by Bryson, Bill
Personally, I think Australians ought to be extremely proud that from the most awkwardly unpropitious beginnings, in a remote and challenging place, they created a prosperous and dynamic society. That is exceedingly good going. So what if dear old gramps was a bit of a sticky-fingered felon in his youth? Look what he left behind.
And so once more to Circular Quay in Sydney, where Governor Phillip and his straggly, salt-encrusted band stepped ashore two centuries ago. I was back in Australia after a trip home to fulfil some other commitments and I was feeling, I have to say, pretty perky. The sun was gorgeously plump, the city coming to life – shutters were rattling open, chairs being set out at cafés – and I was basking in that sense of wonder and delight that comes with being freed from a sealed aeroplane and finding myself once again Down Under. I was about to see Sydney at last.
Life cannot offer many places finer to stand at eight thirty on a summery weekday morning than Circular Quay in Sydney. To begin with, it presents one of the world’s great views. To the right, almost painfully brilliant in the sunshine, stands the famous Opera House with its jaunty, severely angular roof. To the left, the stupendous and noble Harbour Bridge. Across the water, shiny and beckoning, is Luna Park, a Coney Island-style amusement park with a maniacally grinning head for an entrance. Before you the spangly water is crowded with the harbour’s plump and old-fashioned ferries, looking for all the world as if they have been plucked from the pages of a 1940s children’s book with a title like Thomas the Tugboat, disgorging streams of tanned and lightly dressed office workers to fill the glass and concrete towers that loom behind.
An air of cheerful industriousness suffuses the scene. These are people who get to live in a safe and fair-minded society, in a climate that makes you strong and handsome, in one of the world’s great cities – and they get to come to work on a boat from a children’s story book, across a sublime plane of water, and each morning glance up from their Heralds and Telegraphs to see that famous Opera House and inspiring bridge and the laughing face of Luna Park. No wonder they look so damned happy.
It is the Opera House that gets all the attention, and you can understand why. It’s so startlingly familiar, so hey-I’m-in-Sydney, that you can’t stop looking at it. Clive James once likened the Opera House to ‘a portable typewriter full of oyster shells’, which is perhaps a tad severe. In any case, the Opera House is not about aesthetics. It’s about being an icon.
That it exists at all is a small miracle. It’s difficult to conceive now just what a backwater Sydney was in the 1950s, forgotten by the world and overshadowed even by Melbourne. As late as 1953, there were just 800 hotel rooms in the city, barely enough for one medium-sized convention, and not a thing to do in the evenings; even the bars closed at 6 p.m. The city’s capacity for mediocrity cannot be better illustrated than by the fact that where the Opera House now stands, on as fine a situation as water and land afford, was then the site of a municipal tram garage.
Then two things happened. Melbourne was awarded the 1956 Summer Olympics – a call to action for Sydney if ever there was one – and Sir Eugene Goossens, head of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, began to agitate for a concert hall in a city that didn’t have a single decent orchestral space. Thus goaded, the city decided to tear down the ramshackle tram shed and build something glorious in its place. A competition was held for a suitable design and a panel of local worthies convened to select a winner. Unable to reach a consensus, the judges sought the opinion of the Finnish-born American architect Eero Saarinen, who sifted through the offerings and selected a design that the jurors had rejected. It was by a little-known 37-year-old Danish architect named Jørn Utzon. Possibly to the panel’s relief, certainly to its credit, it deferred to Saarinen’s opinion and Utzon was cabled with the news.
‘The plan’, in the words of John Gunther, ‘was bold, unique, brilliantly chosen – and trouble – from its inception.’ The problem was the famous roof. Nothing so daringly inclined and top-heavy had ever been built before and no one was sure that it could be. In retrospect, the haste with which the project was begun was probably its salvation. One of the lead engineers later noted that if anyone had realized at the outset how nearly impossible a challenge it would be, it would never have received the go-ahead. Just working out the principles necessary to build the roof took five years – the whole project had been intended to last no more than six – and construction in the end dragged on for almost a decade and a half. The final cost came in at a weighty $102 million, fourteen times the original estimate.
