Sydney
Page 25
The wars of the British Empire, nevertheless, have left their sad mark upon this city. The first to involve Sydney soldiers was the Maori War of the 1860s, when several hundred Australian volunteers fought with the imperial armies, but the first proper Australian expeditionary force sailed away from Sydney in 1885, and is commemorated by a bronze plaque (paid for by a bequest from one of its soldiers) on the sandstone bluff behind the Opera House.1 The 750 men of the force, which was raised by the New South Wales Government, had volunteered to fight in one of the most passionate of the imperial crusades, the campaign to reconquer the Sudan after the death of General Gordon at Khartoum. The expedition got off to an ignominious start, one of its troopships colliding with the cruiser Nemesis before it had even left the harbour, and its return was rather bathetic too, for it had reached Africa too late to see anything but a few skirmishes.1 It had established a fateful precedent, though, and for the next century there was scarcely an imperial war in which men from Sydney did not fight and die.
This is a city of war memorials, so large a contribution have these conflicts made to the community’s character and self-knowledge. There is a memorial to the volunteers of the Boer War, up on Observatory Hill. There is a memorial inside the Queen Victoria Building to holders of the Victoria Gross, There is a memorial in the porch of the Great Synagogue to the 113 Jewish servicemen who died in the First World War. In the naval chapel on Garden Island (which has a pulpit like a ship’s prow) there is a touching series of stained-glass windows commemorating ships and classes of ship which have sailed from this port Into battle – all the Second World War Bathurst corvettes, for instance, and all the First World War submarines. The Cenotaph in Martin Place commemorates the dead of both World Wars, and each Thursday at eleven sees a small ceremony there, with a band, a couple of platoons of soldiers and officers with swords. The whirling circular fountain at King’s Cross remembers the victory of El Alamein in 1941. In Parramatta, opposite a service station on the Cumberland Highway, the symbols K13, standing in gigantic concrete n a scummy ornamental pool, were erected in 1961 as a memorial to submariners of both World Wars, by a local survivor of the submarine K13, lost in 1917.2
When I first came here the greatest of these monuments, the Anzac Memorial in Hyde Park, seemed to me central to the city’s conceptions of pride, manhood and mateship. It was one of the keys, I thought then, to the Sydney character. It honoured all the dead of the First World War, but was associated in everyone’s minds with the tragedy of Gallipoli, which had changed Australians’ conception of their place among the nations. Never again would the leaders of the British Empire, far away in London, be regarded as infallible or omnipotent, and I interpreted the memorial as a permanent rekindling not merely of sadness, pride and resolution, but of bitter disillusion too.
I still consider it one of the most moving of war memorials, and one of the most under-estimated, being often dismissed by Sydney people as pompous, romantic or just embarrassing. The Sydney architect C. Bruce Dellitt designed it, but its glory is a series of sculptures by Rayner Hoff, a young Sydney artist who had himself served in the trenches. A squat flat-topped monolith of reinforced concrete, faced with granite outside and marble within, it is like a truncated pyramid on a shallow plinth. Around its summit sit a number of solemn thoughtful figures, not heroic at all, but infinitely sad. They sit there almost crouching, looking into the distance – here a sapper, there a gunner, an infantryman on one corner, a sailor on another. Inside the building 120,000 stars shine down from the ceiling, representing every man who went to the Great War from New South Wales; far below a pitiful bronze ensemble of Sacrifice, three women and a child mourning a dead soldier on a shield, stands in the place one might expect to find a gilded catafalque. There is no false triumph about this noble cenotaph. Gallipoli in particular, the memory of which lies at the heart of its message, was nothing but terrible failure, and there is no pretending otherwise.
A Sydney generation has grown up now that hardly knows where Gallipoli was, and long ago I came to feel that the Anzac Memorial had lost its awful charge, and stood there in the park like a spent reactor. However some time during any evening at a Returned Services Club a dimming of the lights is likely to interrupt the cheek-to-cheek dancing, the laughter at the bar, the slamming and tinkling of the poker machines. A hush falls upon the club, as the members one and all stand and turn in the same direction – towards Gallipoli? Towards Flanders? Towards the remote half-imaginary imperial country Sydney used to call Home? Many of them are Italians or Greek nowadays, but they all stand silent as a sepulchral voice declaims over loudspeakers the great mourning dirge of Laurence Binyon – ‘They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old … at the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember them.’ ‘We will remember them,’ mumble the revellers respectfully. Up go the lights, the band resumes the foxtrot, the poker machines crash back into action.
