30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account Read online

  30 Days in Sydney

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  His Illegal Self

  Theft: A Love Story

  Wrong About Japan

  My Life as a Fake

  True History of the Kelly Gang

  Jack Maggs

  The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith

  The Big Bazoohley

  The Tax Inspector

  Oscar and Lucinda

  Illywhacker

  Bliss

  Collected Stories

  30 Days in Sydney

  A Wildly Distorted Account

  Peter Carey

  BLOOMSBURY

  Copyright © 2001 by Peter Carey

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced

  in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the

  publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical

  articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA,

  175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

  All papers used by Bloomsbury USA are natural,

  recyclable products made from wood grown in well-managed

  forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the

  environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  eISBN: 978-1-60819-238-0

  Library of Congress control number: 2008930905

  First published by Bloomsbury USA in 2001

  This paperback edition published in 2008

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed in the United States of America by Quebecor World Fairfield

  For Kelvin, Lester, Sheridan,

  Marty, Jack and Geordie

  'I had to rearrange their faces

  and give them all another name.'

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  A NOTE ON THE TYPE

  CHAPTER ONE

  I DESPAIR OF BEING able to convey to any reader my own idea of the beauty of Sydney Harbour, wrote Anthony Trollope. I have seen nothing equal to it in the way of landlocked scenery, -nothing, second to it. Dublin Bay, the Bay of Spezia, New York and the Cove of Cork are all picturesquely fine. Bantry Bay, with the nooks of the sea running up to Glengarrif, is very lovely. But they are not the equal of Sydney either in shape, in colour, or in variety. I have never seen Naples, or Rio Janeiro, or Lisbon; - but from the description and pictures I am led to think that none of them can possess such a world of loveliness of water as lies within Sydney Heads.

  I could not see the harbour from the aisle seat of the Boeing 747 that brought me home from New York and I squirmed and craned just like my broad-shouldered companions from Connecticut, each dressed in spectacular outfits tailored from the stars and stripes. Members of a martial-arts team, they were so aflame about this journey, had been loudly excited since we left LA thirteen hours before, that they had tested the powers of my Temazepam to the limits. It had taken two 1Smg capsules and four glasses of red wine before I could finally sleep. Our conversations had been brief. I knew only that they wished to win some medals in Sydney. They knew that I lived in New York City. I am sure they had no idea that I was an Australian trying to get a glimpse of home.

  Home? I did not come to live in Sydney until I was almost forty and even then I carried in my baggage a typical Melbournian distrust of that vulgar crooked convict town. I rented a leaking ramshackle semi in Balmain because I knew that even if my mother was correct, even if Sydney was just like Liberace, I could never be sorry to wake in the morning and look out on that harbour. This was in Wharf Road, Balmain, between Stannard's shipyard and the Caltex terminal. Balmain was an old working-class suburb with vanilla slices in the bakers' windows, bad restaurants, bleak beer-sour pubs patronised by dock workers, communists, crims, cops and the odd mythologiser who wistfully described its literary life to a reporter from Le Monde as 'Le Ghetto de Balmain'.

  There were writers, yes, but in those years Balmain had a working waterfront and at the bottom of my neglected garden I could watch the low-riding brown work boats, oil tankers, container ships, and smell the fuel oil and watch the flying foxes swooping like Tolkien's Nazguls in the hot subtropical nights when Margot Hutcheson, who I lived with in those years, slept beside me on a mattress right on the harbour's edge. The oily iridescent dark throbbed with the sounds of ships' generators.

  Now, twenty-seven years later, a resident alien in the United States, I was making claim on the city 2,000 feet below. The video display showed Sydney only three miles distant, but the choppy Pacific was still obscured by low cloud and when we finally broke through, I didn't know where I was. We could not take the perfect flight path I had dreamed of, one which would bring me straight into the familiar mouth of Sydney, between those two high yellow bluffs they call the Heads. These bright yellow cliffs show the city's DNA - that is, it is a sandstone city, and sandstone shows everywhere amongst the black and khaki bush, in the convict buildings of old Sydney and in the retaining walls of all those steep harbourside streets. Sydney sandstone has many qualities. It is soft and easily worked (to the convicts a sandstone was a man who cried and broke beneath the lash). It is also highly porous, and the first settlers would use it to filter water. When it rains in Sydney, which it does as dramatically as a Hong Kong monsoon, the water drains rapidly, leaving a thin dry topsoil from which the nutrients have long ago been leached. This in turn determines the unique flora which thrives here.

  With nutrients so scarce, Tim Flannery writes, plants can't afford to lose leaves to herbivores. As a result they defend their foliage with a deadly cocktail of toxins and it's these toxins that give the bush its distinctive smell - the antiseptic aroma of the eucalypts and the pungent scent of the mint bush. When the leaves of such plants fall to the ground the decomposers in the soil often find it difficult to digest them, for they are laden with poisons. The dead leaves thus lie on the rapidly draining sand until a very hot spell. Then, fanned by searing north winds, there is fire.

