SYDNEY: A BIOGRAPHY

“I came to Sydney from Melbourne in 1978 and immediately fell in love with its history, the sandstone buildings, the gorgeous harbour, the bridge, the Opera House, its ad hoc streets and its denizens.” Acclaimed playwright and author Louis Nowra arrived in Sydney looking for opportunities. He never left. He fell in love with a city of optimism and colour. In his new book Sydney A Biography, Nowra captures what it is that makes Sydney Australia’s standout capital. The Sydney Institute Wednesday 12 July 2023, Louis Nowra addressed The Sydney Institute to give some insights into what his new book reveals.

SYDNEY: A BIOGRAPHY

LOUIS NOWRA

Tonight, I’ll talk about Sydney: A Biography, but first I’ll have to put into the context of it being the third book of a trilogy. The first was Kings Cross, the next was Woolloomooloo and the final one my recent book on Sydney.

A couple of decades ago I became interested in the books of an English author, Iain Sinclair. For want of a better word, he is a psychogeographer which is a pretentious word for someone who walks around the area where they live and examines everything around him; the buildings, the shops, the cafes, the people and see how they fit together as a community as seen through the psychological make-up of the author. Another word is flaneur, a person who walks the streets taking in everything that is around him. Of course, nowadays when everyone is looking at their phones, and not at what is around them, the flaneur is an increasingly endangered figure.

Just over a decade ago I was wandering through the streets of Kings Cross and thought that although I had lived there for over 25 years, I really did know it. I was ignorant about the true history of the area. Yes, I knew local shopkeepers, hookers, drug dealers, lawyers  and beggars but there were no real histories of the famous district. Most books about Kings Cross are photographic books or sensational exposes. I wanted to understand its deep history, one that had made it such an extraordinary place.

In this era of short attention spans I decided to construct the book in a different way from a simple linear narrative. It would consist of three complementary strands: one was a linear history, and this was intercut with a second strand a historical and contemporary portrait of individual streets as I saw them and, thirdly, my account was made up of themes, such as fire or neon lights. It began it with a look at the apartment block where I lived and its occupants, past and present. It had been built in 1929 and once had been one of the tallest buildings in the area (quickly surpassed by towering art deco buildings).  Of course, I focused on various people who contributed to the reputation of the Cross, from entertainers to gangsters. The area was also a site of modernism (buildings, food and flat life) while the rest of Australian slumbered in suburbia. What also became important were the cafes and restaurants which contributed to the sybaritic energy of the Cross. As I knew from experience, a celebrated restaurant like the Bayswater Brasserie in the 1980s was a haven of writers, directors and producers who became the incubator of many Australian films.

Once I had finished the Kings Cross book, I had no intention of writing another similar volume. Around that time, I drank at the Old Fitzroy in Woolloomooloo which had been built in 1860 and was one the first pubs in the rapidly expanding suburb of Woolloomooloo. I was intrigued by the fact that Kings Cross and Woolloomooloo were next to each other but had entirely different reputations (one was for violence and public housing, the other for nightclubs and posh apartments).

I realised that I knew little about Woolloomooloo and again, like Kings Cross, the few books written about, were light on historical detail and the people who lived there. So, I set about researching the history of the Old Fitzroy hotel and then the suburb itself. Like the previous book, I spent much time wandering the streets trying to create a portrait of both the look of the place and its inhabitants. Again, I used the three complementary strands.

I thought that would be the end of my interest in the places I lived. Not long afterward I was talking to the owner of the Potts Point bookshop, Anna Low, when she mentioned that what Sydney needed was a proper history about it. There were many picture books, orientated towards tourists, and some books on esoteric subjects like sewers, but very few went into any depth about the city. Anna had inadvertently set me on a path of my next book. When I told my wife, Mandy, that I was going to write a book about Sydney. She groaned, ‘Oh, no, you went crazy writing the other two.’

I originally came from Melbourne and quickly fell in love with Sydney. The big question for me to answer, is why. Yes, it’s different from Melbourne, but what attracted me to Sydney? Like the previous two books it would be in three strands. There would be the linear history (few books on Sydney are deeply historical), then themes, like sandstone, weather (an underrated feature of unexplored in the histories of cities) and water – few people now are aware of how essential water was in the 19^th century to the functioning and progress of the city. The search for a water supply became crucial to the growth of the city. Eventually, a tunnel (Busby’s Bore) was built from Centennial Park (Lachlan’s swamps), which directed water to Hyde Park where carriers filled up barrels and later sold the water in the streets of the town. Water was at times so expensive and rare that many a well was dug in the gardens or yards of The Rocks that became deathly magnets for children and drunks.

One of the first things that struck me when I shifted to Sydney was the weather. I arrived in a humid and sweltering summer, and it took me three years to get used to the sultry climate. It was a feature that many men and women in The First Fleet commented on.  For the first couple of years the colony had to put up with summers so hot that birds and bats fell dead from the skies. Then there were the frightening thunderstorms and lightning strikes. The colonists had never struck such enervating and terrifying weather before. Sydney itself is defined by its weather. In summer it can be 30 degrees in the eastern suburbs and at the same time 40 degrees out west. The weather continues the social divide between the wealthy and upmarket eastern suburbs and the struggling sometimes parched western suburbs.

