Down Under (9 page)

By 1790, the government farm had been abandoned and, with no sign of relief from England, they were desperately dependent on their dwindling supplies. It wasn’t
just that the food was short, but by now years old and barely edible, the rice so full of weevily grubs that ‘every grain . . . was a moving body’, as Watkin Tench queasily noted. At the height of their crisis they awoke one morning to find that half a dozen of their remaining cattle had wandered off, not to be seen again. These were seriously at-risk settlers.

There was at times a kind of endearing quality to their hopelessness. When Aborigines killed a convict named McEntire, Governor Phillip in an uncharacteristic fury (this was not long after he had been speared himself) dispatched a band of marines on a punitive expedition with orders to bring back six heads – any six. The marines tramped about in the bush for a few days, but managed to capture just one Aborigine, and he was released when it was realized he was a friend. In the end they captured no one and the matter seems to have been quietly forgotten.

Exhausted by the stresses, Phillip was called home after four years, and retired to Bath. Apart from founding Sydney, he had one other notable achievement. In 1814, he managed to die by falling from a wheelchair and out of an upstairs window.

It is impossible in the frappaccino heaven that is modern Sydney to get the slightest sense of what life was like in those early years. Partly this is for the obvious reason that things have moved on a bit. Where, 200 years ago, there stood rude huts and sagging tents, today there rises a great and comely city, a transformation so total that it is impossible to see both ends at once, as it were. But there is also
the consideration that the nature of Australia’s beginnings is, even now, a tiny bit fudged, if not actually suppressed.

Nowhere in the city will you find a monument to the First Fleet. Go to the National Maritime Museum or Museum of Sydney and you will certainly get an impression that some of the early residents experienced privations – you might even deduce that their presence was not completely voluntary – but the idea that they arrived in chains is somewhat less than manifest. In his majestic history of the country’s early years,
The Fatal Shore
, Robert Hughes notes that until as late as the 1960s Australia’s convict beginnings were not deemed worthy of scholarly attention, and certainly not taught in school. John Pilger, in
A Secret Country
, writes that in his Sydney boyhood in the 1950s even among the family one never made reference to ‘The Stain’, the curiously menstrual euphemism by which convict antecedents were acknowledged. I can personally affirm that to stand before an audience of beaming Australians and make even the mildest quip about a convict past is to feel the air conditioning immediately elevated.

Personally, I think Australians ought to be extremely proud that from the most awkwardly unpropitious beginnings, in a remote and challenging place, they created a prosperous and dynamic society. That is exceedingly good going. So what if dear old gramps was a bit of a sticky-fingered felon in his youth? Look what he left behind.

And so once more to Circular Quay in Sydney, where Governor Phillip and his straggly, salt-encrusted band stepped ashore two centuries ago. I was back in Australia after a trip home to fulfil some other commitments and I was feeling, I have to say, pretty perky. The sun was
gorgeously plump, the city coming to life – shutters were rattling open, chairs being set out at cafés – and I was basking in that sense of wonder and delight that comes with being freed from a sealed aeroplane and finding myself once again Down Under. I was about to see Sydney at last.

Life cannot offer many places finer to stand at eight thirty on a summery weekday morning than Circular Quay in Sydney. To begin with, it presents one of the world’s great views. To the right, almost painfully brilliant in the sunshine, stands the famous Opera House with its jaunty, severely angular roof. To the left, the stupendous and noble Harbour Bridge. Across the water, shiny and beckoning, is Luna Park, a Coney Island-style amusement park with a maniacally grinning head for an entrance. Before you the spangly water is crowded with the harbour’s plump and old-fashioned ferries, looking for all the world as if they have been plucked from the pages of a 1940s children’s book with a title like
Thomas the Tugboat
, disgorging streams of tanned and lightly dressed office workers to fill the glass and concrete towers that loom behind.

An air of cheerful industriousness suffuses the scene. These are people who get to live in a safe and fair-minded society, in a climate that makes you strong and handsome, in one of the world’s great cities –
and
they get to come to work on a boat from a children’s story book, across a sublime plane of water, and each morning glance up from their
Heralds
and
Telegraphs
to see that famous Opera House and inspiring bridge and the laughing face of Luna Park. No wonder they look so damned happy.

