30 Days in Sydney Read online

  De Selby has some interesting things to say on the subject of houses. A row of houses he regards as a row of necessary evils. The softening of the human race he attributes to its progressive predilection for interiors and waning in the art of going out and staying there.

  (Jack, I thought.)

  This in turn he sees as the result of the rise of such pursuits as reading, chess-playing, drinking, marriage and the like, few of which can be satisfactorily conducted in the open. Elsewhere he defines a house as 'a large coffin', a 'warren' and 'a box'. Evidently his main objection was the confinement of a roof and four walls.

  I was laughing out loud as Flann O'Brien, writing in a gloomy Dublin winter, magically, exactly, uncannily, predicted Jack Ledoux's architectural approach to life in subtropical Sydney.

  [De Selby] ascribed somewhat far-fetched therapeutic values - chiefly pulmonary - to certain structures of his own design which he called 'habitats', crude drawings of which may still be seen in the pages of the Country Album. These structures were of two kinds, roofless 'houses' and 'houses' without walls.

  Then, or soon thereafter (as they say in police reports), there was a loud knocking on the door. I answered with The Third Policeman in my hand to meet . . . de Selby!

  Ha! cried the genius, tapping my shirt pocket where I had imagined my mini tape recorder safely hidden. The report-ah!

  I transfer the machine to my backpack, and no more was said about it. Then we were back in that humid musty Saab and twenty minutes later we arrived on the east coast of Australia confronting one more of Sydney's natural wonders, the vertiginous sandstone cliffs at the end of New South Head Road.

  The walls of the city, said Jack.

  Below us rolled the great Pacific Ocean whose tropical waters give Sydney its particular light, so different from the cold ocean light of my southern childhood. It is one of a hundred places you will find in Sydney which take your breath away, and I, familiar but disoriented, was in a state of constant amazement that any metropolis could be so blessed.

  Yet behind our backs, on the other side of the narrow winding blacktop of Old South Head Road, was another reminder of Sydney which familiarity often blinds us to - on the walls of paradise stood a block of clumpish red-brick flats. You didn't need to even look at it. You could feel the dull blindness in your spine.

  Who could build such a thing? It is not as if Sydneysiders did not love the natural beauty of their city. Indeed, we have been driving our visitors crazy for two centuries with demands that they admire it too. We have always been a maritime people, a city of sailors, swimmers, surfers. Our garages are cluttered with fishing rods, beach umbrellas, outboard motors, tents. Indeed, Jack's passion for the campsite is a Sydneysider's passion.

  So who could have put THIS here? It would have been depressing in Brooklyn or Queens but here it seemed criminally insane.

  In my imagination I saw the builder, a man who did not wish to look at where he was. He had made the windows small on purpose. He could not bear to confront all those terrifying miles of empty inhuman sea. He did not want to be here, on this sterile sandstone cliff. Deep in his psyche he was a denizen of the sandstone city described by Watkin Tench in 1790. By the time this reaches you, the young captain wrote, the fate of this settlement, and all it contains, will be decided. It is now more than two years since we landed here, and within less than a month of three since we left England. So cut off from all intercourse with the rest of mankind are we, that, subsequent to the month of August 1788, we know not of any transaction that has happened in Europe, and are no more assured of the welfare or existence of any of our friends than of what passes in the moon. It is by those only who have felt the anguish and distress of such a state that its miseries can be conceived. . .the dread of perishing by famine stares us in the face.

  It is here, or near here, where many a Sydney life has ended, as unhappy men and women have jumped off the cliff at a place known as the Gap. The Gap draws them still, although the media remain silent rather than increase the place's magnetic hold on misery.

  As for Jack, he could never allow himself to be negative for long, and although he showed appropriate disgust about the buildings behind us he was soon celebrating the beautiful cloud banks off the coast. He explained why the clouds were building, but something here had chilled my soul and I did not pay attention.

  If Jack had been one to dwell on death and desolation he would not have built a house here. But he was one of life's celebrators and in this neighbourhood he had built one more extraordinary machine for living. Am I going to describe it? No way.

  But here again - the campsite. The walls closed for the winter, evaporated in summer. It was an elegant and thoughtful space, and I will reveal not one more thing - well, perhaps just one: the roof could raise and tilt like a white wing. We stood, Jack, the owner, myself, and admired the clear perfect slit of ultramarine sky. My heart, I confess, was once again filled with envy.

  The noise of an approaching helicopter did not annoy me. After all, I sleep with fire trucks and police sirens going past my house each night.

