by Jan Morris
The antipathy has faded. The colonial chip on the shoulder is almost gone, and I get the impression that in general Sydney’s attitudes towards its progenitors have matured into indifference. English people may still find themselves teased and patronized, but they are unlikely to be abused simply for being English. The imperial factor is an irrelevance now, and most people do not appear to care much whether Australia is monarchist or republican. The old trust in British power, at once debilitating and inspiring, was terribly weakened by the catastrophe of Singapore in 1941, and was symbolically dismissed in 1951 when the Anzus Defence Treaty was signed, linking Australia not with Great Britain, as in effect the protecting Power, but with the United States. Since then American warships have been more familiar visitors to the harbour than the ships of the Royal Navy, and when the Royal Australian Navy celebrated its seventy-fifth anniversary the Americans marked the occasion by sending the immense battleship Missouri, more powerful than any warship the British ever built, to tie up at Garden Island opposite Admiralty House.
The constitutional connection with Britain is now remote indeed, having been weakened in stages down the decades. Once governed directly from London, Sydney became first the capital of a selfgoverning colony, then the capital of a State within an independent Australian federation, so that there are now no direct administrative links between this city and the old imperial centre. An Agent-General of New South Wales is stationed in London, but is hardly more than a trade representative; the British maintain a consulate-general in an office block overlooking Sydney Cove, like any other foreign Power. Britons need visas to come to Sydney now. ‘My first feeling,’ wrote Charles Darwin of his introduction to Sydney, as so many British travellers wrote then about so many imperial stations, ‘was to congratulate myself that I was born an Englishman.’ Now not one visitor in ten thousand, I would hazard a guess, thinks of this city as British at all. In 1990 Sydney’s 1st East Miranda Scout Group, born by loyalty out of Empire, was the last in Australia to wear the kilt; but it could muster only four scouts and two cubs.
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It was inevitable. Sydney was always on the far perimeter of the British Empire, and was bound to break away in the end. Founded in English contempt, and inhabited by people often genetically Anglophobe, it was remarkable that the place remained so British so long.
The first foreign intervention in the affairs of this city occurred before the city even existed. Six days after the First Fleet arrived in Botany Bay, the day before the move through the Heads, Phillip’s men were astonished to see the masts and upperworks of two strange ships approaching from the sea. ‘At first I only laughed,’ Tench recorded, so improbable was the event. They turned out to be the French frigates La Boussole and L’Astrolabe, commanded by Jean-François de la Pérouse, on a voyage of discovery through the southern hemisphere. Taken aback by their arrival, the British embarrassingly managed to collide four of their own vessels as they beat their way out of Botany Bay, but put a brave face on the presence of their old enemy as they set about establishing the settlement at Sydney Cove. ‘All Europeans are countrymen so far from home,’ La Pérouse declared, and he and Phillip became quite friendly. Some of the convicts, having been disembarked at Sydney Cove, very soon found their way overland back to Botany Bay, hoping for asylum with the French (or at least sympathy from La Pérouse’s lieutenant on La Boussole, the Irishman Sutton de Clonard); but they were rejected, it seems, and perhaps they were lucky, for when La Pérouse sailed away six weeks later he, his ships and all his men vanished into the Pacific for ever – wrecked, it was discovered long afterwards, in the New Hebrides.1
It was manifest then that Sydney could never be insulated against the world and its effects, and the bizarre arrival of La Pérouse in the first week of Sydney’s history has never been forgotten. The suburb that is named for him, with its Aboriginal settlement, stands at the place on Botany Bay where his ships anchored, and a little enclave down there commemorates his stay. There is a memorial obelisk, a museum tells the sad tale of the expedition, and a French chaplain who died while they were in the bay lies in his tomb nearby – just down the road from the Snake Man. The crews of many French warships have paid their respects at this melancholy spot. It is not true, as legend suggests, that it is actually French soil; but until 1983, when French nuclear tests in the Pacific soured relations with Australia, it was customary for the La Perouse Aborigines to celebrate Bastille Day, and the children would scramble for sweets showered among them by the French Consul-General.
Very soon Dutch, Spanish, Danish and American ships were coming to Sydney, and as the nineteenth century progressed foreign vessels of every nationality took to using Sydney as a port of call or repair. It may not have seemed so at the time, but it was really a prophetic moment when, in 1908, Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet arrived in the harbour. This spectacular squadron, of sixteen battleships and four auxiliaries, was circumnavigating the world allegedly in the cause of peace, really in pursuit of American prestige, and it was by far the largest foreign force ever to be seen at Sydney, easily out-dazzling the elderly British cruisers which then represented the South Pacific squadron. Sydney adored the Great White Fleet, its spanking (if varyingly effective) warships, its good-natured matelots. It was true that after a reception for civic leaders on the battleship Connecticut some of the silver was found to be missing, but in general the Americans were given an extremely warm welcome. The city was plastered with American flags, eagles and portraits of George Washington; innumerable speeches of cousinly goodwill were exchanged; a five-storey replica of the Statue of Liberty was erected; the American admiral got hundreds of fan letters. During the week’s visit a million passengers were taken by the Sydney Ferry Company to view the fleet, and thirty American sailors jumped ship for good. It was, though, more than a mere social triumph. America was displaying itself as a common enemy of the Yellow Peril, by then seen as the main threat to Australian well-being. As the correspondent of the New York Sun reported, in their effusive welcome to the fleet the Sydney-siders were ‘telling something extremely important to Great Britain’; and perhaps the Great White Fleet did impress upon the civic mind the realization that there were other Powers but Great Britain in the world, and other ideals but Empire.