It is the Opera House that gets all the attention, and you can understand why. It’s so startlingly familiar, so hey-I’m-in-Sydney, that you can’t stop looking at it. Clive James
once likened the Opera House to ‘a portable typewriter full of oyster shells’, which is perhaps a tad severe. In any case, the Opera House is not about aesthetics. It’s about being an icon.

That it exists at all is a small miracle. It’s difficult to conceive now just what a backwater Sydney was in the 1950s, forgotten by the world and overshadowed even by Melbourne. As late as 1953, there were just 800 hotel rooms in the city, barely enough for one medium-sized convention, and not a thing to do in the evenings; even the bars closed at 6 p.m. The city’s capacity for mediocrity cannot be better illustrated than by the fact that where the Opera House now stands, on as fine a situation as water and land afford, was then the site of a municipal tram garage.

Then two things happened. Melbourne was awarded the 1956 Summer Olympics – a call to action for Sydney if ever there was one – and Sir Eugene Goossens, head of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, began to agitate for a concert hall in a city that didn’t have a single decent orchestral space. Thus goaded, the city decided to tear down the ramshackle tram shed and build something glorious in its place. A competition was held for a suitable design and a panel of local worthies convened to select a winner. Unable to reach a consensus, the judges sought the opinion of the Finnish-born American architect Eero Saarinen, who sifted through the offerings and selected a design that the jurors had rejected. It was by a little-known 37-year-old Danish architect named Jørn Utzon. Possibly to the panel’s relief, certainly to its credit, it deferred to Saarinen’s opinion and Utzon was cabled with the news.

‘The plan’, in the words of John Gunther, ‘was bold, unique, brilliantly chosen – and trouble – from its
inception.’ The problem was the famous roof. Nothing so daringly inclined and top-heavy had ever been built before and no one was sure that it could be. In retrospect, the haste with which the project was begun was probably its salvation. One of the lead engineers later noted that if anyone had realized at the outset how nearly impossible a challenge it would be, it would never have received the go-ahead. Just working out the principles necessary to build the roof took five years – the whole project had been intended to last no more than six – and construction in the end dragged on for almost a decade and a half. The final cost came in at a weighty $102 million, fourteen times the original estimate.

Utzon, interestingly, has never seen his prized creation. He was effectively dismissed in 1966 after an election brought in a change of state government, and has never been back. He also never designed anything else remotely as celebrated. Goossens, the man who started it all, likewise failed to see his dream realized. In 1956, while passing through customs at Sydney Airport, he was found to be carrying a large and diversified collection of pornographic material, and he was invited to take his sordid continental habits elsewhere. Thus, by one of life’s small ironies, he was unable to enjoy, as it were, his own finest erection.

The Opera House is a splendid edifice and I wish to take nothing away from it, but my heart belongs to the Harbour Bridge. It’s not as festive, but it is far more dominant – you can see it from every corner of the city, creeping into frame from the oddest angles, like an uncle who wants to get into every snapshot. From a distance it has a kind of gallant restraint, majestic but not assertive, but up
close it is all might. It soars above you, so high that you could pass a ten-storey building beneath it, and looks like the heaviest thing on earth. Everything that is in it – the stone blocks in its four towers, the latticework of girders, the metal plates, the six million rivets (with heads like halved apples) – is the biggest of its type you have ever seen. This is a bridge built by people who have had an Industrial Revolution, people with mountains of coal and ovens in which you could melt down a battleship. The arch alone weighs 30,000 tons. This is a great bridge.

