not entirely pejoratively: in later years various social cliques liked to call themselves Pushes, and when in the 1980s a group of historians published a journal concerning the origins of Australia, Push from the Bush is what they called it.

  The more outrageous of Sydney’s crooks and racketeers, the assorted Mr Bigs of organized crime, the Colourful Racing Identities, the con men and the fraudsters, to some degree inherited the mantle of John Donaghoe. They were villains, but they were heroes of a sort too, wild colonial boys, and the tales that were told about them acquired the vitality of myth. My own favourite concerns the Tichborne Claimant. The mystery of the Tichborne inheritance was well-known in Victoran Australia. Roger Tichborne, heir to a great estate in England, was generally supposed to have drowned in a South American shipwreck in 1854, but his mother Lady Tichborne, the family matriarch, was convinced that her son was still alive somewhere in the world. In 1866 Arthur Orton, son of a London butcher, having arrived in Sydney after a scallywag career at sea, in Tasmania and in up-country New South Wales, boldly took up this challenge, and declared himself to be the missing aristocrat. He was semi-literate, fat and very vulgar, while Tichborne was an excellent linguist and a former officer in the 6th Dragoon Guards, but he was so successful in his act that Sydney society was fulsomely deceived. He was invited to grand houses, he was allowed to run up enormous debts, and an ancient pensioner of the Tichborae family, by then himself retired to Sydney, swore that he remembered the rascal well. Off Orton went to London, where he inexplicably convinced poor Lady Tichborne too, squeezing a handsome annual allowance out of her: but the rest of the family contemptuously rebuffed him, and after eleven years in English gaols for perjury the Tichborne Claimant came clean at last, and published a full confession of his enterprise. As an irresponsible rogue, a deceiver of toffs and an enthusiastic gambler, he was a man after Sydney’s heart.

  Later the swaggering kings of the syndicates were stars of a kind, and lived filmic lives. When the hoodlum Phil Jeffs died in 1945 the tabloid Truth began its obituary: ‘Phil the Jew, Sydney racketeer, gangster, drug peddler, procurer, sly grogger, alleged phizz gig for some detectives, gunman, wealthy friend of some politicians and many police, died on Tuesday.’1 Richard Reilly, who was himself murdered by the syndicates, began his career as a dance-hall bouncer, became a wartime racketeer, ran a roadhouse called Oyster Lil’s, drove a Maserati sports car, lived in a mansion and was known as the King of Baccarat. The gambler Chicka Barnes, murdered in 1957, was found to have four bullet-scars in his abdomen, one finger shot from his left hand, two stab-scars on his chest, a knife-scar on his throat, bicycle-chain-scars on forehead and shoulders, various scars on his chin and lips and the bullet-hole in his back that killed him. When Colourful Racing Identity George Freeman died in 1990, the Sydney Morning Herald called him Big Crime’s Artful Dodger. He was Mr Big Enough for twenty-five years, the paper said, and it added that during all that time the best the police could manage against him was a couple of fines for illegal betting, though he certainly had contacts with the Chicago underworld and the Chinese Triads, was generally assumed to fix horse races and run illegal casinos, was strongly suspected of heroin smuggling and had been refused entry to England as an undesirable. ‘His word was his bond,’ an old friend was quoted as saying, and many devoted Colourful Identities were photographed at his funeral.

  *

  I kept random notes of crime and misbehaviour over a few months in Sydney, and the profusion was astonishing. Here for instance is a man on his seventy-ninth charge of having refused to pay restaurants for meals he has eaten: this time he has dined on soup, oysters, fillet steak, dessert wine, cognac and Campari. Here another Racing Identity, convicted of stabbing a man to death in a street fracas, finds himself in the same gaol as his twenty-one-year-old son, who has recently assaulted a Chinese cab-driver.2 A gang of Fijians, Tahitians and Samoans clashes with a gang of bikies in the western suburbs. A senior railway official is accused of fiddling an expense account for an apple and a Devon sandwich.1 A solicitor is found guilty of keeping a brothel. The Maritime Services Board says that during the past eighteen months people with chain-saws have stolen 200 solar-powered panels from navigation lights. Illegal hot-dog vendors, says a report, are battling with each other to preserve their territories.

  What’s this now? A visiting Commonwealth MP is bitten on the wrist by a female drug-addict. Seven schoolboys, aged eleven to fifteen, are charged with breaking 300 train windows in two months. A surgeon is accused of deceiving patients; he pretends to operate on them for Ménière’s disease, but a skull is presented as evidence to show that he never drills deep enough. A report says that the Philippines have become a second home for leaders of the Sydney underworld, who arrange many of their drug deals there, and control much of the prostitution. The Corrective Services Minister, sentenced to seven and a half years for taking bribes to arrange the early release of prisoners, appeals and has his sentence increased to ten years. Here is a complete newspaper story which was printed on 21 March 1990, but which had, I thought, something particularly timeless to it:

  GIRL ROBBED

  Four boys walked off laughing, after robbing a

  19-year-old girl of $150 outside Campbelltown

  public library yesterday. One threw her e
mpty

  wallet back and shouted ‘You stupid bitch’.