Utzon, interestingly, has never seen his prized creation. He was effectively dismissed in 1966 after an election brought in a change of state government, and has never been back. He also never designed anything else remotely as celebrated. Goossens, the man who started it all, likewise failed to see his dream realized. In 1956, while passing through customs at Sydney Airport, he was found to be carrying a large and diversified collection of pornographic material, and he was invited to take his sordid continental habits elsewhere. Thus, by one of life’s small ironies, he was unable to enjoy, as it were, his own finest erection.
The Opera House is a splendid edifice and I wish to take nothing away from it, but my heart belongs to the Harbour Bridge. It’s not as festive, but it is far more dominant – you can see it from every corner of the city, creeping into frame from the oddest angles, like an uncle who wants to get into every snapshot. From a distance it has a kind of gallant restraint, majestic but not assertive, but up close it is all might. It soars above you, so high that you could pass a ten-storey building beneath it, and looks like the heaviest thing on earth. Everything that is in it – the stone blocks in its four towers, the latticework of girders, the metal plates, the six million rivets (with heads like halved apples) – is the biggest of its type you have ever seen. This is a bridge built by people who have had an Industrial Revolution, people with mountains of coal and ovens in which you could melt down a battleship. The arch alone weighs 30,000 tons. This is a great bridge.
From end to end, it stretches 1,650 feet. I mention this not just because I walked every foot of it now, but because there is a certain poignancy in the figure. In 1923, when the city burghers decided to throw a bridge across the harbour, they determined to build not just any bridge, but the longest single-arch span ever constructed. It was a bold enterprise for a young country and it took longer to construct than expected – almost ten years. Just before it was completed, in 1932, the Bayonne Bridge in New York quietly opened and was found to be 25 inches – 0.121 per cent – longer.*5
After such a long spell in an aeroplane I was eager to stretch my shapely limbs, so I crossed the bridge to Kirribilli and plunged into the old, cosily settled neighbourhoods of the lower north shore. And what a wonderful area it is. I wandered past the little cove where my hero, the aviator Charles Kingsford Smith (about whom much more anon), once impossibly took off in an aeroplane, and into the shaded hills above, through quiet neighbourhoods of cottagey homes buried in flowering jacaranda and fragrant frangipani (and in every front garden cobwebs like trampolines, in the centre of each the sort of spider that would make a brave man gasp). At every turn there was a glimpse of blue harbour – over a garden wall, at the bottom of a sloping road, suspended between close-set houses like a sheet hung to dry – and it was all the finer for being furtive. Sydney has whole districts filled with palatial houses that seem to consist of nothing but balconies and plate glass, with scarcely a leaf to block the beating sun or interrupt the view. But here on the north shore, wisely and nobly, they have sacrificed large-scale vistas for the cool shade of trees, and every resident will, I guarantee, go to heaven.
I walked for miles, through Kirribilli, Neutral Bay and Cremorne Point, and on through the prosperous precincts of Mosman, before at last I came to Balmoral with a sheltered beach overlooking Middle Harbour and a splendid waterfront park shaded with stout Moreton Bay figs, the loveliest tree in Australia by far. A sign by the water’s edge noted that if
you were eaten by sharks it wasn’t because you hadn’t been warned. Apparently shark attacks are much more likely inside the harbour than out. I don’t know why. I had also read in Jan Morris’s engaging and cheery book Sydney that the harbour teems with lethal goblinfish. What is notable about this is that in all my reading I never came across a single other reference to these rapacious creatures. This isn’t to suggest, I hastily add, that Ms Morris was being inventive; merely that it isn’t possible in a single lifetime to read about all the dangers that lurk under every wattle bush or ripple of water in this wondrously venomous and toothy country.
These thoughts took on a certain relevance some hours later in the dry heat of afternoon when I returned to the city dog tired and pasted with sweat, and impulsively popped into the grand and brooding Australian Museum beside Hyde Park. I went not because it is fabulous, but because I was half crazed from the heat and it looked to be one of those old buildings that are dimly lit and gratifyingly cool inside. It was both of those, and fabulous as well. It is a vast and old-fashioned place – I mean that as the most admiring compliment; I know of no higher for a museum – with lofty galleried halls full of stuffed animals and long cases of carefully mounted insects, chunks of luminous minerals or Aboriginal artefacts. In a country such as Australia, every room is a wonder.
