A Writer's World (41 page)

But emerging half-shattered one day from the Observer Inn, having weaved a perilous way among those flailing limbs and stomping size 14s, I chanced to see, in a shop down the road, a print of early Sydney settlers living it up 150 years ago. They wore floppy slouch hats and check shirts, were heavily bearded, and were probably celebrating their recent release from hard labour in the prisons: but they were kicking their legs about in that self-same Sydney fandango, in just the same heavyweight high jinks, and were yelling their songs and cheerful obscenities, I am sure, in similarly rank and entertaining distortions.

For even Sydney has a past. It began in the 1780s with the arrival of the first British convicts, put ashore here in their chains to serve as the reluctant and incongruous Founding Fathers of Australia. It ended in the 1950s with the mass landings of the European immigrants, disembarking after their government-subsidized passages to transform Australia from semi-emancipated colonialism into Pacific cosmopolitanism. By then the penal colony had developed into a city of great but somewhat unlovely character, chauvinist to an almost comical degree, with an elite of often snobby and vulgar monarchists, and a labour force so powerful that unionists everywhere called this the Worker’s Paradise. In those days any Sydney matron worth her social salt boasted of her distant connection with the Earl of Mudcastle, while the Sydney proletariat was as rough, as ready, as truculent, as contemptuous of earls and as militantly Irish as a self-respecting proletariat ought to be.

Today that society has mostly gone underground. If you want a symbolic demonstration of it, try going to the subterranean railway station beside the Town Hall: for there behind the trendily creeper-covered walls of the sunken plaza, all waterfalls and canopies, the station itself survives as a very museum of the Old Australia – brass knobs, Bakelite switches, Instructions to Employees in copper-plate script behind brass-framed glass, bare electric bulbs lighting up to announce the next train to Pymble or Hornby. The Sydney railways are very Old Australia. So are the ferries, and the less liberated pubs, and the memorials to kings and queens and Robbie Burns. The granddaughters of those well-connected matrons still curtsey with a preposterous zeal when Prince Charles drops by. Go-slows on the Woop Woop line, heavy-jowled men with placards demanding a Fair-Go For Aussie Ships, recall the heyday of the Worker’s Paradise. The old beery machismo has not been entirely subsumed in white wine and unisex hairdressing.

More importantly, out of the Old Australia comes Sydney’s sense of order and fair play, which underpins the shifting vigour of this city.
Kindness
and
Courtesy
is still the motto of Double Bay School, and to a remarkable degree the old values obtain. You might expect this haven on a creek at the bottom of the world to be a seamy, wild and reckless place, and of course Australians, like city people everywhere on earth, talk with dismay of rising crime rates and drunken driving. By most standards, though, Sydney is good as gold. The streets are much safer than most, the traffic is generally demure enough, even jay-walkers look guilty, and the city comports itself, at least to visitors, with unfailing politesse.

These are legacies based,
au
fond
, upon parliamentary democracy and the Common Law, and their survival is a tribute to their strength: for what has happened all around them, in the last three decades, is nothing less than a social revolution. Sydney has become a different city, different in style, in aspiration, in loyalty, in taste. A generation ago, it seemed to me, the very core of the Sydney ethos was the memory of the sacrifices its men had made in the two world wars, fighting in a cause almost quixotically remote to them, yet made poignantly real by their devotion to Crown, Flag and Empire. The heroic ordeals of Gallipoli and Alamein stood somewhere near the root of the civic pride, and the Returned Servicemen’s League was sacrosanct and inescapable.

But on a recent winter Sunday I revisited the great war memorial in Hyde Park which was the shrine of those epic memories, and found its tragic magnetism dispersed. It stood there still of course, grey, powerful and sombre among the trees; the sad sculpted soldiers still looked down, sitting like thoughtful gods around the parapet; but the people in the park somehow seemed to shy away from its presence, as though it had been put out of their minds by some process of re-education, or sealed up, with all its toxic energies, like an expended reactor.

