A writerly stroll through our Emerald City
Seeing Sydney through writers’ eyes is a novel way to rediscover our most truly international harbour city.
Tourism promoters love to appeal to our senses. Savour Paris. Take in the sights of New York. You can hear yourself think in Tahiti.
What Aboriginal poet-artist Jazz Money likes most about their hometown is that it gets up their nostrils. On a trip down to Melbourne, they tell us, how they noticed how dry the air was “and then coming back here, it was warm and lush. Sydney just smells so good for a city”.
Walking Sydney, a compendium of perspectives about Australia’s oldest European settlement, is subtitled Fifteen Walks With a City’s Writers.
Jazz Money’s account kicks it off, but the rich variety of views adds up to a panoramic take on the first of this continent’s capitals named after an English lord. Despite the subtitle, Walking Sydney actually has 16 writers, as Belinda Castles provides a meta-narrative binding the other fifteen’s stores into one seamless tapestry, as the following sample will illustrate.
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In her novel Iris, Fiona Kelly McGregor depicts Central Station during the Depression: “All along the gangplank men held signs asking for work. A woman sat on a butterbox with a bawling baby on her lap and a toddler next to her, muttering Spare change?’’
Enter Castles’ Greek chorus: “Today, in this city awash with money, commuters flood under the sandstone bridge towards the buses and the city, past people without homes sleeping rough under cardboard.”
Plus ça change, another novelist with an eye for history, Gail Jones, searches out the unfamiliar fact.
It was news to me that in the late 1870s a young Polish sailor, the future Joseph Conrad, lived for five months on board a ship docked at Circular Quay. And that, as she goes on to relate, in 1900 an outbreak of bubonic plague swept The Rocks. (The horror! The horror!) What won’t come as any surprise is new evidence that Sydney is not only a city of great character but of great characters.
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“Colourful identity” Abe Saffron and Arthur Stace, the man who chalked Eternity on the pavements for more than 30 years, come immediately to mind.
Vanessa Berry, who grew up in the counter-cultural mecca of Newtown, introduces Bob Gould, an anti-Vietnam War protester and committed socialist whose love of books provided his livelihood and brought about his death (he fell downstairs while stacking them in his cavernous bookshop on King Street).
Malcolm Knox, who next to Tim Winton has probably done more to popularise surfing among readers (not to mention reading among the surfing fraternity), records his love for Freshwater, on the Northern Beaches. Changing its name to Bluebird for fictional purposes, he made a point that will resonate with anyone who’s been warned off a foreign strand: “In a lot of places in the USA and Europe, you wouldn’t have access to a beach like this. The entire waterfront would be taken up by private property In Malibu, they have some of the most gorgeous beaches in the world – really nice surf breaks – but there’s a four- or six-lane highway running along metres from the water, and between the highway and the water is house after house after house without any public access between.”
How lucky are we. Castles places great store on “psychogeography’”, a term I find pretentious. But there’s no quibbling with her observation, which always rings true in my experience, that “We make a city our own by noticing”.
This struck a chord because – as a wheelchair user who relishes the thrill of arriving in a new city yet finds it time-consuming to negotiate the transport, I always prefer to make my first acquaintance with it at ground level. Going slowly, you naturally see more than could ever be taken in from a speeding car or bullet train.
Walking, like reading, is most rewarding when done at a leisurely pace. So browse the latest book on our most alluring metropolis as you would a travel brochure, but at greater depth. Wherever you are in it a delight awaits you just around the corner. On every page you turn, there is something fresh in the Harbour City air.
Walking Sydney: Fifteen Walks With a City’s Writers by Belinda Castles, NewSouth Publishing, $34.99