- Sydney: A Biography, by Louis Nowra. NewSouth, $39.99.
Sydney is a beast. Anyone who has spent time in this city, perhaps even only a day, or the first 18 years of their life, as is the case with this reviewer, knows it to be true. A sprawling mass, and mess, that almost 5.4 million people call home across 658 suburbs and counting. There is the harbour, of course, an undeniable jewel, though for decades it was sullied with sewage and heavy metals (and more than a few human bodies), and there is the Harbour Bridge and Opera House, the inner city "villages", as well as the beaches to the east, and the mountains, all blue allure, to the west. But beneath the hedonism and privilege is melancholia, one that, in part, comes from that other fact: Sydney is built on the foundations of violence, dispossession, racism, sexism, classism, misogyny, and homophobia.
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In the opening pages of Sydney: a biography, Louis Nowra, an eminent Australian playwright, screenwriter, novelist and librettist, describes his early experience of Sydney in the 1990s, after he moved from Melbourne with the hope of seeing his work performed on the stage (he only had to wait two years, and it would be at the Opera House): "Sydney's streets were a bewildering mixture of the narrow, the wide, the winding, the undulating... It was as if Sydney was a constantly evolving being." And that being is near impossible to trap and dissect.
Numerous writers have made the attempt, the most memorable of recent years being Jan Morris, the late Welsh travel writer who came to Sydney in the early 1990s to make amends after writing a most unflattering article about the place, John Birmingham, who conjured a version of the city in Leviathan (1999), and Delia Falconer's incisively lyrical and elegiac portrait, published in 2010.
Now, hot on Falconer's heels, is Nowra.
In his Author's Note, Nowra states his Sydney is told through three "strands": chronological history, spaces and places, and physical characteristics such as sandstone and water. With an empathetic recognition of the way First Nations people were dispersed, assaulted and ultimately decimated, Nowra leads his readers through the establishment of the penal outpost and its swift growth into a city that some praised while others thought merely mimicked London.
Although Nowra includes a chapter titled "Mortdale, AKA Valley of the Dead", about one suburb in the south-west, this is very much an inner-city man's representation. Indeed, he admits, "My Sydney is basically bounded by Chippendale, Redfern, Ultimo, Walsh Bay, the harbour, Surry Hill, Woolloomooloo and, of course, the Rocks." Surely there is a market for a book about Sydney written by someone on the margins, in all sorts of ways.
As a whole, Nowra's Sydney is rather workmanlike, but it does shine light on some interesting features. In "The Shame of Clontarf", he provides a fascinating account of this harbourside enclave, which was once a rather colourful pleasure ground but was also a hotbed of crime, including, in 1868, the attempted assassination of Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh and the second son of Queen Victoria.
Unsurprisingly, Nowra excels at revealing Sydney through the prism of the arts.
In "The Golden Twenties", he tells us about the three McDonagh sisters, who became obsessed with film, making Those Who Love (1926), which was such a success that it trumped Charlie Chaplin's Gold Rush, as well as The Far Paradise, which came shortly after, with film critic Graham Shirley describing it as "one of the best-directed of all Australian features prior to the coming of sound". The sisters' story does not end there, and, in Nowra's hands, it makes for fine reading.
He is also good at showing the city through the eyes of novelists, including Sumner Locke Elliott and Patrick White, two unabashed homosexuals, one of whom, the former, would abandon Sydney for the US, while the other, after a period in England, found love back home in a man from Greece. Perhaps White, who once described himself as "a monster", felt an affinity with the city that, if it could find some humility, might use the same word to describe itself.
There is much to admire in Sydney - it is well-researched and genuinely engaging - but it does, at times, feel a little rushed, resulting in some repetitions that could have been resolved through a tighter edit.
However, anyone who attempts the unnerving task of trying to pin Sydney down should be congratulated. Ultimately, this is one thoughtful man's conclusion: "I turn my attention back to the water. It is a beguiling sight. Today the air and the light of the intense blue sky and how it plays with the water seems magical. It's like one great act of affirmation, an open heart that invites you to take Sydney personally. And I do." So do we all.
- Nigel Featherstone is the author of My Heart is a Little Wild Thing, published by Ultimo Press.
