history
Peter Craven
John Birmingham
Leviathan: The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney
Knopf $59.95hb, 563pp, 0 091 83261 6
WALTER BENJAMIN IN A REMARKABLE phrase, said the history of civilisation was always at the same time the history of barbarism. John Birmingham, the man who made a name for himself with He Died with a Felafel in his Hand and who has proved himself to be, at thirty-five, the nation's premier 'gonzo' journalist (not least because of the moral clarity he brings to his tall tales of colour and murk) has written a remarkable history of the city of Sydney in which the snarl of barbarism and the blood dripping from its dark hide obscures any sense of the civilisation that provides it with a lair. Not even -- at least for the most part -- the wild blue optimism of a Harbourside culture, the sun and the surf and seaside, the working person's paradise of seafood and libertarianism and up-yours-with-the-rent.
This is not Donald Horne's sense of Sydney innocence, nor Robert Hughes' mediterranean lifestyle at home, though Birmingham does share with Hughes a belief in the nakedness of the Australian will to power. The difference -- and it is a difference of emphasis -- is that he sees this operating bestially 'without history or longlived institutions or a moral centre'.
In an afterword the author confesses that celebration had been his original intention but the shadow of the slouching of the rough beast got in the way 'because someone always gets hurt'. He had wanted to write an anatomy of Sydney in the manner of Michael Pye's book about New York, Maximum City, which would reconstruct that city through a series of narrative layers, part recapitulated historical research and part on the spot 'new' journalism, contemporary interviews and anecdotes which would give a kind of synchronic drama to the apprehension of how the past lived as a virus in the present but still had time -- why not -- for the Mardi Gras and the oysters.
Somehow the Beast got in the way. Birmingham's opening invocation of the idea of the seamonster Leviathan is from Milton (it 'sleeps or swims and seems a living land') but it becomes rapidly apparent that a Hobbesian pessimism -- though not a Hobbesian conservatism -- is in play. This Leviathan is a kind of alternative jeremiad against Sydney which with considerable eloquence and intensity spits out whatever half of the truth resides in the fact that the history of the city is nasty, brutish and short.
It's a Rum Rebellion history which excoriates the class of go-getting hucksters who dealt in grog to the first convict settlement (against the interests, Birmingham quotes Brian Fitzpatrick as saying, of 199 people out of two hundred). Birmingham loathes the Macarthurs of Australian history, with their insolence and their second-rate lurch towards wealth and it gives him more than a little sympathy for those early governors who fell foul of them -- Bligh (for all his bad language), and Macquarie despite his vainglory. Indeed Birmingham has such a visceral distaste for the Rum Corps and the Exclusives and for the length of their shadow that he sometimes sounds as if he is inclined to agree with old Lachlan that anyone who is anyone in the history of Sydney is either the fine flower of the dungheap of the penal colony or guilty of crimes that would have deserved transportation anyway. And in the whole catalogue of Sydney enormity nothing appals him more than the alliance between legal and non-legal violence which, from the time of Askin to the time of the Woods Commission, was like the resurrection of the never more than dormant beast that had plagued the early colony.
On red-coated flog-opera Sydney Birmingham is remarkably adept in his narrative flow, not least because he has the backs of Manning Clark and Robert Hughes (a palpable influence) to ride on. These earlier sections of narrative recapitulation are terrific stuff even if they occasionally seem a little bit ceaselessly free flowing. Birmingham is excellent on Phillip and Watkin Tench and the Aborigines, though perhaps he doesn't pause long enough to deliver the kind of summarising setpieces that distinguish later parts of the book. On the other hand anyone who can explain the effect of El Nino and give the most vivid account of the rebellion against Bligh I have come across is obviously a formidable customer and one our educationists should think about putting it on the syllabus, not least because his streetwise lingo might prove arresting to the young.
It has to be said though that in diction Birmingham is something of a caution to us all. The moment when he describes William Wentworth as 'as a real trouserman and party animal' is just one of a thousand moments when the author's virulent Oz slangspeak (which at its best is wielded like a weapon) comes close to cliché and journalese.