  So the very perfume of the Sydney air is a consequence of sandstone. It is also sandstone that dictates the terms of human settlement. For 40,000 years Aboriginal hunters and gatherers had known how to eat, to sometimes feast here, but the British who began their creeping invasion in 1788 had no clue of where they were. They set out to farm as they might in Kent or Surrey and the sandstone nearly killed them for it. Starvation. That is what the yellow cliffs of Sydney spell if you wish to read them. But there is more, much more. This modern good-time city of beaches and restaurants, of sailing boats and boozy Friday nights, was formed by traumas that it cloaks so casually you might easily miss them. If you come from New York City all you may notice is the apparent easiness of life, the lightness, the sense of a population forever on holiday. But t
here was a bitter war fought here upon and about this earth. The Eora tribe, who still thought of Sydney as their country, were given smallpox and fell like flies. Convicts were flogged. Convicts raped Eora women. Eora men trapped and murdered convicts. Two hundred years later the past continues to insist itself upon the present in ways that are dazzlingly and almost unbelievably clear.

  Of course Captain Cook never recommended that anyone settle in Sydney Cove. It was Botany Bay, five miles to the south, that he promoted as a place of settlement, but Governor Phillip took one look at Botany Bay and declared it impossible. Within a week he had inspected Sydney Harbour and set his human cargo ashore.

  His Excellency, wrote Watkin Tench, seeing the state these poor objects [the convicts] were in, ordered a piece of ground to be enclosed, for the purposes of raising vegetables for them. The seeds that were sown upon this occasion, on first appearing above ground, looked promising and well, but soon withered away.

  It is more than a little intriguing that some of the best vegetable gardens in Sydney can be found today at Botany Bay, and one is tempted to imagine how the city might have formed, how its character would be different, if Governor Phillip had settled where he had been instructed.

  But Botany Bay was abandoned, and, one feels in looking at it, punished for not being what Cook had promised. It became the place where everything and everyone who is not wanted - the dead, mad, criminal, and merely indigenous - could be tucked away, safely out of sight. It is the back yard, the back door, the place where human shit is dumped. What better place to site an airport?

  On the day I arrived in search of home I skimmed low across the choppy waters of Botany Bay, and landed with a hard unpleasant bump at Kingsford Smith Sydney International Airport.

  Customer O'Brien, Customer Figgis. These were the first words I heard spoken on Australian soil. Customer O'Brien, Customer Figgis, please present yourselves at the podium inside the terminal.

  The formal bureaucratic style jarred my ears and reminded me that I was indeed home, no wucking furries!

  Customer O'Brien, approach the podium.

  I turned to my companions from Connecticut. They did not know how weird they looked. Nor did they have the least idea of what a strange place they were in. Of course they were not offended by this style of greeting but I was suddenly awash with irritation more explicable in a teenager coming home from boarding school and discovering the unsuitability of his family. God damn! Why did we talk to people like this? Customer? What sort of dreary meeting in what windowless conference room had produced this honorific for international travellers? Customer O'Brien. Customer Kane!

  You cannot expect a curious tourist to understand that this language contains the secrets of our history, but this was the discourse of a nation which began its life without a bourgeoisie, whose first citizens learned the polite mode of conversation from police reports: eg, At this stage I apprehended the suspect, I informed him of his rights and he come quietly with me to the podium where he assisted me with my enquiries.

  Yes, this is unfair of me. The word customer is decent enough. You are our customer. If you are a customer, then you shall be served. But, damn it, we have always had trouble with service.

  In 1958 the Englishman J.D. Pringle, in his patronising but insightful Australian Accent, made the following useful observation of Australians: they are inclined to assume that being polite is to be servile.

  One could give many examples of this, he continues. Lawrence described it perfectly in the opening pages of Kangaroo when Somers is trying to get a taxi. A distinguished British scientist who was staying in a small hotel during a visit to Australia once asked the hotel porter - or man of all work - to bring down his bags from his room. He was taken aback to be told: 'Why don't yer do it yerself - yer look big enough.' . . . The Australian cannot see why a man should not carry his own bags if he is strong enough to do so. The same reasoning lies behind the almost universal custom of sitting in the front of the taxi if you are alone. To sit behind would imply the master-servant relationship of the rich man and his chauffeur. The driver will not say anything if you sit in the back, but he will often manage to make you feel that you have committed an error of taste.