*
For many years nobody thought of Sydney as anything but a British port and settlement, part of the vast imperial network. Convicts were sent to the penal colony not only from Britain and Ireland, but from Canada and South Africa, and officials came to Sydney as a posting in the course of worldwide imperial careers. Watkin Tench had served in the American colonies, Lachlan Macquarie in India, William Dawes went on to West Africa, Barren Field to Gibraltar. William Balcombe, appointed Colonial Treasurer in 1823, had served on St Helena during Napoleon’s exile there, and William Broughton the first Bishop of Sydney had started life as an East India Company clerk. In later years Governors came from other colonies and admirals proceeded to command other stations of the imperial seas, while the early Anglican clergymen of Sydney owed their duties to the diocese of Calcutta.1
These peripatetic Empire-builders brought with them from other possessions many an imperial prejudice, method, style and even protégé – Governor Macquarie was accompanied everywhere by his Indian servant George, acquired as a child for 85 rupees, and Governor Darling imported from Mauritius his friends the Dumaresq brothers, destined to be great colonial swells. Anglo-India was the chief exemplar, of course. The Sydney style of architecture, with its emphasis on the veranda and the wide eave, was recognizably descended from Anglo-Indian precedents. The bungalow, the very ark of the Australian suburban faith, was a form out of India; Sydney’s military structures were obviously derived from those of the cantonments; the Queen Victoria Building is alleged to be in an American Romanesque style, but it looks to me, with its domelets and Hindu-style chattris, at least as directly influenced by the hybrid Anglo-Indian architecture of the time. There is a supposed likeness between the ground plan of downtown Sydney and that of Calcutta, the Domain of the one city being the Maidan of the other. Certainly in early years the relationship between the two New South Wales Government Houses, at Sydney itself and at Parramatta, was very like that between the Viceroy’s twin palaces at Calcutta and Barrackpore, even down to the gubernatorial barges which conveyed Their Excellencies from one to the other – serenaded sometimes, in Australia as in Bengal, by water-borne bands.
Imperialism often rode high in Sydney, in the heyday of the creed. Bishop Broughton said that while there was certainly ‘an eternal purpose’ to the existence of the place, there was also a historical purpose: ‘the exaltation of the English nation, and its gradual extension of power to the limits of the habitable world’. Charles Went-worth thought that one day Sydney might actually replace London as the centre of British dominion. The memorials in St James’s Church would perfectly satisfy any vicar in Poona or Leatherhead, recording as they do so many officers, barristers, clergymen and other figures of the imperial Establishment, dying after esteemed careers in the public service, going down with their ships, killed fighting Germans, Turks, Blacks or ‘Natives in the valley of the Horokiwi’. Loyalty to the Mother Country could sometimes be fulsome and sometimes ridiculous. One had to be fairly obsessed to name a slab of Sydney bush Chipping Norton, to build a Mortlake and a Putney on
the banks of the Parramatta River, to cause the postmen in this brand-new country to be dressed up in the white pith helmets, scarlet jackets and striped trousers of British livery, or to equip St Andrew’s Cathedral with bits of stone not only from Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral, but also the Houses of Lords and Commons.1
An imperial occasion in Sydney could be imperial indeed. In 1868 the young Duke of Edinburgh became the first royal personage ever to visit the city, and a Citizens’ Ball was held in his honour. For this Sydney erected, in Hyde Park, one of the largest wooden structures in the world. It had a ballroom 250 feet long, a supper room almost as big, and its fountains spouted varying colonial perfumes, courtesy of E. H. O’Neill’s, Druggists, King Street.2
*
But then the city had grown rich by virtue of the imperial connection. Once the East India Company had relinquished its monopoly of British trade with the east, Sydney soon became a lively participant in the Empire’s oriental trades; and when the imperial economic system reached its Victorian climax, and for a time the British Empire seemed likely to become a permanently self-supporting unity, the one part of it providing raw materials, the other manufactured products – then for a few brief decades Sydney appeared to have a secure and rational function part of a system, part of a generative process.