As you can imagine, I was particularly attracted to all those things that might hurt me, which in an Australian context is practically everything. It really is the most extraordinarily lethal country. Naturally, they play down the fact that every time you set your feet on the floor something is likely to jump out and seize an ankle. Thus my guidebook blandly observed that ‘only’ fourteen species of Australian snakes are seriously lethal, among them the western brown, desert death adder, tiger snake, taipan and yellow-bellied sea snake. The taipan is the one to watch out for. It is the most poisonous snake on earth, with a lunge so swift and a venom so potent that your last mortal utterance is likely to be: ‘I say, is that a sn—’
Even from across the room you could see at once which was the display case containing the stuffed taipan, for it had around it a clutch of small boys held in rapt silence by the frozen gaze of its beady, lazily hateful eyes. You can kill it and stuff it and put it in a case, but you can’t take away the menace. According to the label, the taipan carries a venom fifty times more deadly than that of the cobra, its nearest challenger. Amazingly, just one fatal attack is on record, at Mildura in 1989. But we knew the real story, my attentive little friends and I – that once you leave this building the taipans aren’t stuffed and behind glass.
At least the taipan is five feet long and thick as a man’s wrist, which gives you a reasonable chance of spotting it. What I found far more appalling was the existence of lethal small snakes, like the little desert death adder. Just eight inches long, it lies lightly buried in soft sand so that you have no hope of seeing it before setting your weary butt on its head. Even more worrying was the Point Darwin sea snake, which is not much larger than an earthworm but packs venom enough if not to kill you at least to make you very late for dinner.
But all of these are as nothing compared with the delicate and diaphanous box jellyfish, the most poisonous creature on earth. We will hear more of the unspeakable horrors of this little bag of lethality when we get to the tropics, but let me offer here just one small story. In 1992, a young man in Cairns, ignoring all the warning signs, went swimming in the Pacific waters at a place called Holloways Beach. He swam and dived, taunting his friends on the beach for their prudent cowardice, and then began to scream with an inhuman sound. It is said that there is no pain to compare with it. The young man staggered from the water, covered in livid whip-like stripes wherever the jellyfish’s tentacles had brushed across him, and collapsed in quivering shock. Soon afterwards emergency crews arrived, inflated him with morphine, and took him away for treatment. And here’s the thing. Even unconscious and sedated he was still screaming.
Sydney has no box jellyfish, I was pleased to learn. The famous local danger is the funnel-web spider, the most poisonous insect in the world with a venom that is ‘highly toxic and fast-acting’. A single nip, if not promptly treated, will leave you bouncing around in the grip of seizures of an incomparable liveliness; then you turn blue; then you die. Thirteen deaths are on record, though none since 1981 when an antidote was devised. Also poisonous are white-tailed spiders, mouse spiders, wolf spiders, our old friend the redback (‘hundreds of bites are reported each year . . . about a dozen known deaths’) and a reclusive but fractious type called the fiddleback. I couldn’t say for sure whether I had seen any of these in the gardens I had passed earlier in the day, but then I couldn’t say I hadn’t since they all looked essentially the same. No one knows, incidentally, why Australia’s spiders are so extravagantly toxic; capturing small insects and injecting them with enough poison to drop a horse would appear to be the most literal case of overkill. Still, it does mean that everyone gives them lots of space.
I studied with particular alertness the funnel-web since this was the creature that I was most likely to encounter in the next few days. It was about 1.5 inches long, plump, hairy and ugly. According to the label, you can identify a funnel-web by ‘the mating organ on the male palp, deeply curved fovea, shiny carapace and lower labium studded with short blunt spines’. Alternatively, of course, you can just let it sting you. I carefully copied all this down before it occurred to me that if I were to awake to find any large, furry creature advancing crablike across the sheets I was unlikely to note any of its anatomical features, however singular and telling. So I put away my notebook and went off to look at minerals, which aren’t so exciting but do have the compensating virtue that almost never will they attack you.