  It sounds appalling. In fact I have never once felt frightened in Sydney. There are few places in this city where one cannot walk with safety, even after dark, and in recent years Sydney’s murder rate has been considerably lower than London’s, and something like one-fifteenth of Los Angeles’. As to petty crime, it is probably no more common here than anywhere else, but I sometimes feel it is regarded differently – more as a folk-custom perhaps. I remember well the goggle-eyed astonishment with which a young couple on holiday from Adelaide listened to a ferry deckhand, the very image of a Sydney larrikin or hoon, telling all and sundry how he habitually got home after night duty – he took a cab to a nearby address, asked it to wait for a moment and disappeared. And it was on a ferry too that a kindly woman warned me one day to be especially careful about pickpockets on public transport in Sydney. I thanked her for her advice, and when we parted she returned to me my purse, which she had extracted from my handbag in the course of the conversation.

  *

  Yet despite it all, despite all the energies of this rich and vigorous place, despite the restless undercurrents and procrastinations, still I often irrationally feel that Sydney exists simply to be – and to present itself. This it does with infinite panache. Everything looks so easy here, at first sight, that the stranger can hardly imagine the cauldron of complexities bubbling behind the scenes, while Sydneysiders as a whole bear themselves as though possessing citizenship of this city were purpose enough in itself.

  Sydney is born to show itself off. Like Venice, it is its own advertising slogan, for ever blazoning its own merits. Elsewhere, as the poet Vincent Buckley once remarked, the play may be the thing: in Sydney it’s the première. Perhaps it all began with the flash of criminals long ago. Certainly visitors to Sydney down the generations have commented on the swagger of things, the showy techniques of horse-tram drivers, the flaunting gear of larrikins, the confidence amounting almost to exhibitionism of working-men. Showmanship of a kind is everywhere here. It may be just the crazy driving of a cab-driver, skidding zigzag through the traffic on the New South Head Road. It may be an aerobics class glimpsed through a North Sydney window, prancing like so many blonde demons to the beat of rock and the whirring of ceiling fans. There is a street group called the Aussie Small-Change Brass Band which might well represent the city at ceremonial functions, so alive is it with the authentic Sydney mixture of fun, fizz and chutzpah: its players are three very small boys in very large hats, with two trumpets, a tuba and extremely powerful amplifiers, and I can tell you they play ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’ like nobody else. Virtuoso infant trumpeters – dress-up silks in the middle of the morning – scud of seaplanes off Rose Bay into the sun – chess-players in Hyde Park concluding their games with majestic scowls, as though they have torn up a treaty – GORGE at the ice-rink – Harry the Hat with his feet up before the Royal Commission – curly-wigged strutting barristers at the Supreme Court, bemedalled worthies at royal rituals, bowler-hatted trap-drivers at the Easter Show – all these characters and glimpses, and thousands more, together with the Grand Guignol of awful memory, and the flourish of true achievement, add up to the histrionic purpose that is Sydney.

  1 It is revealing that the piers of Circular Quay are numbered from the seaward side – seen from the land they ran backwards, Pier 1 to the right, Pier 7 to the left.

  2 Conrad himself came several times, though never as a captain, and wrote about Sydney in The Union of the Sea, 1906.

  3 Won without exception by the Cutty Sark, whose fastest journey took seventy

  1 The ship’s anchor stands beside the track up South Head upon which we met, in an earlier chapter, those well-disciplined schoolgirls.

  2 Where that dashing pilot of page 124 still lands and loads her seaplane.

  1 The P. and O. cruise ship Fairstar still sails out of Sydney Cove, but it is registered – O tempora, O mores! – in Monrovia.

  1 Besides being ordered to wear a canvas smock with the letter R for rogue sewn on it. How many Rs would we see on the streets of Sydney now, if such penalties were still enforceable?

  1 Not that the tourists seem to mind. Later I overheard the guide who gave the suicidal answer being thanked for the tour by a Japanese: ‘A little interesting. See you again.’

  1 He never lived to see it, if only because fourteen years later he was drowned in a shipwreck in the Bay of Biscay.

  1 Though my own favourite Sydney critique, in the Sydney Morning Herald recently, was nothing if not balanced. Writing about a concert of twelfth-century French hurdy-gurdy music, the reviewer observed that the players ‘brought a style to this music which bears the intimation of authenticity, though other approaches can be imagined’.