Out through the port went the wools and the gold, in came the machinery, the clothes, the books and the spectacle-cases. Sydney’s currency was the pound sterling; its ultimate exchange was the City of London; its carrier was the British merchant fleet; its ultimate legal sanctions came from the English courts. Its economic partners were London and all the dependent cities of the Empire, with whom it was linked first in the fraternity of Free Trade, later in the device of Imperial Preference: the emblematic devices on the Customs House represented the West Indies, South Africa, Canada, Calcutta, Singapore, Cape Town, Quebec, Hong Kong, Durban, Rangoon and Vancouver, as if nowhere outside the Empire really mattered. British money sustained the growth of Sydney, and more often than not British settlers wishing to move to Sydney, as part of the natural imperial process, could often rely upon a Government subsidy to help them – it was well after the Second World War that the last of the £10 immigrants dubiously filed down the gangplank (for by then the whingeing Pom was in full flower) to the transit camps of this city.1
All this meant that for generations the imperial factor was inescapable in Sydney. Other Australians often thought the city excessively loyal, and the writer Francis Adams, looking at it in 1886, could only marvel at ‘the appalling strength of the British civilization’, so powerful were the influences of Empire. The rich shamelessly aped the British, in the noonday of British prestige, and if they could not actually send their children to England to be educated, saw to it that their schools in Sydney were impeccably British in style. Most of the ships that lay at the Sydney wharfs flew the Red Ensign; when the flying-boats came to land in Rose Bay they were, if not those of Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Service (QANTAS for short), those of Imperial Airways. What a thrill when, in 1930, telephonic voice contact was first made with London, the Mother City! How moving to hear, every Christmas courtesy of the British Broadcasting Company’s Empire Service, the crackling voice of the monarch himself, sending his message of paternal goodwill to his subjects wherever the flag flew! As late as the 1950s the directors of the Sydney Morning Herald were claiming their newspaper to have ‘the largest circulation in the colonial empire’, and in 1958 Frank Hurley’s book Sydney still felt itself to be describing the Empire’s ‘second white city’.
*
Even now imperial vestiges survive. The Governor of New South Wales, up there in his castellated mansion above Sydney Cove, still wears on ceremonial occasions the plumed hat and striped trousers of the British colonial administrator, and strives through presentation and garden party to cherish the imperial strain of gracious ceremonial. It is true that his powers are limited to ‘assenting in the Queen’s name to bills passed by the Parliament of the State’, and that all too often the Court Circular in the morning paper records only his opening of a new primary school, or his reception of a delegation from the New South Wales Cheese-Making Society. Nevertheless it seemed very proper when one recent incumbent was Sir Arthur Roden Cutler, VC, who had only one leg and looked indeed like a hero of the frontiers. The Governor’s superior the Governor-General of Australia also lives in sovereign spaciousness, when he comes to Sydney. His official house at Kirribilli is full of fine portraits, ancient silver and mementoes, and when His Excellency arrives there from Canberra, to look out over the harbour from the spacious bedroom of the Admirals, he most feel that he is indeed surrogate to the Queen of Australia herself.1 Titles, though abandoned in New South Wales now, are still much in use here – in 1990 there was a knighted minister of the United Church in Sydney, and a knighted Cardinal too – and there are plenty of people in this city to whom the imperial conventions are important. When British royal persons come here, as they are rather fond of doing,2 part of the populace greets them with indifference or derision, but another part reverently puts on its tail-coats and flowered hats, prepares its curtseys and perhaps reminds itself of its own family links with the English nobility – enough to send a shudder down a Welsh republican spine.
In some ways Sydney is still much like a British city. Most of its people are of British stock – in 1986 220,000 of them had actually been born in Britain – so that even now I often find it difficult to determine whether a stranger is an indigene or a Pom. The line between the two is hazed, too, by practice and relationship: thousands of Sydneysiders spend parts of their lives in Britain, thousands of Britons are always at large in Sydney. Sydney motorists still drive on the left, Sydney lawyers still wear wigs, Sydney schoolchildren are still dressed in flannel shorts and blazers, Sydney letters sometimes get posted in a letter-box with a crown on it. Television here is still partly British-inspired – they even call the ABC ‘Aunty’, which is what the British call the BBC – and the Daily Express in London actually publishes a special Sydney edition‚ for suitable expatriates living here. British investment is still enormous. Sydney rabbis go to London for their training. Until the connection was ended in 1986 the New South Wales bar resorted to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, the old Empire’s supreme tribunal, more frequently than any other overseas bar, except Hong Kong’s. Everything most horribly English is stoked by the young women who come here from London to work as Personal Assistants to friends of Daddy’s, or public-relations persons in Sydney branch offices, whose supercilious manners and nasal distortions of the English language they themselves seem to suppose evidence of superiority.
