Leviathan (27 page)

Here Kelly catches a glimpse of a none too subtle ideological agenda behind government support for this housing boom. As an Anglican canon had said in the Depression, ‘A man does not fight for his boarding house, but he will fight for his home.' Even the
Sydney Morning Herald
had understood this 100 years earlier when it questioned why the city's slum-dwelling underclasses should owe any allegiance to a society which allowed them to wallow in such squalor and misery. The massive increase in home ownership after the Second World War was, in part, explicitly encouraged by governments to guarantee the loyalty of their working masses. Unlike earlier growth, however, it was not tied as tightly to the railway lines. Cheap mass-produced cars liberated Sydney's workers and sent them hurtling across the basin like a blast wave which swept all before it.

Mass transport, an efficient power grid and the telephone also liberated business and industry from the spatial demands of a horse-powered economy. As millions of settlers swarmed over the western plains and along the coast to the north and south, commerce and capital followed them for the first time, establishing a feedback loop of fantastic growth. The kinetic energy of a growing city no longer travelled solely along the railway lines which radiated out from Central Station. Everything flowed everywhere and micro-cities such as Parramatta and, later, Chatswood grew like dwarf stars within a metrogalaxy. The simple, easily sketched structure of the city had been left behind forever. It had become a leviathan, evolved from a few small cells, those lonely canvas tents which Ralph Clark thought looked so ‘pretty amongst the trees' in 1788.

The explosive change did not just spread outwards. It shot skywards as well. The same commercial forces which had devoured the town's mudbrick core after the arrival of Macquarie were still at work a century and a half later. State cabinet had temporarily crimped the Manhattanisation of Sydney's skyline in 1912 when they restricted building heights to forty-five metres after civic horror at the spectacle of Culwulla Chambers soaring fifty-one metres above Castlereagh Street. Culwulla, a speculative venture which utilised the latest American high-rise technology, would remain the tallest building in Sydney until 1956, when the irresistible pressure of money blew the cap off any height restrictions. In that year American technology and style returned to Sydney in the form of the MLC Building, a long rectangular box of thin cement wafers, heat-resistant glass and aluminium panels, all hung on a steel skeleton arranged around a ‘wind-resisting service core'. It was not simply the height, the design or the engineering wizardry which marked this building as a departure from the old sandstone elephants of yesteryear. Its location on the North Shore signalled the renewal of a part of the city pretty much obliterated by the Harbour Bridge. The north's neglected streets, lined with small struggling businesses, drew the attention of giant companies like Ampol and British Petroleum who were looking for headquarters sites without the hassles of heritage restrictions and competition for space which they encountered in the established CBD. Their towers climbed over the bones of the old working-class suburb, raising a sister city across the water. Lacking the original city centre's many layers of history, however, North Sydney became something of a doppelgänger; a soulless facsimile from which life quickly drained when the office workers who peopled it during the day switched off their lights and departed for the night.

The developers and insurance companies which funded this boom looked like achieving similar success in the CBD as their skyscrapers crushed great swathes of the old masonry and wrought-iron city under foot. The giants' footprints destroyed multiple blocks run through with the secretive alleys and wynds of the nineteenth century. Sometimes sweatshops and other remnant industries disappeared beneath their massive concrete footing. Sometimes much more valuable swatches of the older town's fabric were torn apart and discarded. The old Theatre Royal was buried under Harry Seidler's sixty-five storey MLC Centre, while thirty small sites and a quiet world of back lanes disappeared when he sent the stunning circular tower of Australia Square soaring fifty storeys over George and Pitt Streets. The Royal Exchange and both the Royal and Imperial Arcades were levelled and excavated. Wrecking balls crashed through the elegant Italianate facade of the Hotel Australia, atomising polished marble and sculpted plaster and silencing a few ghosts of the city's cafe society which had been drawn to the specialist booksellers and tea rooms gathered around the hotel in Rowe Street along with a collection of high-class jewellers, florists and quality restaurants.