I don't think this is anything to weep over in a book with the sweep and pizazz of Leviathan, though a tougher editor might have stopped this book from sounding quite so recurrently strident and -- just every so often -- a bit self-consciously charming and faux youthful. Helen Garner has written about the psychological effect of wearing stripes on Australian men (she thinks it infantilises them) and Leviathan would be a better book if it wasn't quite so hip.
None of which is to deny the power of the vision Birmingham projects, which is -- paradoxically -- at its finest in the sections of Leviathan which get down and dirty with the insulted and the injured, the victims, not 'innocent' but trampled and dispatched nonetheless, of Sydney lust and hubris and greed.
There are several John Birminghams at work in this book, each in his way impressive. There's a left wing moralist who wants to celebrate the struggles between the working class battlers and the bloody-minded coppers during the Depression. At times he succumbs to a kind of generalised psychology of envy (or at any rate of outrage) that's a little bit rhetorical and threadbare. He's marvellous when he reminds us how strange it was during the Cold War for the middle-class women of Kelly's Bush to get into bed (so to speak) with the BLF of the noble Jack Mundey era, so that the ringtailed possums were saved by the idealistic wing of the militant Coms, but it's a bit of a failure of tone (as well as sense), in the midst of a celebration of the Green Band when he says that no builders labourer would have been welcome to move into their neighbourhoods. It might also have complicated what remains a slightly weird class-consciousness in a book that surges with a belief in the ideal of egalitarianism (but everywhere denies its substance) if Birmingham had recalled the surely moving moment when that old toff Patrick White said that he should cut his Nobel Prize in three and give not only one bit to Manning Clark but one to Jack Mundey. That's the aspect of Sydney Birmingham is clearly intensely appreciative of but which somehow rarely surfaces in this long dark night of the city's soul.
On the other hand there are a couple of other Birminghams at play in this flawed overblown monster of a book -- a book by the way which will send any of our Olympic tourists, should it fall into their hands, screaming back to their planes -- and it has to be admitted they are incomparable.
There is the John Birmingham who has the great-Aristotelian-gift of metaphor, and who can speak, with a real moralist's thunder and compassion, of how the ghost city and the shadow state, the alliance of government money and underworld money, 'was exposed for a moment, blinking in the sun'.
This is the Birmingham who can say that when it was discovered that the workers in the morgue were ransacking the bodies of the corpses it was 'perversely refreshing' because it proved that there was 'no outrage so profane it could not come to pass in Sydney'.
He is also the Birmingham, this grim scathing moralist of satirical bent, who can say that the rise of the violent drug-dealing Vietnamese gang followed in the wake of the eager media anticipation of just such a phenomenon. Even bullshit, he says, is self-generating and these hapless aliens, if they asked what this new country wanted of them, were handed the most potent script of outlawdom and disaffection. As Birmingham says, though they walked through the valley of the shadow of death they would be the worst motherfuckers in that valley. You can't argue with analysis and vision of this power, nor with its demotic. And the moments in this book when Birmingham hits the streets are things of wonder that leave the reader humbled. He decides to live rough, as a journalistic assignment. An ex-Navy man now a derro asks him what he does for a crust. 'I'm a writer,' Birmingham replies. And the reply? 'Yeah, I'm outta work at the moment too.'
More sombrely there is an account in this book of a scene between a thirteen-year-old prostitute, in rainsoaked grey miniskirt and Minnie Mouse t-shirt and her pimp who is no more than seventeen. She wants another hit and he wants her to go back on the job and earn a dollar. He keeps slapping her over and over but it's when he says that if she's good maybe she can have some more that she succumbs.
On another occasion a young Aborigine, the human wreckage where the debris piled quickly, asks Birmingham to 'Do my arm.' He admits that it was only the suppurating ulcers and the thought of the dirty needle that stopped him from acquiescing.