But sometimes I am touched by reminders of the imperial past. The Strand Arcade, an antipodean version of London’s Burlington Arcade, can give me a momentary frisson of homesickness, with its faintly Dickensian suggestion of bright lights shining comfortably on damp winter evenings, and its stately uniformed beadle perfectly equipped to say ‘Morning, m’Lord’ to familiars walking through to Albany.1 Some of the more venerable apartment houses of the Older Money suburbs can be evocative too: dark wood, polished brass, ornate and sluggish Edwardian elevators, name-plates by the door announcing the residence of Professor This, His Honour Judge That or Sir Manly Parramatta QC. What could be more essentially British than the Frank Cash Memorial Prize, awarded annually at Shore School to a boy who (1) is a regular chapel attendant, (2) achieves steady progress in school work throughout the year, though not achieving a top mark, (3) is neat and tidy in the care of his clothes, (4) is a willing hand at chores and (5) is ‘a likeable fellow with his mates, respectful and thoughtful to others’?
I poked my nose one morning through the doors of the fire station at the downtown corner of Castlereagh and Bathurst Streets, designed by James Barnet in 1887. The inevitable icon of Queen Victoria guarded the establishment, flanked by sculpted fire-helmets and axes, and attended rather inappropriately, I thought, by a fla
ming torch. Inside there was no sign of life, but impeccably hung upon a line of hooks were the firemen’s uniforms, their helmets shining, the brass buttons on their heavy serge jackets superbly polished and aligned. How tellingly they spoke of a grand old heritage – the pride, the diligence, the comradeship, the dutifulness which, together with many less commendable abstractions, Queen Victoria’s Empire distributed around the world!1
*
KEEP AUSTRALIA BEAUTIFUL: SHOOT A POM. By the historical nature of things, not everyone in Sydney regards the British connection with affection, or is sentimentally stirred by brass-buttonry. The penal origins of the city, the prevalence of Irishmen, the growth of republican sentiment, the unfortunate habits of visiting English people have all helped to make Sydney’s Anglophilia less than unanimous. ‘The Old Dart’, an old Sydney pejorative for England, implies scheming and hypocrisy; many Sydneysiders thought it proper that when in the bicentennial year a memorial was erected at Circular Quay to commemorate the imperial connection, it should contain parts of a gigantic sculpted chain – bonds of friendship in one interpretation, but links of a shackle in another.
I suppose the first Bloody Pom was Governor Bligh, who so antagonized the local Establishment with his stiff-necked English regard for the proprieties, but republicanism certainly existed in Sydney from the beginning, when many of the convicts must have pined for the new liberties of the United States, and countless Irishmen detested the very notion of the Crown. That ardent Presbyterian Dr John Durmore Lang argued fervently for an Australian Republic, and hardly had the young Duke of Edinburgh been feted at the Citizens’ Ball than an Irishman tried to kill him at a picnic.1 By the end of the nineteenth century, in the scurrilous heyday of Sydney political journalism, there was probably nowhere in the British world where Monarchy was more enthusiastically reviled. The Bulletin did not hesitate to call Edward VII ‘a little fat dismal person with pig-eyes’, while Truth thought him a turf-swindling, card-sharping, wife-debauching boozer. Even Queen Victoria herself, the ultimate Briton, was far from sacrosanct. In the celebratory year of her Golden Jubilee, observed with sickly sycophancy almost everywhere else in the Empire, a public meeting at Sydney Town Hall turned down a proposal for a Sunday-school fête on the grounds that ‘to impress upon the children of the colony the value of the Jubilee years of a Sovereign is unwise and calculated to injure the democratic spirit of this colony’. Sydney cartoonists delighted in lampooning the Queen–Empress’s dumpy figure and jowled features, and the Bulletin once definitively dismissed her as a fat old hunk of sauerkraut.