In Search of Sydney

Delia Falconer is a senior lecturer at the University of Technology in Sydney and an acclaimed writer – most recently of Sydney (New South Press). Her two novels are the bestselling The Service of Clouds, (short listed for major literary awards including the Miles Franklin, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, and the Australian Booksellers’ Book of the Year), and The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers and Selected Stories (short listed for, among other awards, the Spur Award for Best Short Western Novel (US) and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize).  Delia Falconer addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 8 February to discuss the writing of her new book Sydney.

IN SEARCH OF SYDNEY

 

DELIA FALCONER

In 2008, I was approached by Phillipa McGuinness at New South Press to write the Sydney volume of what was to be a series of small, beautiful books about Australian cities.  The books would bear a family resemblance to Bloomsbury’s “Writer in the City” series of the 1990s (although those were slightly shorter books in length): each volume the exploration of an individual city by a well-known literary author, and designed to feel lovely in the hand.   But the twist, apart from the series’ Australian focus, was that we would be writing about our hometowns by birth or adoption. Beyond this, the brief was open.

I’m going to talk tonight about the challenge of trying to write about my city. Perhaps unusually in a city that is such a magnet for new residents, Sydney is my hometown by birth. I’m going to talk through the process, and about some of the things I learned and conclusions I came to draw. The open brief and the short length (50,000 words) were both a worry. Like Los Angeles, and many other large metropolises, Sydney has increased in scale to the point that it is possibly better conceived of as a loose association of different villages (and in fact, as I argue in my book, it has perhaps always conformed in its zones of imagination into its early parishes of north south east and west).  To try to capture everything about it, one would need the scope of a book at least the length of John Birmingham’s well-named Leviathan. In addition, I had doubts about my suitability to write this book. I had never had much interest in the “top end of town”. My interest was more in the ordinary lives of ordinary people. While I had almost always lived near the centre of the city, I felt the greater energy of Sydney, especially the fight for its heart and soul, was possibly now at its edges.  Just last month, on a flight back from Los Angeles, I sat next to a Nazarene rabbi from Texas on his way to meet with the parishioners of the new churches he had established in Campbelltown. It still seems to me that there is another book about the modern city to be written, that looking at life in these rapidly-changing colonial and once-rural settlements like Windsor and Campbelltown at its western edges.  It is possibly now the case that the city’s agendas no longer radiate out to the fringes from the centre, but that our future is manufactured out there, where some of the newest residents and ideas meet the oldest. Yet, gradually, I came to see that I did have one very particular set of experiences that would help in writing this book, and this was an unusual childhood on the harbour, at a time it wasn’t considered desirable for young families to live in the inner city – in fact, there were only two other children that I knew of in my whole suburb. I grew up in McMahons Point. My playground was Luna Park, where my mother would take me on one of the small Lavender Bay ferries. From window of our apartment I would watch the Big Dipper, and hear the endless gasps and screams of its passengers — perhaps setting the foundations of a fairly anxious temperament! From earliest memory I also spent a lot of time in the city itself. My parents, who ran a graphic design business from home, also kept an office in York Street, and most often took me with them. My father brought me with him to the printeries near Essex Street around where Shangri-La now stands; parking in the Rocks, we would pass the old terraces, most of them squats, with sheets turned into banners hung from balconies to protest the area’s planned demolition.

The inner city was unusually deserted, its buildings allowed to run down, slated as they were to be turned into car parks and more office space.

I remember the crumbling wedding cake of closed-down Anthony Hordens department store, at the city’s south end, which, most appealingly for a child, held a roller skating rink in its depths; Knock and Kirbys hardware on George Street with its smell of rubber from inflatable pools and tennis shoes; and mysterious Angel arcade, where a bearded man in a tiny opal shop ran a lucky dip for children. So my first primary relationship, beyond my parents, was an intense one with my city. In a review of Sydney, Louis Nowra points out that the city took the place of a sibling for me, which I thought was a particularly acute observation. I had the advantage, in McMahons Point, of seeing what was still, just, a working harbour.  When I was seven, my family moved up to the suburbs of the north shore.  Then, as soon as I could, I came back to the city, to live with so many other university students of my generation in the inner west.