  What are the helicopters up to? Jack asked.

  Someone off the Gap.

  He frowned. Oh dear. Does it happen often?

  All the time, once or twice a week.

  As we looked up the helicopter entered the parallelogram of sky framed by the lifted roof and the rammed-earth walls. And there it stayed, like a black invader inside a human cell.

  Oh dear, said Jack.

  He turned to me, passing his large hand across the stubble of his jaw. Why don't you call Sheridan?

  While I dialled the first of Sheridan's many numbers, Jack stood with arms folded across his chest, staring at his ruined sky.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE TWO HOUSES ON Pittwater had stood side by side for many years, although to call Jack's old place a 'house' is to stretch the truth a little. It had once been a house, and it certainly had a good solid sandstone fireplace, but by the time Jack paid his $2,000 and took possession, the structure had collapsed into a heap amongst the wild lantana. Jack had propped up the walls on two sides and put a corrugated-iron roof on top. He had constructed a deck, and here, in a place commanding spectacular views of the estuary and the escarpment, he had erected a Japanese soaking tub and this he then connected to a little stove which served not only to heat the bathwater but to provide a campfire for his deft and tasty meals.

  Somewhere very near by, in the middle of the floor, there was a toilet, as disconcerting to some guests as the household habit of naked bathing in the hot tub beneath the frosty stars.

  Through this extraordinary campsite, burgling possums and thieving kookaburras came and went, the kookaburras by day, the possums by night, and when August came and the westerly began to blow, Jack's carefully drawn plans would be lifted straight off his drawing desk and carried, soaring like sea eagles, out above the scrub.

  Snuggling right next door, behind Jack's blind back wall, was a more conventional structure, a rectangular wide-verandahed house with a big sandstone chimney at its heart. Alison and I had once owned this house, together with Sheridan and Clara. This old place had not been perfect. It lost light too early in the afternoon and it was very cold in winter, but it had this splendid wide verandah on which great thick wistaria vines had twisted themselves.

  It was to this site that I returned with Jack late that afternoon, walking up the steep path through the white-barked gum trees. As I walked I could feel the pressure of the tape recorder in my pocket, but there was an even greater pressure in my heart because both these houses had been violently destroyed.

  In January 1994, when we were in our fourth year in New York City, fire swept down that hill, leaping with explosive force across the steep fire trail along which Alison and I had so often walked at the end of our day's work, a trail on which she had suggested I change my character 'Hermione' to 'Lucinda', a trail which led, not through this dreadful hell of burning birds and trees, but to a high roc
ky bluff where you could sit beside huge cinnamon-barked angophoras, their trunks as smooth as human skin, and look down to that cerulean blue water and above it the ultramarine sky and when I wrote, in those years, about being in love, then these trees and this water were part of the language together with, thwack, the tight tumescent smack of a spinnaker filling with wind on the water far below.

  It was here that our first son had been conceived while the jacaranda petals lay upon the lawns like so many carelessly discarded jewels.

  It was here that the fire roared like a train, incinerating our house, Jack's house, breakfast cereal, baby photos, fishing rods, mosquito nets, garden hose and a lifetime of Jack's plans, not only houses but big dreams for Sydney, a gateway topped by a dance floor above Circular Quay, an idea to turn Darling Harbour into 'lungs', a passageway for fresh salt air down into the forsaken edge of Broadway.

  I am sorry, My Lord, to add to this letter, wrote John Hunter almost 200 years before, that we have this last summer experienced the weather so excessively sultry and dry that from the very parch state of the earth every strong wind has occasioned conflagrations of astonishing extent, from some of which much public and much private property has been destroyed. Some of the settlers have been ruined by losing the whole produce of their harvest after it had been stacked and secured; others have lost not only their crops, but their houses, barns, and a part of their livestock, by the sudden manner in which the fire reached and spread over their grounds. Trains of gunpowder could scarcely have been more rapid in communicating destruction, such was the dried and very combustible state of the vegetation, whether grass or tree.

  In January 1994 all of Sydney seemed alight. The city was ringed with fire, ash fell in the Central Business District and it was not hard for my friends to imagine a ghastly apocalypse, petrol stations exploding the whole of white civilisation in flames. It was at about this time that people began to pay attention to Tim Flan-nery who was saying that the landscape which the white people found on arrival had been a carefully tended one, produced by a planned regime of burning, that practice known as 'fire-stick farming'. Commenting on John Hunter's letter, Flannery wrote: By now Wune 10 17971 the Eora had experienced a decade of European interference. The effects of disease, farms and settlement meant that they were no longer able to manage their land by burning it as they had done for millennia. Death-dealing bushfires with their terrifying roar and unimaginable heat were becoming a major problem.