It seems only proper that the motto of another Sydney school,
I
Hear
,
I See, I
Learn
, should translate into Latin as
Audio
,
Video
,
Disco
, for the young have boisterously discarded the old image of Sydney, and have remoulded it again in their own. Today this city is one of the world’s great promises, a pledge of better things, living in a state of ill-defined but perpetual expectancy. It is a very young city: not just young in manners and accomplishment, but exceedingly young in person. Sometimes indeed it seems to be inhabited chiefly by schoolchildren, children kicking pebbles across bridges, children racing fig leaves down the channels of ornamental fountains, children clambering like invading armies all over the Opera House, or mustered in their thousands in the New South Wales Art Gallery. They seem to me a stalwart crew. ‘Now this is a Picasso,’ I heard a teacher say in the gallery one day, ‘I’m sure you all know who Picasso was.’ ‘I don’t,’ piped up a solitary small Australian at the back, and I bowed to him as the only absolutely honest soul in sight.

It is a city attuned to young ideas – ‘Barefoot shoppers,’ sensibly decrees one of the grandest department stores, ‘must not use the escalators’ – and its youthfulness is so pervasive as to be almost hallucinatory. The magistrate in the petty sessions court looks like a second-year law student, the prosecuting attorney might just have invested in his first motor bike, and
surely the accused, who is charged with public indecency, has not yet reached the age of puberty? As for the Stock Exchange, it appears to be run by several hundred athletes, helped by a few go-go girls in miniskirts, and the old men in the public gallery upstairs, ostensibly examining the shares board through their binoculars to see how Consolidated Metals are doing, look to me less like speculators than plain voyeurs.

The youthfulness of Sydney, like all youthfulness, is a little schizo, being half brash, but half timid. In a posh Sydney hotel, for instance, or an upstage Sydney restaurant, customers tend to behave with a detectable sense of reverence, talking in undertones to each other and gratefully accepting the wine-waiter’s recommendation – it would be a maître d’s delight, were it not for the fact that in Sydney even that insufferable guild behaves with a becoming inhibition. Australians always used to be accused of inferiority complex, and though their image in the world is very different now, still Sydney has not reached the free fine assurance of absolute civic maturity – ‘When I go to California,’ a very attractive and intelligent Sydney girl said to me, ‘I feel like a mouse.’ And the mouse instinct erupts sometimes, of course, as it always does, into absurd expressions of self-assertion. Sydney people are far less vulnerable to criticism than they used to be, but they are hardly less sensitive to the patronizing or the aloof. In Europe, one Sydney intellectual told me severely, ignorance about Australian affairs was abysmal,
abysmal
– why in London, he had been assured, reputable art critics had never even heard of Brett Whiteley!

‘Brett Who?’ I could not resist inquiring (remembering the boy in the art gallery) for this aspect of the Sydney style can be a bit relentless. One is told a little too often of the Whiteley genius, one tires of the gossip about the Sidney Whites and the Patrick Nolans; yes, one did realize that the author of
Schindler’s
List
was a local man; for myself I feel lucky to have missed the recent Sydney fashion show, about which I heard so much, which featured a ballet performance to aboriginal music, songs with flute accompaniment against a background of wrecked cars, and some extreme examples of the Bundled Jap look.

But then youth, hope and silliness go together, in cities as in people, and it is the hope that counts. The hope is what Kev unconsciously feels, as he jogs over the bridge in the morning, and what nearly every stranger feels too, on a first foray into the streets of Sydney. How young and strong the city! How magnificent the promise! One forgets sometimes that even in the Land of Oz, youth is not eternal …

The Reeperbahn or 42nd Street of Sydney is King’s Cross, a mile or two south-east of Sydney Cove. This used to be an entertaining Bohemian quarter, but has degenerated lately into a nasty combination of squalor and pathos. Among the usual Reeperbahn company of pimps, pornographers, strippers, tattooists and transvestites, bathed in the conventionally sinful half-light, gaped at by the inevitable visitors from Woop Woop, through King’s Cross after midnight there now move some more heart-rending figures: child-prostitutes, hardly in their teens, desperately made up and not very expertly soliciting the passing drunks and lechers.

John Gunther, the great reporter, used to ask, wherever he went in the world, ‘Who runs this place?’ It is my practice to ask who (or in print, perhaps,
whom
)I ought to be sorry for. In some cities – think of Calcutta, think of Johannesburg! – the question is superfluous. In many another the tender heart is wrung by terrible poverty, or political oppression, or general gloom of environment. In Sydney there is hardly any abject poverty. Politically the people of this city are free as air, socially they are as emancipated as anyone on earth. Their town is clean and mostly safe, their climate is a dream, and though they grumble a good deal about the effects of recession, and frequently go on strike, by the standards of the world at large they live magnificently.