Rowe Street, which these days is little more than a litter-strewn access lane for the MLC Centre – and, somewhat piquantly, for Arthur Rickard's old haunt the Millions Club – was formerly the infamous Brougham Place, described in the 1870s as ‘the nightly resort of itinerating musicians, knife-grinders and other out-of-doors businessmen'. The opening in 1891 of the Hotel Australia, the self-appointed premier hotel of the Southern Hemisphere, changed all that. It was said that if you wanted to meet anyone in Sydney (or at least anyone who was someone) you need only sit in the Australia, perhaps to sip on your Chateau Mouton Rothschild for an hour, and all of society would eventually pass you by. At the entrance on Castlereagh Street two giant bronze figures held aloft magical electric lights in front of imposing red granite columns and stained-glass doors. Those who passed through left the dusty, foul-smelling chaos of nineteenth-century Sydney behind, gliding into the cool of the vestibule with its polished stone columns and intricately tiled floor. Wandering through to the Grand Central Court, the relieved visitors could easily imagine themselves in one of the finest establishments of London or New York. It was a magnificent chamber, washed in bright light which streamed in through an ornamental roof of wrought iron and glass. Here clicked the buttoned-up boots of Sydney's most important women on their way in gloves and hats to the Ladies' Writing and Reading Room, an oasis of privacy with ‘all the necessary paraphernalia for correspondence and literary pursuits'; or perhaps to Herr Ohensschlager's excellent hairdressing saloon which boasted ‘every accessory' demanded by refined modernity, ‘including medicated and electric baths'. And over there, by the aquarium, in their dark woollen suits, gathered the city's most powerful men; traders, industrialists, the sons of the squattocracy, perhaps to lunch in the Australia's fine dining room, or perhaps to scheme in the deep Moroccan leather armchairs of Mr F Thrower's much admired billiards room. The Australia, wrote Arnold Haskell, was Sydney's Casino, and Sydney itself, to the leisured visitor, a bright, sunbaked Riviera resort, an English Nice or Cannes.

It was this leisured, naive and parochial outpost which was consumed by the jackhammers of the 1960s and 70s; the smaller, more intimate world of Harold Cazneaux's photographs which captured so well his achingly sad, almost haunted study of the old Royal Exchange on the corner of Pitt and Bridge Streets. Taken around 1934 the scene could have been shot in the Old World, so soft is the light into which the hansom-cab driver is leading his horse, and out of which rides the future in the form of a slightly menacing motorcar. The few scattered pedestrians, although dwarfed by the Exchange's elegant Corinthian mass, still own the scene, their minute forms integral to the moment. A favourite haunt of ships' captains and shipping agents, a centre of commercial and social life, the building was much loved by the city, but this was not enough to save it from the wreckers in 1965.

This once-upon-a-time city of Harold Cazneaux was a world of ‘quiet alluring poetry'; where Mark Foy's department store set up a circus on their roof at Christmas, with swings, carousels and slippery dips; where a cannon fired to mark one o'clock each afternoon, ten minutes before the single mail plane to Brisbane droned over the city; where a lunchtime crowd would gather with sandwiches in paper bags at Swains, the stationers, who daily cranked up a gramophone to play ‘the best music to be heard in Sydney'. Draught horses and trams still vied with the automobile for supremacy in that vanished city. The quirky, the odd and the defiantly individual could all still stand out. The city's landscape cheerfully accommodated harmless oddities like Arthur Stace and Bea Miles, micro-celebrities whose fame came from their daily travels in eccentric freedom across the face of the metropolis. Arthur chalked the word
Eternity
a million times on the footpaths and in doorways. Bea recited Shakespeare, terrorising cab drivers and hunting for sharks off Bondi with a knife clamped between her teeth. (She normally wore it strapped to her thigh.)

Hyperdevelopment and the acceleration of life seemed to press these endearingly wonky fragments of humanity out of the city's frame of reference. The hundred mile city, as Deyan Sudjic termed it, admits of no place for the sincerely offbeat. Its grotesqueries are Herculean and Kafkaesque rather than intimate and personal. Its buildings are often little more than ‘aesthetically worthless rent slabs' for stacking human capital, which is itself to be consumed or discarded at the whim of the market. In such a place it sometimes feels as though the city is eating itself. Architects and developers with little or no sympathy for the nuances of history and the needs of the human beings who must actually live inside their nightmares have reworked the wedge of land which forms the city's heart with a series of profoundly antihuman, brutal and vaguely Orwellian schemes such as the Masonic Centre (of course), the knitted concrete face of the Hilton Hotel, and the giant brooding militarised bunker of the Sydney Police Centre in Surry Hills.