What also strikes one on researching the city’s history is its importance as a port city. It helped defined it.  Everything arrived by sea; convicts, soldiers, settlers, goods from across the world, whaling and sealers’ ships and, in the early days of the city, the arrival of ships meant continuing connection with the outside world via letters and newspapers.

In the early days the ships were an invitation to party, something that the town took to readily (and still does). The arrival of visitors was a relief from the sense of being forgotten at the bottom of the world.  A few years after the advent of the First Fleet a Spanish vessel anchored in the harbour and Sydney embraced them. What the locals didn’t know is that the Spanish were secretly planning to destroy Sydney town. Not long afterwards Sydney welcomed two French ships. Their secret mission was to plan the destruction of the town, one that was growing so fast that the French realised they would only have a short time to raze it. Both these Spanish and French plans indicate just how quickly Sydney was growing and how firmly established the British presence in the Pacific was becoming.

Sydney’s sometimes volatile mixture of convicts, settlers and marines bemused many a visitor. The free men and women of the town developed a selective blindness to the daily sight of chained convicts going about their business of building houses and roads.  Sometimes the two worlds collided. There were complaints by the St James congregations about the clanking sounds of the prisoners’ chains as the men climbed up into the gallery to hear a sermon. But without convicts the settlement wouldn’t have functioned as well as it did. There was a mutual interdependence between the convicts and free people that created a porous boundary between corruption and honesty that extends until today, where corrupt activity can be no barrier to being part of Sydney society.

If this is a characteristic of the city, then so is the cult of the body. Many visitors to Sydney in the first twenty to thirty years of its existence, such as Russians, Frenchmen and Spanish sailors found it disturbing that naked or near naked Aborigines were a common sight in the streets. Some Aboriginal women were forced to wear dresses but there were those like Barangaroo who went naked. To the visitors what added to the scandal was how settlers and convicts paid little or no attention to this lack of attire. What bothered governors like Macquarie were naked men swimming or washing themselves in the harbour and Parramatta River. The weather also encouraged people to flaunt their bodies. One only had to look at artists like Norman Lindsay or Brett Whiteley to see how much they worshiped the naked body. There is little tradition of the hedonistic body in Melbourne art where a puritan streak, amplified by stern left wing politics reigns. In the Second World War, artists, like William Dobell and Donald Friend, admired the party atmosphere and the sexual heat the American troops bought to Sydney, whereas in Melbourne artists like Tucker were appalled by such behaviour and made their ‘loose’ women look like diseased gargoyles.

This difference between the cities in attitudes towards sexuality and the flesh, became obvious in the 1950s and 1960s with the advent of the Sydney Push. It was a libertarian mix of independently minded men and women who distrusted government and exalted the individual. Melbourne adored – and still does – the idea of big government and limiting the role of the individual. Germaine Greer is a case in point. After graduating from Melbourne university she came up to Sydney and quickly became enmeshed in the Push. She liked its hedonistic impulse, the promotion of the individual over the State, sexual experimentation, and the freedom from oppressive Marxist ideology. She often said she could not have written The Female Eunuch if she had stayed down south. Many others revelled in this libertarian philosophy, including Robert Hughes, Clive James and Barry Humphries.  They became famous Australian expats – and all came out of the Sydney Push.

It’s is nigh impossible to overlook the unmistakable smugness and cockiness of Sydneysiders, as typified by Paul Keating’s crack that if you’re not living in Sydney you’re camping out. This attitude infuriates Melbournians. I recently talked to a photographed for Sydney Morning Herald who said if he was to photograph Sydney for its sister newspaper the Age, he wasn’t allowed to have images of the Opera House, Bridge or Harbour because Melbourne thought it would be diminished by seeing such natural and architectural beauty.

In writing my book I trace this cockiness back to the middle and late nineteenth century when tourists and visitors came to Australia. Their first view of Sydney was invariably coming through the Heads into the glorious harbour. This was a spectacular vista and, in a chapter I deleted from my book during the proofs stage, I quoted extensively from migrants, sailors and writers who gave their first impressions of sailing into Sydney. They were awestruck by the beauty of the harbour, the splendid sandstone buildings, the beautiful mansions of Potts Point, built in the 1830s by the wealthy, and which, as Charles Darwin wrote, reminded visitors of splendid English houses and gardens (some of these beautiful mansions survive e.g., Elizabeth Bay House). Early Sydneysiders were more than willing to show off how far the city had come in such a short time. The admiration of these visitors thrilled locals and has done so ever since.