Sydney has been defined for decades by its tourist icons

My book, I decided, would have to have an autobiographical aspect — I would write about “my” Sydney. I came gradually to realise two things about my childhood and teens in the late 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. First, I started to view this as the city’s “romantic” period, caught between deco promise and destruction. The inner city was unusually deserted, its buildings allowed to run down, slated as they were to be turned into car parks and more office space. Second, my childhood had been shaped by what was one of the high-water marks of one of the city’s waves of Protestantism, which has emerged periodically as a tightening up, and a celebration of plainness, in the face of perceived threat.  In this instance, even in the late sixties, the city was still attempting to right itself, to become “respectable” again, after the great social licence of the Second World War. In my book I refer jokingly to tracing my own “Protestant dreaming”. We forget so much of our history, and our reinvention as a global city of fun in the 1980s soon erased this quieter city.  But the memory seemed worth preserving. This was the other great challenge presented to my by this project: it seems to me, though it might seem surprising to say so, that Sydney is a particularly secretive city.  Most people’s conception of Sydney, especially from outside, is precisely the opposite. Sydney is the city Australians feel they most “know” — even that they “have its number”. Sydney has been defined for decades by its tourist icons, its spectacular harbour, and big public events: since the Edelsten era of the eighties, by conspicuous consumption and real estate; and even more recently, since the Olympics, by an abrasive boosterism. In a tram in Melbourne, I heard a girl say to her boyfriend that she didn’t like Sydney because it was “up itself” and the people were unfriendly. No one felt the need to contradict her.

why, then, if Sydney is apparently so brash, so robust, does such a great current of melancholy run through so many of its myths and works of literature

Having lived in Melbourne for ten years, I was particularly aware of this difference between public and private that defines the textures of the two cities. There are certainly more hidden places in Melbourne and remnants of dreamy Victorian spaces.  While Sydney was as much a great Victorian city, it is its eighteenth-century beginnings that seem to have more hold on our imaginations here. Besides, we lost so much of our Victorian infrastructure in the 1980s through development, which Melbourne was spared (though much damage had already been done in the 1970s) because of its recession, and loss of primacy as a financial capital in the 1980s to Sydney. So in Melbourne it is still possible to experience a touch of flânerie — secret wandering within the crowd, the mysterious private itinerary — which Melbourne has been quick to exploit since the nineties, with its tiny bars, and covered laneways.  (There is a little bar above one of these back alleys, with a wigmaker’s sign on the dim stairway; climbing up, it is very easy to imagine the desperate characters with “domes of thought in need of rethatching”, as the Victorians used to say, making their secret and shameful way up the stairs). These Victorian shadows have almost gone from Sydney: and I think it is the Victorian architecture of arcades and laneways that, in a modern age, we associate with the great eras of cities and the city’s secret life.  There are few such spaces of contemplation left in Sydney. But why, then, if Sydney is apparently so brash, so robust, does such a great current of melancholy run through so many of its myths and works of literature —  why do they seem so preoccupied with eternity, death, and decay? Of course the most loved, and famous, literary work about Sydney is Kenneth Slessor’s poem “Five Bells”.  Slessor wrote his long, elegiac poem in response to the death of young black and white artist Joe Byrne, who in 1927 fell or jumped from the Manly ferry, near Fort Denison, and whose body was never recovered.  How strange that this city, which so loves to love itself, which is so obsessed with progress and glamour, should recognise itself in a poem about the ghost of a drowned man in the middle of the harbour. In fact, the poem is less sad than unsettling, because Joe is no peaceful ghost.  Instead, he is an angry one: a voiceless shade, turned into something between human and sea, unable to communicate with those above. “Yet something’s here,” the narrator writes, “yet something forms its lips/And hits and cries against the ports of space/Beating their sides to make its fury heard.” Read Slessor’s poem more closely, and it is even more disturbing. For the narrator infers that the harbour has always already been haunted in some way, acting as a kind of uneasy dam of time; and Joe, too, has been haunted, hag-ridden, before his death. The more you look at the poem, the more it seems that the whole of the city is saturated by a kind of bottomless, Moebian haunting. I believe Slessor’s poem endures because it captures a sense of something dark, deep, even chthonic, beneath Sydney’s surface. It may be hard to see beneath our hedonism, but it is there. And, in fact, that urge to live life to the fullest and thoughts of imminent destruction, of looming darkness, are not necessarily unrelated.