All is not darkness however. A dress circle of interesting and, God help us, sensitive skyscrapers is emerging around the juncture of Macquarie and Pitt Street where megaspiv Alan Bond's elegant Chifley Tower is engaged in a conversation, as architects love to say, with the darker and more aggressive twin towers named after Governors Macquarie and Phillip, and where Renzo Piano's altogether more refined spires promise to hide their environmentally friendly charms behind long skirts of floating glass. And these skirts are, apparently, to have a bit of a chat with the sails of the Utzon's Opera House down the hill a-ways. The block which the Chifley dominates presents as a series of architectural time capsules, all laid open for the curious passerby. Four buildings share the block, each representative of a quantum leap in the sophistication of city's built environment; from the simple Georgian austerity of the 1842 Angus and Coote building, through the optimistic post-Victorian bombast of John Burcham Clamp's 1911 Wyoming, the unfortunate functional cracker box of Hambros House (which is not even striking enough to be impressively ugly), and the digital-era opulence of the Chifley. This latter structure, the city's first billion-dollar building, is a cathedral of global capital. Between the intimidating millionaire's trinket shop Tiffany's on the ground floor and the fantastic luxury of restaurant Forty One way above in the clouds, are stacked thousands of knowledge workers, layer upon layer of them: lawyers, bankers, management gurus, consultants, insiders, promoters, ten-percenters, pretenders and players. Very few of them will ever make anything as concrete as the builders and tradesmen who raised the tower in which they work but, by manipulating intricate systems of symbol and meaning, they daily create, assign and distribute insane amounts of wealth amongst those corporations which can afford to bid for their services.

The only redistribution of wealth which takes place here is amongst those corporations and their ilk. Very little leaks out of the cool marble atrium and onto the streets below, and that which does, does not stray far. It is doubtful if one dollar of each billion at play within this building ever makes its way out to the far horizon, to the badlands, which thankfully dissolve into a convenient haze on most days. Out there live the figurative descendants of those slum-dwelling wretches whose revolutionary potential so worried the
Herald
150 years ago. You can gaze benignly down on them, or at least in their general direction, from Forty One's Krug Room, where a marvellous tartare of yellow-fin tuna with beetroot oil and oscietre caviar, accompanied by a chilled glass of Krug's excellent '85 Clos Du Mesnil will leave you at peace with the world below, no matter how poor a state it is in. For to venture out there is to leave behind the genteel world of Tiffany's and Forty One and to travel amongst savages. Out there, in places like Macquarie Fields, you will find ‘slums of the most abject kind'. Out there, where the poor and abandoned prey on each other for lack of more rewarding targets, you will find dozens of discrete, ugly little worlds which almost perfectly mirror Henry Parkes's description of nineteenth-century Ultimo as a region of ‘human slaughter houses'. For nowadays the poor, like the Iora, have been dispersed. No longer concentrated in the inner city, they are encamped on the western and south-western fringes of the metropolis, up to half a million of them, uneducated, unemployable and with little future beyond daytime TV, junk food, bad drugs and madness.

Some years ago, researching an article for
Rolling Stone
, I spent a couple of weeks living on the streets amongst the lowest members of this urban tribe, the ones who could not even make it into Department of Housing accommodation. They spent their nights in warehouses and toolsheds, under old buses and in the smashed graffiti-scarred bodies of trains, in humpies, squats and refuges, in halfway houses, crisis centres, on the doorsteps of shops, in parks, toilets and even in graveyards, sleeping on cardboard and using heroin rather than hot milk to lull themselves to the land of nod. I stayed a few days in Penrith with a couple of teenaged break-and-enter specialists named Snake and Heather who haunted a shooting gallery above a fish and chip shop. Two stinking foam mattresses, one of them half burned, were the only items of furniture. Decorations consisted of about six or seven months' worth of heroin detritus, fast food refuse, some rags and a couple of oily organic-looking smears on the wall which I declined to investigate. When the ambience of the gallery became too much even for them, they could take short-term refuge at a nearby drug rehab centre. It was an old stone place which would now fetch a cool half million in the former slum suburbs of Glebe or Darlinghurst had its clients not set about systematically destroying it for want of anything more interesting to do.