When I first arrived in Sydney I took a ferry trip around the harbour. The beauty of it was even more remarkable from this perspective. The ferry chugged past the gorgeous Opera House, the awe-inspiring Bridge was always in view, and the many sunlit inlets and peninsulas and coves filled with boats and families enjoying themselves seemed to convey an optimism missing from other Australian cities. The passengers on that day were tourists from overseas. When the guide announced that we were passing houses that were worth millions of dollars, there was a rush to the starboard side, and we gazed through the briny haze at the houses and mansions of the eastern suburbs, some of them perched on the shoreline itself. They seemed to be basking, not only in the sunlight, but in their appearance as unadulterated examples of wealth and prestige. There was no humility, only a showing off. Very Sydney, I thought.

What struck me in my first year or two in Sydney, as it did to many travel writers and articulate visitors, was the strange nature of the city itself. The streets were like an improvised grid. From the beginning of settlement Sydney’s unruly streets and lanes were spontaneous and unplanned – some were based on Aboriginal walking tracks, others were rough-and-ready ways of making ones way around the rocky terrain of The Rocks, other streets and roads were easy options to get from A to B without official planning. The landscape itself was undulating and sometimes jagged. You could walk or ride on a street and have no idea what was going to happen to it over the next rise – would it continue straight or turn or segue imperceptivity into another street?

One just has to see the incoherent nature of the recent bicycle paths, which crowd narrow streets, abruptly stop, as in the top of William Street, because the street or road  suddenly bends or narrows.  The flat grid pattern of Melbourne or Adelaide streets are suitable for bike paths but not Sydney. This almost whimsical street pattern entertains or irritates visitors.  The other geographical feature of Sydney is its peninsulas, isthmuses and hilly landscape that have given Sydney’s suburbs, around the harbour especially, a variegated look, as if each suburb developed with no sense of relationship to the suburb next door. It has none of the suburban uniformity of a city like Adelaide. The harbour itself has created a division between the smug suburban middle-class world of the North shore and the less salubrious and motley south shore.

One of the great engineering projects in Australia was the Harbour Bridge. The bridge uniting north and south shores had been a dream since 1788 when the engineer and marine William Dawes proposed a bridge. This was seriously taken up by Macquarie’s architect, Francis Greenway.  After almost a hundred and fifty years of speculating about it, the Bridge opened during the height of the Depression and, for the whole of Australia, it represented a defiant sense of optimism, a sense that this engineering marvel was a foretaste of a bright future. It was also a beacon of modernism, not only in its design and function but as an inspiration to modernist painters like Grace Cossington Smith and Marion Black whose paintings of the Bridge are supreme examples of modernist art.

Sydney Modernism extended to buildings, especially those Art Deco apartment blocks in Potts Point and Kings Cross. The intricate and beautiful brickwork and structures were copied from American architecture. American influence didn’t end there. Up at the Cross in the 1930s were milk bars and hamburger cafes and coffee houses all showing the fascination with American lifestyles and restaurant designs, like the famous Californian in the Cross. If that wasn’t enough, World War Two bought thousands of American troops to Sydney with their officers inhabiting the flats and mansions of the Cross and Potts Point, bringing with them, their food tastes, their music and their limitless optimism. The Vietnam war was a time when thousands of US troops spent their rest and recreation break in Sydney during the late 1960s. When they left they bequeathed a  legacy to the locals of a taste for heroin and marijuana that would transform social and moral values among the young.

Sydney, unlike Melbourne, looked to America as the future it wanted for itself, hence the destruction of the wonderful tramway system, because Sydney thought that compared to the modern American adoration of the car, its trams were laughably old fashioned. This copycat admiration extended to the eyesore of Cahill Expressway which was an echo of similar American constructions.

If one looks beyond the harbour, its weather, the unruly grid of roads and streets, the symbiotic relationship between nature and architecture, then a defining characteristic of Sydney, then it lies in its sandstone, whether official buildings, private homes, walls or even gutters. Its colour changes due to the weather creates colours from white to bright yellow to greenish black. When it hosts shrubs, weeds or tree roots it seems to be a living thing. When I began to live here, I marvelled at the sandstone buildings and how the stone was not cold and brutal like the bluestone of Melbourne, but friendly and warm. Sandstone was ubiquitous and seemed to have given birth to Sydney.

From the beginning of Sydney, with its potent and sometimes disturbing mixture of convicts and free men and women, it has had a curious relationship with corruption and crime. At times it seems that no matter how you earned your money, you were welcome into Sydney society. The rigid social hierarchies in other cities, especially those of Melbourne and Adelaide who are proud of their convict free beginnings, doesn’t apply here. Society is much more fluid and open, and is one where the corrupt and the honest work and party side by side.

I finish my book at Barangaroo on a sunny winter’s day with office workers, businesspeople, tradesmen, and tourists enjoying a perfect Sydney day en plein air. And, as I stood amongst the massive sandstone blocks of the foreshore, I turned my gaze to the intense blue and sunlit water. It was a beguiling sight. It was like one great affirmation, an open heart that invites you to take Sydney personally – and I do.