  Pringle seems unable to actually say why the porter and the taxi driver might be like this. At first I was irritated by this apparent obtuseness but finally, in the last page of his book, I began to suspect that his silence was produced by caution. He had worked in Sydney after all. He knew beaer than to say that its inhabitants were still marked by the convict stain. But, in the last lines of Australian Accent, he finally reveals what has been on his mind for 202 pages. Deep in the secret heart of Sydney, he writes, beneath the brashness and the pride and the boasting, is a memory of human suffering, and a resentment of those who caused it.

  The past in Sydney is like this, both celebrated and denied, buried yet everywhere in evidence as in this Exhibit A, this irritating honorific Customer, which I set before Your Honour as, on this clear blue-skied morning, I come to claim a home.

  CHAPTER TWO

  IF YOU CAN CONFIDENTLY say you know a city, you are probably talking about a town. A metropolis is, by definition, inexhaustible, and by the time I departed, thirty days later, Sydney was as unknowable to me as it had been on that clear April morning when I arrived. As the final heat of summer waned and we moved into the cool sunny days of May, I would make more than my fair share of discoveries, and yet I would leave with pretty much the same notions I arrived with - Sydney was like no other place on earth, and it was defined not only by its painful and peculiar human history but also by the elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water.

  You can live in New York all your life and, give or take a blizzard or two, somehow persuade yourself that nature does not apply to you. I would never seek to define Manhattan by asking my New York friends for stories of Earth and Air and Fire and Water, but that is exactly what was in my mind as I walked through Immigration at Kingsford Smith Sydney International Airport. It was a nice simple idea and I could head for EXIT B totally confident of the wealth of material that awaited me.

  I was expecting Kelvin, and he was there, a heavy-set fellow in a crumpled beige suit. He was there because he was my oldest dearest friend but he also happens to be a perfect example of what I mean. He knows things about Water that I am happy to be hearing on dry land.

  Kelvin waves his rolled Financial Review above the crowd and as he pushes towards me I must confess that I have changed his name, not for any legal reason, but because I have employed him as a character before and if you watch that slight rise of colour above the size seventeen neck, if you observe those shoulders forcing their way through the press, you will easily guess that this is a man who would not quietly accept imprisonment on the page. Kelvin actually enjoys being written about, but he is very particular about his portraits. He meddles. He drinks with editors. Such are his connections that he has been able, without my knowledge or consent, to eradicate whole paragraphs between proof and first edition.

  Kelvinator? he says when I tell him his name. What sort of fucking name is that?

  Built like a refrigerator, I explain. It's very flattering.

  He has aged since he first arrived at my door in 1974. He no longer has the shoulder-length blond hair or the shark's tooth round his naked neck but, on hearing his nom de guerre, he reveals that his mouth, mobile, sentimental, quarrelsome, is quite unchanged.

  I am going to call him Kelvinator even if he hates it, but in return I will give him a little extra hair. He should be grateful. He is a middle-aged man in a crumpled suit, and it is in my power to make him bald.

  Kelvinator? he says. We'll discuss this later.

  So saying he snatches up my bag and starts for the car park.

  Wait, I need to change some money.

  Forget it. You've got a problem here you don't want to have.

  I don't have a problem.

  Yes you do. Sheridan is here. He's stalking you.

  How c
ould I guess that it was Sheridan who would finally blow my simple ideas wide apart and demand my story should be about him?

  I like Sheridan, I said innocently, as I searched the crowd for a sign of that untidy bearded face.

  No, mate, said Kelvin, taking me firmly by the elbow and propelling me past Foreign Exchange and out into that bright clear Sydney air. No, mate, the old Sherry is very drunk. He is in no state for pleasant conversation.

  It's seven o'clock.

  Exactly. I told him you arrived yesterday and I thought you were staying at the Regent but he's still lurching around the arrivals hall.

  We can't just leave him here.

  Mate, said Kelvin, relax. His older son is with him and he, thank Christ, is almost sober. You really wouldn't want to deal with this straight off the plane. Sheridan's broken up with Clara and he's been living in a cave in the mountains.

  Oh I'm sorry.

  Well it's probably very nice for Clara. He's got himself obsessed with Aboriginal firestick farming. It's all he can talk about. He had a great pile of notes to give you. He drops them. The son picks them up. There's not a lot of variety in the act.

  Well I'd like to read about firestick farming.

  According to Sheridan the whole issue is a conspiracy by the mining companies.

  To what end?

  Who would have any fucking idea? I can't see my car.

  I followed him as he searched through row after row of shining new and near-new vehicles. Perhaps it was just that JFK is so ugly and chaotic, or perhaps it was the smell of eucalyptus in the air, but even here in an airport car park Sydney seemed particularly unpressured and attractive. It was seven in the morning. Everything seemed clean and uncongested. There was a gentle nor'-easterly blowing. There were flowering shrubs and, again, that clear crystal warble of the western magpies.