From end to end, it stretches 1,650 feet. I mention this not just because I walked every foot of it now, but because there is a certain poignancy in the figure. In 1923, when the city burghers decided to throw a bridge across the harbour, they determined to build not just any bridge, but the longest single-arch span ever constructed. It was a bold enterprise for a young country and it took longer to construct than expected – almost ten years. Just before it was completed, in 1932, the Bayonne Bridge in New York quietly opened and was found to be 25 inches – 0.121 per cent – longer.
^*5

After such a long spell in an aeroplane I was eager to stretch my shapely limbs, so I crossed the bridge to Kirribilli and plunged into the old, cosily settled neighbourhoods of the lower north shore. And what a wonderful area it is. I wandered past the little cove where my hero, the aviator Charles Kingsford Smith (about whom much more anon), once impossibly took off in an
aeroplane, and into the shaded hills above, through quiet neighbourhoods of cottagey homes buried in flowering jacaranda and fragrant frangipani (and in every front garden cobwebs like trampolines, in the centre of each the sort of spider that would make a brave man gasp). At every turn there was a glimpse of blue harbour – over a garden wall, at the bottom of a sloping road, suspended between close-set houses like a sheet hung to dry – and it was all the finer for being furtive. Sydney has whole districts filled with palatial houses that seem to consist of nothing but balconies and plate glass, with scarcely a leaf to block the beating sun or interrupt the view. But here on the north shore, wisely and nobly, they have sacrificed large-scale vistas for the cool shade of trees, and every resident will, I guarantee, go to heaven.

I walked for miles, through Kirribilli, Neutral Bay and Cremorne Point, and on through the prosperous precincts of Mosman, before at last I came to Balmoral with a sheltered beach overlooking Middle Harbour and a splendid waterfront park shaded with stout Moreton Bay figs, the loveliest tree in Australia by far. A sign by the water’s edge noted that if you were eaten by sharks it wasn’t because you hadn’t been warned. Apparently shark attacks are much more likely inside the harbour than out. I don’t know why. I had also read in Jan Morris’s engaging and cheery book
Sydney
that the harbour teems with lethal goblinfish. What is notable about this is that in all my reading I never came across a single other reference to these rapacious creatures. This isn’t to suggest, I hastily add, that Ms Morris was being inventive; merely that it isn’t possible in a single lifetime to read about all the dangers that lurk under every wattle bush or ripple of water in this wondrously venomous and toothy country.

These thoughts took on a certain relevance some hours later in the dry heat of afternoon when I returned to the city dog tired and pasted with sweat, and impulsively popped into the grand and brooding Australian Museum beside Hyde Park. I went not because it is fabulous, but because I was half crazed from the heat and it looked to be one of those old buildings that are dimly lit and gratifyingly cool inside. It was both of those, and fabulous as well. It is a vast and old-fashioned place – I mean that as the most admiring compliment; I know of no higher for a museum – with lofty galleried halls full of stuffed animals and long cases of carefully mounted insects, chunks of luminous minerals or Aboriginal artefacts. In a country such as Australia, every room is a wonder.

As you can imagine, I was particularly attracted to all those things that might hurt me, which in an Australian context is practically everything. It really is the most extraordinarily lethal country. Naturally, they play down the fact that every time you set your feet on the floor something is likely to jump out and seize an ankle. Thus my guidebook blandly observed that ‘only’ fourteen species of Australian snakes are seriously lethal, among them the western brown, desert death adder, tiger snake, taipan and yellow-bellied sea snake. The taipan is the one to watch out for. It is the most poisonous snake on earth, with a lunge so swift and a venom so potent that your last mortal utterance is likely to be: ‘I say, is that a sn—’

Even from across the room you could see at once which was the display case containing the stuffed taipan, for it had around it a clutch of small boys held in rapt silence by the frozen gaze of its beady, lazily hateful eyes. You can kill it and stuff it and put it in a case, but you can’t take away
the menace. According to the label, the taipan carries a venom fifty times more deadly than that of the cobra, its nearest challenger. Amazingly, just one fatal attack is on record, at Mildura in 1989. But
we
knew the real story, my attentive little friends and I – that once you leave this building the taipans aren’t stuffed and behind glass.

At least the taipan is five feet long and thick as a man’s wrist, which gives you a reasonable chance of spotting it. What I found far more appalling was the existence of lethal small snakes, like the little desert death adder. Just eight inches long, it lies lightly buried in soft sand so that you have no hope of seeing it before setting your weary butt on its head. Even more worrying was the Point Darwin sea snake, which is not much larger than an earthworm but packs venom enough if not to kill you at least to make you very late for dinner.