history/place
A SYDNEY GALLIMAUFRY
Don Anderson
Richard Hall (ed)
Sydney: an Oxford Anthology
OUP $39.95hb, 260pp
0 19 550687 1This being Sydney, I write only for money.
SYDNEY. 'THE OLYMPIC CITY.'Capital of 'The Premier State' (NSW car licence-plate logo.) 'Emerald City' (thank you, David Williamson.) The architectural heart of Facadism, a singularly Sydney solution to the marriage, not of Cadmus and Harmony, but of the Old and the New, of Heritage values and the cravings of Commerce. The city in which and of which Robert Askin, aka Bob ('Drive over the bastards.' -- to LBJ of anti-Vietnam protesters) Askin, later Sir Robin Askin, said, on the eve of his election to the Premiership of NSW in 1965, '"I think we're going to win." And then, with a laugh: "And think of the money we'll make." (I thought he was joking.)' (Donald Horne, Into the Open, HarperCollins, 2000.) Even its Jewry is antipodal to Melbourne: 'In Melbourne, Jews fund and open a synagogue; in Sydney, they open a Leagues Club.' (Ron Elisha.) Sydney, already partly-despoiled by the incursions of that late-twentieth century pandemic, Tourism. What will be left after the brief candle of the Olympics? More Tourism? More big buses on modest roads. More Duty Free shops? What if the Japanese Yen yangs? The US dollar gets the dolours?
(Anonymous entry in Y2K Sydney Writers' Festival Competition.)
'The only paradises are lost paradises.' (Samuel Beckett.) Or was Sydney ever thus, from its original sinners, not just penal colony but venal colony? Charles Darwin observed in 1845: 'The number of large houses and other buildings just finished was truly surprising; nevertheless, everyone complained of the high rents and difficulty in procuring a house.' Sidere mens eadem mutato, indeed, even before the University of Sydney was established and took that as its motto. John Hood, an emigrant of sufficient status to leave his card at Government House in 1841, observed:
One thing that pains and surprises a stranger, is the vast number of grog-shops, and the conspicuous and public places and thoroughfares selected for those wells of poison. I am told there are at present in Sydney two hundred and fifteen of these dens of iniquity; which gives one public-house, where spirits are sold and drunk over the counter, for every one hundred and forty souls, including women and children!
Hood notes that at the colony's fons et origo, as it were, 'his Majesty's servants made rum a legal tender, and the liberty to sell it was a privilege eagerly grasped at by gentlemen holding at the time commissions in his Majesty's army.' While I do not share the hysterical anti-Americanism of those who pen Letters to the Editor deploring the incursion of Americanisms into true-blue Australian vocabulary, I think we missed a singular opportunity to celebrate the essence of our History when we changed to decimal currency and dully, imitatively, used the terms 'dollars' and 'cents'. How more imaginative, singular, and true, to have called our notes 'drams', our coins 'pots'. But, to this day, the study and celebration of our History, despite the Canute-like efforts of NSW Premier Bob Carr, has sunk deeper and deeper into disregard.
From the observations of Frank Fowler, who visited Sydney from 1855 to 1857 'for the good of his health' (not a euphemism of the 'for his country's good' kind), about Sydney's lanes and alleys, no doubt today the routes of Tourist Walks ('in roguery and raffery, as vile as Whitechapel') to 'Neddy' Smith (1944 -- ; `thief, stand-over man, and murderer'), `I ripped the red phone off the wall...', Sydney has had a soft spot for its crims, its dips and molls. Artists and crims have tended to inhabit the same suburbs -- Balmain, Darlinghurst, Kings Cross. Who but an artist or an unlucky crim would have inhabited the apartments described by George Johnston in Clean Straw for Nothing (1969), the kind of apartments where doubtless the historical Johnston and Charmian Clift and their awesomely intelligent son, Martin, did some time?
The corridor was all gloomy traces of brown, and the excremental colour and smell of this dingy byway went with the bathroom, which had stains on the walls like old maps and blotches more repellent in the toilet-bowl where something seemed to have happened with Condy's Crystals. The cracked wash-basin was a mess of squeezed-out tubes and rusted bobby-pins, and the final sordid touch was a framed printed sign screwed above the ringmarked bathtub which said, GUESTS ARE POLITELY REQUESTED NOT TO SHIT IN THE BATH.
There are, of course, other Sydneys. There is Her Majesty's personal floating palace, Britannia, visited by the acidulous Patrick White, among others. ('I spoke to Admiral McNicoll and his wife. He is the brother of that bastard on the Telegraph who is one of the leaders of the opposition to my books.') There is Sydney Society (Nola Dekyvere and 'Andrea' were also leaders of the opposition to White's work; Nola knew Patrick's mum and, given what White does with mothers in, say 'The Letters', Mrs Dekyvere's defensive position is understandable) as recorded by the Janus-faced Daphne Guinness, who is included in Sydney: an Oxford Anthology , and to whom I imagine Richard Hall will never again grant an interview. Yet even Homer nods, and even Daphne slips now and then. She claims: 'any member of the Australian Club would certainly think he was aristocratic.' I have a very dear friend, a member of the same Australian Club, who would never think of himself as an aristocrat, even though he is a natural one.
Much of the above, and much more, I have gleaned from Richard Hall's Sydney: an Oxford Anthology. Among the considerable virtues of this collection is the fact that it does not merely assemble the Usual Suspects (there is a down side to this, of which more in a moment), but is a product of that burrowing in the State Library of NSW, an institution where Richard Hall is well-known. The anthology is constructed on historical principles, beginning with Arthur Bowes Smith's 'Dissipation Ashore' (1788) and ending with Elisabeth Wynhausen in the heart of Aboriginal Redfern in 1997. In between are one hundred and twenty-five entries, from such diverse sources as Watkin Tench, Thomas Watling (viewing Sydney through the lenses of German Romanticism), Select Committee on Aborigines (1845), Caroline Chisholm, Australian Engineering and Building News, Arthur Streeton, Alfred Deakin, Archbishop Kelly, Christina Stead, Nancy Phelan, Lenny Lower, Meg Stewart, Shirley Hazzard, Penelope Nelson (daughter of the aforementioned 'leader of the opposition' to Patrick White's books. It's that kind of city.), Rosa Cappiello, Helen Garner, Jessica Anderson (no relation; it's that kind of city, too), George Papaellinas, Gay Bilson, David Malouf, David Marr.
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