So who should I be sorry for? Sydney people are puzzled by the question, and sometimes can’t think of anyone at all. Sometimes they reply with jokes about unsuccessful football players or politicians in eclipse. ‘Me,’ says Kev, but he does not mean it. A few propose those poor children of King’s Cross, there are vague references sometimes to derelicts (‘derros’) or exploited immigrants. And in the end it occurs to most people that I should give a thought to the abos, the aborigines, whose names are all around one in Sydney, in Woolloomooloo, in Parramatta or in Woop Woop, but whose physical presence is but a wisp or a shadow in the thriving city.

Most of the aborigines of these parts were exterminated, by imported disease or by brute force, within a few decades of the first white settlement. Yet two centuries later a few hundred cling to their roots in Sydney, at the very site of the European coming. They are called ‘coories’ here, and like the water of the harbour, like the exotic foliage of the parks and headlands, they are a reminder of stranger, older things than Kev and his kind can conceive. To some Australians the aborigines are a blot on the conscience, to others just a pain in the neck: still, in the end most people thought the coories were worth feeling sorry for, and feel sorry for them I did.

Though their community has produced some celebrities in its time, notably boxers, they live mostly in more luckless quarters of the town, and do not show much as a rule. As it chanced, however, while I was in Sydney this time they celebrated Aboriginal Day. The aboriginal flag of gold, black and yellow flew, to the consternation of Old Australians, side by side with the national flag on Sydney Town Hall, and a march through town was announced, to be followed by a rally at Alexandria Park. Alas, all this went sadly awry. Nobody seemed to know where the march was to begin, or when, somebody pulled the flag down from the Town Hall, not everyone seemed to have mastered the rally chant –
What do we want? Land rights!
What have we got? Bugger all
– and the arrangements ran so late that when the time came for speeches everyone had gone home. ‘They are a
random
people,’ was the convincing explanation I was given, when I asked if this was true to coorie form.

By the time I reached Alexandria Park Aboriginal Day seemed to have fizzled out altogether, and all I found was a small huddle of dark-skinned people around an open bonfire, surrounded by litter on the edge of the green. They greeted me with a wan concern, offering me beer out of an ice-bucket, sidling around me rather, and occasionally winking. A small thin boy with cotton wool stuffed in one ear wandered here and there leading a black puppy on a string. Others kicked a football about in the gathering dusk, and around the fire a handful of older men and women looked sadly into the flames. A strong smell of alcohol hung over us, and the man with the bucket urged me quietly, again and again, to have one for the road, dear. Had the rally been a success? I asked. ‘Yeah,’ they said, and looked into the fire.

I
did
feel sorry for them. They were like last wasted survivors from some primeval holocaust, whose memories of their own civilization were aeons ago expunged. Did they have a Sydney all their own, I wondered, long ago near the beginnings of time? Did their flag fly braver then? When I said goodbye and drove away (‘Go on, dear, just one’) the lights of the downtown tower blocks were shining in the distance: but in the shadows at the edge of the park the bonfire flames were dancing still, and the frail figures of the indigenes moved unsteadily in the flicker.

One morning I went to Iceland, the skating rink, to watch the Sydney people skating. They did it, as they do most things, very well. Their tall strong frames looked well on the ice. Once more I was struck by the Scandinavian analogy, so Nordic does an Australian look when you put
him in cold circumstances, but eventually my attention was gripped by a figure who, it seemed to me, could be nothing else but Aussie.

He was about five years old, blond, lively, tough and unsmiling. He could not, it seemed, actually skate, but he was adept at running about the rink on his blades, and his one purpose of the morning was to gather up the slush that fell off other people’s boots, and throw it at passing skaters. This task he pursued with skilful and unflagging zeal. Hop, hop, he would abruptly appear upon the rink, and picking a lively target, staggering his way across the ice, inexorably he would hunt that victim down until
slosh!
the missile was dispatched – and hobble hobble, quick as a flash he was out of the rink again, gathering more material.