Nowadays I am constantly struck by Sydney’s breadth of foreign interests and connections. Ships from unknown ports frequent the harbour, the Sydney Morning Herald regularly carries weather forecasts from the South Pole, and while I was working on this book there arrived at Sydney airport the world’s largest freighter aircraft, loaded with a cargo of 1.6 million nappies from Kiev. Tourists from everywhere come to this city nowadays: a young man I once saw clumping up the steps of the Opera House in roller-skates turned out to be a Frenchman who had skated across half the world to this, the object of his pilgrimage. Some people claim to find Sydney Americanized, and call it a little Manhattan. I feel no sense of cultural annexation, though. The city feels to me no more Americanized than it did when I first knew it – no more Americanized than London.1 It is not the impact of America that impresses me, every time I return to Sydney, but the ever-growing impact of Asia.
Nobody talks of the Yellow Peril now, and every year Sydney is more enmeshed with Asia. Sydney soldiers have fought in two post-imperial conflicts, independently of the British, and they were both in Asia – in Korea and in Vietnam, in each case a war to prevent hostile Asians extending their power further to the south. Asian power gets closer anyway. Japan has long replaced Britain as the main customer for the commodities which pass through Sydney’s port and, here as everywhere in the Pacific world, is now a mighty investor too. Asians from Vietnam and Hong Kong have flooded into Sydney, and a Chinese community which used to be thought of as a coterie of unhygienic restaurateurs, gamblers and opium-smokers is fast becoming a formidable economic force. Every time I go to Sydney Asian faces are more common in the streets, the papers carry more references to Asian affairs, and the ships that sail beneath the Ha
rbour Bridge are more likely to be lying Asian flags. When I was there recently one of them flew not the Innocuous moon ensign of the Japanese merchant fleet, but the blood-red rising sun of the Japanese Defence Force, successor to the Imperial Japanese Navy, I thought this reminder of old enmities might arouse disagreeable emotions in Sydney, since it was probably the first time the flag had flown anywhere near the place since the submarine attacks in 1942. In fact nobody took the slightest notice.1
Perhaps the truth is that this city has accepted its geographical destiny. The British Empire is dead and gone, the very concept of Australasia is tenuous, and the world is really divided into three or four enormous geopolitical units. Seen in these terms, Australia is the southernmost island of the Indonesian archipelago, reaching down from south Asia, China and Japan, and Sydney is no more than a regional port of the Pacific – its peers, partners and rivals now are not Liverpool, Bombay or Baltimore, but Singapore, Osaka, Hong Kong. Sydneysiders are perfectly conscious of these inexorable developments. Sometimes they respond with racist expostulation, sometimes they seem unnerved by the cleverness and diligence of their new Asian fellow citizens, but generally they appear to look forward fatalistically into a world very different from the comforting constructions of the lost Empire. Easy come, easy go! One evening I sat in a café at King’s Cross, its television flickering all-but-disregarded above the counter, contemplating the cheerful scene around me. The noise level was high, the customers were young and fun. Thinking how prosperous the place seemed, how sure of itself, and how high-spirited, I caught out of the corner of my eye a very different scene on the television screen. It showed a boat-load of refugees from Cambodia arriving half-starved, destitute and wide-eyed somewhere on the Australian coast, I missed where. They were clinging all over their rickety vessel, hanging over the gunwales, draped over the wheelhouse.
It reminded me of old pictures of those overloaded Manly ferries, and just for a moment I thought it really might be one of the Sydney ferry-boats that the refugees had commandeered. The Australians on the screen stood aghast to see them come, and remonstrated for a while, but in the end they had to let them land – as it were on Sydney Cove just down the road, or at Balmoral beside the bandstand. What else could they do?
1 Old Sydney riddle: Why did Cremorne Point? Because it saw Atholl Bight off Bradley’s Head.
1 Malaspina was treated with courtesy by the not terribly warlike British officers, who were delighted to have visitors, and was obliged to admit in one of his dispatches to Madrid that they had been very nice to him – ‘We shall remain for the rest of our lives eternally grateful for the gracious hospitality for which we have been obliged to the colony.’
1 ‘… and gracious! how Lord Lundy cried!’
2 For many years, though, the lines were supposed to have been written by an anonymous convict as a prelude to the performance of The Recruiting Officer which we attended on page 176 – legend said it had been declaimed by George Barrington, a celebrated pickpocket known as The Prince of Thieves.
1 One of whom seems to have been fairly certainly established as Frederick Meredith, steward to the captain of the transport Scarborough; he has many descendants in Sydney still, and when a celebratory party was thrown on Garden Island in 1988‚ forty of them turned up.