I spent four days wandering around Sydney. I visited the principal museums with dutiful absorption and spent an afternoon in the admirably welcoming State Library of New South Wales, but mostly I just went wherever there was water. Without question, it is the harbour that makes Sydney. It’s not so much a harbour as a fjord, sixteen miles long and perfectly proportioned – big enough for grandeur, small enough to have a neighbourly air. Wherever you stand, the people on the far shore are almost never so distant as to seem remote; often you could hail them if you wished. Because it runs through the heart of the city from east to west it divides Sydney into more or less equal halves, known as the northern and eastern suburbs. (And never mind that the eastern suburbs are actually in the south, or that many of the northern suburbs are decidedly eastern. Australians, never forget, started life as Britons.) To note that it is sixteen miles long barely hints at its extent. Because it constantly wanders off into arms that finish in the serenest little coves, the most gently scalloped bays, the harbour shoreline actually extends to 152 miles. The consequence of this wandering nature is that one moment you are walking beside a tiny sheltered cove that seems miles from anywhere, and the next you round a headland to find before you an open expanse of water with the Opera House and Harbour Bridge and clustered skyscrapers gleaming in airy sunshine and holding centre stage. It is endlessly and unbelievably beguiling.
On my last day I hiked out to Hunter’s Hill, a treasured and secretive district about six miles from the city centre on a long finger of land overlooking one of the quieter inner reaches of the harbour. I chose it because Jan Morris had made it sound so delightful in her book. I dare say she reached it by water, as any sensible person would. I decided to walk out along Victoria Road, which may not be the ugliest road in Australia but must be the least agreeable to walk along.
I strode for shadeless miles through zones of factories, warehouses and railway lines, then miles more of marginal commercial districts of discount furnishers, industrial wholesalers and dingy pubs offering surreally unappealing inducements (‘Meat Raffles 6-8 pm’). By the time I reached a small sign pointing down a side road to Hunter’s Hill my expectations were flagging. Imagine then my satisfaction at discovering that Hunter’s Hill was worth every steaming step �
� a lovely, hidden borough of plump stone mansions, pretty cottages and picturesquely clustered shops of an often impressive venerability. There was a small but splendid town hall dating from 1860 and a chemist’s shop that had been in business since 1890, which must be a record in Australia. Every garden was a treasure and somewhere in almost every backdrop lurked a glimpse of harbour view. I could not have been more charmed.
Reluctant to retrace my steps, I decided to push on further, through Linley Point, Lane Cove, Northwood, Greenwich and Wollstonecraft, and rejoin the known world at the Harbour Bridge. It was a long way round and the day was sultry, but Sydney is such a constantly rewarding place and I was feeling ambitious. I suppose I walked for about an hour before it dawned on me that this was actually quite ambitious – I had barely penetrated Linley Point and was still miles from the central business district – but then I noticed on the map what appeared to be a worthwhile short cut through a place called Tennyson Park.
I followed a side road down to a residential street and about halfway along came to the entrance to the park. A wooden sign announced that what lay beyond was preserved bush land and politely requested users not to stray from the path. Well, this seemed a splendid notion – an expanse of native bush in the heart of a great city – and I ventured in eagerly. I don’t know what image ‘bush’ conjures up in your mind, but this was not the brown and semi-barren tract I would have expected, but a wooded glade with a sun-dappled path and tinkling brook. It appeared to be scarcely used – every few yards I would have to duck under or walk around big spider webs strung across the path – which lent the whole enterprise a sense of lucky discovery.
I guessed it would take about twenty minutes to cut through the park – or ‘the reserve’, as Australians call these things – and I was probably about halfway along when from an indeterminate distance off to the right there came the bark of a dog, tentative and experimental, as if to say: ‘Who’s that?’ It wasn’t very close or intimidating, but it was clearly the bark of a big dog. Something in its timbre said: meat eater, black, very big, not too many generations removed from wolf. Almost in the same instant it was joined by the bark of a companion dog, also big, and this bark was decidedly less experimental. This bark said: ‘Red alert! Trespasser on our territory!’ Within a minute they had worked themselves up into a considerable frenzy.