We are not the benign sun worshippers that grace the pages of magazines, nor the marginal wannabes that we often think ourselves to be. Through necessity our memories are short, as our memories have such a fallow field and usually belong to far distant and illustrious others. Cook is more remembered for his inglorious death than his accidental discovery.
We are still not certain of who found this country under sail and who left in haste, but we are sure that the candidates are numerous and usually better know for other deeds on other shores. What we know for certain is that we were founded on the wrong side of a continent, wrong in both proximity and prosperity. A north that has always been neglected, whether it be a true north or not, and a south that is known only for the bite of a giant and the sharks that bite us still.
We have no centre, just lines that transect a continent and join the small dots that matter. Five dots in all with younger, or older, siblings with less prestige. Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Surfer’s Paradise, Darwin, Hobart. These are the cities that give us a country, or at leat the skeleton of a country, with the rest of Australia providing the connective tissue that hardly registers until something goes wrong, just like you don’t notice the ligament in your knee until you can’t walk. We have cattle country and wheat country and old growth rain forest country.
What we don’t really have is a nation. Names on maps give you reference points, but whatever it is that gives a nation substance is lost in a thing that lays on a lap like a dead thing, like an x-ray isn’t a living person, just the precursor to a dead one. A map is a thing you draw after a nation has petrified. It is the reason Europe still calls to the world, why it seems to be a thing that reincarnates itself within the same tired old body. It is a place where the boarders are still fluid, but the coastline is ever the same. It is why Africa, Asia and the Middle East will be the frontier of a new age where people are almost forgetting a long age of frontiers.
There has been a lot written about the fluidity of our small nation. About our fledgling character and the characters that flicker embryonic in a consciousness that’s all too young. But living here you inhabit a place that’s complete, a set piece that’s finished. A life can only seem like a half finished thing but it never really is, it is a thing that finishes itself in circles, tiny and overlapping, but a quality of living that lets you experience a place that’s imbued with history as well as intentions. It allows you to read about all that has been completed, all that has the quality of the dead or the ghostly, all things authenticated in an archive in the State Library and all things that haunt billabongs and mist shrouded coastlines, sailors drowned on their way to Hobart, Van Diemens land graves dug by the hands of their inhabitants. The tiny circle of each life finished is what leaves us with corpses and a history.
We’ve had our revolutions and upsets, our bouts of constitution writing and drawing lines in the sand, an armed forces that can mourn its dead and count its losses, Governments that have felt the sweep of history as both the consequence and cause of their tragic mistakes and tiny steps forward.
What we have is a story that floats above this continent, waves of heat that emanate of it, always below our feet, making the horizon murky. But here in Sydney we have the skyscrapers to protect us from the horizon and when we look out at the ocean the horizon is no longer ours. We love our city, or hate it, depending on where you started or where you’re going. You come here because you have exhausted the possibilities of an already exhausted bush or you leave because the indefatigable city has exhausted you. I do not think that our quaint Sydney is a Manhattan or L.A, not a amphetamine driven monolith, not even a colonial outpost that sees the comings and goings of empires, of tired, cynical pale men whose ideals lead them to action or commerce. The empire arrived but it never left, given a reprieve by a referendum that no one believed in anyway. Sydney is a sprawl of suburbia with the reflected heart beats of many other cities at its centre, pumping its cultural blood to the peripheries.
I like it because of the pale reflections that get cast by the waters of the pacific. Warm currents brings us driftwood from the European continent, from the ever expanding coastlines of the Americas, from a globe that seems to be shrinking but still seems to leave us untouched. Sydney is so far from all places, even Australian places, but a stroll will get you there if you’re interested. American hip-hop and R’n’B in small clubs filled with people approximating a lifestyle we can ill afford or pull off, European trance in venues that are somewhere and nowhere, empty shells occupied momentarily by the sounds of a culture moving forward, English food on the dinner tables of families that have yet to discover the bliss of Thai at $12 a plate, Italian art at galleries that meander as much as you would like to, too big for the city and too ambitious for their budgets, but working, making you feel like you belong to something, not making you wish you lived in Venice or Florence, the banks of the Seine (left bank or right, does it matter now, has it ever mattered, Paris being Paris), making you wish you lived in Sydney, and then when you walk out the columned entrance and view the domain and the Botanic gardens, fruit bats roosting, a wind ruffling the harbour, the naval ships at Garden Island, more for the scenery than defence, grey on blue and green, small hills that leave their feet in the water, trees that cup their hands to the sky, waiting for a rain that will come, gently at first, a storm to follow from the south, from that other continent that should have no name, I can look at a Monet, I can feel his time in the Belle-Ile –en-Mer, his sight brushing things before his hand ever did, and then I walk outside and let a Sydney breeze brush me, paint me in colours, make me bleed around the edges, let me grow roots and move with my feet emersed, because I love this place and I love everything it means.
My meaning, the meaning I give it in the afternoon and then again at night, when not hung over I give it a tender meaning in the morning when cold water runs down my spine and I wonder where it came from, how far it had drifted; what fish or thing it had caressed in its chill. Each beach with its own story, Bondi with its accents and bleached blond sand, a god that wakes with it in the morning and makes love to it at night, a blessed place with oblivious worshippers, Cronulla is wild, unkempt white locks, blown back from sand dunes and sand stone, too ancient, with blood on its points, a black hole as its premier surf break, it sucks the flesh from your bones but leaves the smile on your skull, and that’s the way Cronulla likes it. It’s our cities own antipode, a place for winter not for the sun, when the water is grey and you just know there are sharks roaming…God I just have to quit now, otherwise I never will. This whole spiel has been the expansion of three words. Read them and weep – I LOVE SYDNEY.