  1 In his contribution to Jim Davidson’s The Sydney–Melbourne Book.

  1 His daughter met them at the door with drawn parasol, but they found the Governor under his bed, hiding State documents according to his own account, hiding himself according to the rebels.

  2 Even the socialist Beatrice Webb found the political scene distasteful; after meeting Sydney civic leaders in 1898 she reported that the Lord Mayor was illiterate in speech, awkward in manner, extraordinarily muddled and ‘heavily scented with whisky’

  1 Though it is true that the shire of Hornsby declares itself in the best Sydney style: WELCOME TO HORNSBY SHIRE. WE ARE COMMITTED TO ENHANCING THE QUALITY OF OUR SHIRE BY PROVIDING COST EFFECTIVE SERVICE TO OUR CUSTOMERS.

  1 In 1988 a Royal Commission was appointed to inquire into the tragedy. By then the presiding doctor of the hospital had killed himself, like twenty-two of his patients.

  2 Although he was, as it improbably happened, a direct descendant of Captain Cook: his maternal grandfather was the operatic bass Aynsley Cook.

  3 BRING UTZON BACK, said a graffito of the time, but there was soon an addition to it: AND HANG HIM.

  1 Though the spellings were varied and unreliable – Bingarra sometimes had two Ns in it, Kuringai sometimes had a hyphen, Burrabra was sometimes two words.

  1 Which are not actually connected to the bridge arch, though from a distance they look as though they are, and had no functional purpose until in 1990 the two northern towers were adapted as ventilators for the tunnel being built on the harbour-bed below.

  1 The ebullient miscreant was an Irish member of the New Guard, Francis de Groot (1888–1969), the owner of a furniture factory who by this single act immortalized himself. He was taken to a psychiatric hospital but declared sane, and was later fined £5, with £4 costs, for offensive behaviour in a public place. Charges of damaging a ribbon to the extent of £2 were dismissed. De Groot found many admirers – some say the Governor-General’s guard had lent him the horse – while within the year Jack Lang was dismissed from office by the Governor of New South Wales, Sir Philip Woolcott Game, CB, KCB, GBE, KCMG, GCVO, GCB, a future Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police.

  2 In earlier, even more completely British years, the popular analogy would have been not Manhattan and Brooklyn, but Liverpool and Birkenhead. Anyway, there was a Sydney Brooklyn already, up on the Hawkesbury River; its name confusingly commemorated the Union Bridge Company of Brooklyn, New York, builders of the Brooklyn Bridge, whose engineers had constructed a nearby railway bridge In 1899.

  1 Askin, a Grand Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George, was also well-remembered for the order he gave his driver when, in 1966, hostile demonstrators threatened to block President Lyndon Johnson’s motorcade through Sydney: ‘Run over the bastards.’

  1 Of a pretty Gothick toll-gate the Governor had commissioned this disagreeable inspector wrote that ‘while it must excite the derision of everyone acquainted with style in architecture it must also raise in responsible breasts a strong emotion of regret at the vast disbursement on this inelegant and fugacious toy’.

  1 It is commonly known as The Bay – just what penal Sydney used to be called among the English criminal classes.
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  1 A phizz gig was a police informer, a curious Sydney derivation from an old word which (so the Oxford Dictionary tells me) can also mean a frivolous woman, a kind of top, a harpoon or a silly notion.

  2 He suffered from Parkinson’s disease, and was described by a colleague as being as shaky as a dog shitting razor-blades.

  1 Devon is a processed food containing meat, spices and cereals; its pink colour fades in bright light. I read somewhere that until the Second World War it used to be called Fritz, but a Pom-busting informant assures me that so bland a victual always did have an English name.

  CONNECTIONS

  ALWAYS, SOMEWHERE IN SYDNEY’S WATERS, GREY WARSHIPS can be seen: lying in dock, steaming out to sea, or standing morosely month after month in Atholl Eight, between Cremorne Point and Bradley’s Head, waiting to be scrapped.1 A pictorial album of Sydney is like a naval register, as the little Sirius of 1788 gives way to the bulky three-masters of the Victorian prime, to the prim-looking men-o’-war of fin-de-siècle, to the rakish three-funnelled County-class cruisers that gave a particular touch of elegance to the Sydney of the 1930s, to the bold carriers of the Second World War and the destroyers of today enmeshed in electronics. Sydney is the main base of the Royal Australian Navy, which hived off from its parent the British Royal Navy in 1911, but which still honours some of the old British traditions, and the naval presence is symbolical. The British Empire was a maritime dominion, built upon sea-power, and of all the cities it nrtured from scratch around the world, Sydney is the most authentically imperial.