The whole city is, of course, built on sandstone, a great water filter. It is still haunted by old waterways

Although I have felt this since childhood, it was still a surprise to see how many other iconic stories of the city involved scenarios of reckoning, ruination, of meeting with the infinite. There is Arthur Stace the “Eternity Man”, of course, chalking his warnings about the immortal soul on Sydney’s footpaths at night. Less well-known is the story of the great conflagration at the Garden Palace, where the Botanic Gardens once stand. Sydneysiders were shocked at the inferno that consumed this huge building modelled on London’s Crystal Palace in 1882. But what is most notable about this story, looking back, is how many raced to immortalise the destruction in paint and poetry: as if it was in conflagration, more than a great edifice, that the city more truly saw itself. Then there is the Reverend Frank Cash, who took photographs from his rectory in North Sydney of the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. But what excited Cash more than building was the demolition of the suburb, which he celebrated in his strange, visionary view book, Parables of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which contains dozens of photographs of buildings vaporising. Most recently, in Gail Jones’s novel Five Bells, her characters wander Sydney on a beautiful summer day carrying around scars of loss and death. Perhaps this is not so strange. Maybe great beauty brings with it a concomitant urge for its destruction. For almost no city is as beautiful as Sydney. Here is the travel writer, Frank Fowler, in 1859:

Evenings in Australia are singularly beautiful. I have often read a newspaper by the light of the moon. The stars are very white and large, and seem to drop pendulous from the blue, like silver lamps from a dome of calcite. I used to visit a house a long way out of Sydney, for the pleasure of being lighted home by the stars.

Yet at the same time maybe there is also something disturbing about Sydney’s beauty, something uncanny and impenetrable. For nature feels more present here than other cities: sometimes almost sentient, intent. The whole city is, of course, built on sandstone, a great water filter. It is still haunted by old waterways: look at the delineations of our postcodes and most mark the paths of ghost streams and creeks. One of Sydney’s other enduring fascinations — another myth of the underground — is the Tank Stream. Thousands enter the ballot each year to take the few guided tours along it. Of course Sydney is also haunted by something else: the damage done to the culture of its indigenous inhabitants. By 1789 smallpox decimated 50 per cent of the Eora population. While I’m not suggesting that this has been a conscious preoccupation for most of the city’s history, I do explore the idea in my book that this in some way accounts for a sense of shadow within Sydney’s sunshine. Did a repressed knowledge that there were other words attached to this place before colonization, other stories, add a melancholy edge to its beauty?

What I have set out to do in Sydney was to penetrate beneath the city’s public story and write a kind of “psychogeography “of its moods.  I have tried to write the kind of book I would want to read about another city I didn’t know. What is the bigger picture behind the way we speak and act? Why do we react to things the way we do? When we laugh at something, why? I found myself tracing our sense of humour, our short fuses, our often unacknowledged melancholy, as far back as I could — finding their origins in the loss of indigenous stories tying us to the landscape, but also to the preindustrial mentality, at war with a more educated administration, that came here with our mainly rural convicts. There were no straightforward answers, of course. But this in itself seemed worth saying — that while Sydney may seem the most straightforward of cities, it is in fact a very complex one. Perhaps you need to have grown up here, and seen it in its quiet ruin, to understand that its current pleasures are reactive; that so, too, is its obsession with glamour. At its most hedonistic, it may also be most haunted by past restraint, and death. In my book, I have tried to explore my feeling that Sydney is the most dialectical of cities: a place of extremes, of to-and-fro.  And to trace how this pattern that has been present from the beginning: the unsettling movement between beauty and death, words and silence, present and eternal.