1 Unless they are Aboriginal, in which case they are never graffiti at all, but rock art.
2 Which had a speaking-tube connecting one floor with another.
3 The Aquitania had last been seen by many Sydneysiders standing offshore at Gallipoli a quarter of a century before.
1 Mr Cansley tells me, by the way, that he was suspected of hyperbole because he wrote of the aircraft-carrier as being ‘prefaced by plunging dolphins’ when she passed through the Heads – but on that summer day of 1945 prefaced by dolphins HMS Glory was.
2 It was built to the same plans as the master-crane at the Singapore dockyard, erected in 1939 but blown up in 1941 before the Japanese could get it.
3 But which many local residents could do without – not least those who, living in the nearby suburb of Woolloomooloo, claim that the Navy’s testing of its radar equipment interferes with their television reception, sets car alarms off and makes them feel ill.
1 One item is the flag of the Australian 7th Infantry Battalion. In 1940, during the Second World War, this was taken from the battalion guard-room in Egypt by Private T. Flannery, who sold it to Private Brian Fitzgerald-Fogarty, who passed it to Corporal T. M. Fennessy. In these various hands it was carried all through the Libyan, Cretan and Greek campaigns, and after the war it came back once more to Fitzgerald-Fogarty, who gave it to the regimental association, which laid it up at last, in 1976, peacefully in Holy Trinity Church.
1 The Kuttabul dead included one touching representative of the Mother Country: Boy D. Trist, Royal Navy.
2 The Japanese did destroy the Chicago in the end, off the Solomon Islands in 1943. In 1979 the officers of a later American cruiser of the same name presented a picture of their ship to be hung on Pinchgut Island, with the inscription: ‘The later missile cruiser USS Chicago made this presentation to atone for the bad gunnery of its predecessor.’
1 All that remains of the sandstone ridge which ran out to Bennelong Point, before it was quarried away. It was nicknamed the Tarpeian Rock by one of the more cultivated officers of the First Fleet – or perhaps one of the more cultivated convicts – after the rock on the Capitoline Hill in Rome over which murderers and traitors were thrown.
1 The British had decided to withdraw from the Sudan after all, and it was another thirteen years before Lord Kitchener took the flag back to Khartoum without benefit of Aussies.
2 The twenty-two British K-boats were steam-propelled, and formed the most unsuccessful class of submarines ever built – eight of them accidentally sank, K13 on her acceptance trials.
1 The most famous of whose bishops, Reginald Heber, gave his name to the suburb of Hebersham.
1 Though when, in 1863, Sydneysiders wished to honour the future King Edward VII’s new wife by naming a suburb for her, they spelt it wrong, and it has been Alexandria ever since.
2 The Duke was followed to Sydney by a well-known prostitute he had got to know in Melbourne, but not invited to the ball was the family of William Augustus Miles, a former Sydney Chief of Police, who was an illegitimate son of William IV. Miles is buried in Camperdown Cemetery, and his epitaph there says pointedly that though his beating heart sank into death unmourned, it might have been Blessed by Thousands – he might, in short, have been William V.
1 How well I remember their pale images, still dressed as I recall them in suits, cardigans and trilby hats, lining the rails of their ships, and sometimes patriotically waving, as they passed through the British-held Suez Canal!
1 The Prime Minister of Australia has an almost equally enviable official house, just around the corner, but of course he is just a Politition.
2 Though Elizabeth II is the only reigning monarch to have set foot in the city.
1 Though once when I inquired after him I was told I would probably find him taking refreshment at Mrs Sippy’s Coffee House.
1 The qualities survive, I am sure, among the men of the Castlereagh and Bathurst fire station, but shortly after I paid my visit the fire service decided to give up brass buttons.
1 The Irishman it was that died – on the gallows.
1 La Pérouse was well-known to the Empire. He had spent two years as a prisoner of the British after the battle of Quiberon Bay in 1759, and during the American wars he had destroyed two British forts on Hudson’s Bay in Canada‚ courteously leaving some supplies behind for the use of their scattered garrisons.
1 But then I am of the opinion that most ‘Americanization’ is simply modernization, and that the Big Mac springs directly from the human heart.
1 And when the ship sailed out again beneath the bridge I saw four of its officers on the helicopter deck pursuing an amiable ritual of contemporary Japan: taking each oth
er’s photographs.
RETROSPECT
WHAT A FINE AND INTERESTING CITY, ALL IN ALL! WHAT AN attractive people! Yet I find I cannot end this book about Sydney without that streak of wistfulness returning. I used to think it was because beyond the Blue Mountains, just out of sight from Circular Quay, there extended an empty wilderness inhabited only by inexplicable primitives. I used to quote the poet A. D. Hope’s indictment of Australia:
The river of her immense stupidity
Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth.
Now the Australian outback feels empty no longer, we think of the land itself in a more comradely way, and we understand a little better the arcane ideas of the Aborigines, but still Sydney feels on the edge of some more metaphysical blank. Most of the world’s great cities have something inevitable about them, as though God decreed them come what may. In Sydney, even now, I catch myself feeling sometimes that the place never need have come into being in the first place.