  By the time I returned to Sydney in 2000 the whole issue of firestick farming had become particularly intense. Fire was defining not simply the landscape but the political climate and I would later have the slightly odd experience of sitting in an expensive Sydney restaurant, looking out across to the harbour and the opera house, and hearing two of my friends almost come to blows on the subject. Then I would see what a long way it was from New York.

  But, for now, I walked in the slightly mournful light towards Jack's house, avoiding looking in the place where my old house had been.

  There's fucking nothing there, mate, Sheridan had written to me. Nothing but the chimney in the middle of a lawn. I can't go there.

  I also kept the chimney behind my back, although as I stepped up on top of the platform on which Jack's new house was built, I could feel the absence pressing between my shoulder blades. It was, alas, my way. I have a lifetime of turning my back on painful memories.

  Jack's rebuilt house, being constructed in true de Selby fashion, still had no more walls than the previous model. Its one solid wall was blind and windowless, politely turning its back on its neighbour. Jack's place faced out towards the estuary, and thus, sitting in the steaming hot-tub, I was able to look down to the mangroves, up to the high darkening escarpment, but to have no visible reminder - if you can discount the silhouettes of dead trees on the clifftops - of all that had been lost in the fire.

  But later, having shared a bottle of Dead Arm Shiraz with Jack and Brigit, I dressed and wandered out on to the lawn. The wine and the bath had made me mellow and, as I walked across the thick damp grass in my warm bare feet, I was not prepared for the surge of grief that now rose in my throat.

  There we had lunched on the verandah beside the dense and fragile old wistaria the brevity of whose yearly splendour was sweet and painful like a Monet Haystack, arguing, in the moment of its greatest beauty, the shortness of our lives. There the black snake had lived beside the sandstone steps. There had lived and died an ancient Vietnamese palm. There were the remains of the water tank in which another snake had died, and there, still, was the careful terracing which the original builder, the director of a mental institution, had his inmates construct, free of charge, on his weekends.

  With the red glow of fires all about them, Sheridan and Jack had stayed there one last night. They cooked a final meal, and at half past four in the morning, as the fire jumped the last break and spread in a great whoosh across the crowns of eucalypt, they boarded Jack's rowing boat, pulled off into the bay, and watched the houses burn.

  Damn, said Sheridan. Fuck it. Damn.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  OF ALL THE WINDS that define this city, it is only the westerly that I hate. It is a bullying blustering wind and it blows for all of August and often for October too. In 1984 a westerly wind came down the Parramatta River at 100 miles an hour and lifted the roof off my bedroom on Louisa Road. I was not there to witness the bookshelves fall or the sliding glass doors crash and break into murderous daggers on my bed but my neighbour, the shipwright Arthur Griffiths, saw the roof sail across the street with its frilly Victorian lampshade still hanging from the centre of its ceiling. He saw it bounce off the house across the way and land in the waters of Snails Bay.

  Years later Jack Ledoux rebuilt that bedroom. He devised a system of shutters so we could batten down against the brutal westerly but, being a follower of de Selby, he also worked to remove any barrier between the room and the world outside. The shutters and the windows all slid back and tucked away as if they were not there. The railing slid down too, so when the building inspector had left and when young Sam Carey was safely tucked in bed, there was no physical or visual separation between inside and outside.

  What about mosquitoes? Even as I asked it I wondered if Jack really understood. He had always calmly coexisted with mosquitoes, ticks, leeches. (Fifteen years later, by the lantern light out on his deck, I would see Jack and Brigit's four year old bravely attack his own foreskin with a pair of tweezers.)

  Well, said Jack, it would be criminal to put flywire over that.

  Jack, I'm not paying all this money for mozzie bites.

  Well, he said, why don't you talk to Brigit?

  These days Brigit has a very successful practice but in those years she was Jack's former student, shockingly young, very pretty, and I thought her rather fey. But now she addressed 'the mosquito issue' and revealed the very practical aspect to her character. She made a stunning curtain. It was very fine royal-blue silk, Velcro'd on the sides, weighted at the bottom, and when I think of Louisa Road I remember, not that rude blustering bad-tempered westerly, but the sweet nor'-easter as Alison and I lay in bed and looked through the jacaranda to the water while Brigit's gossamer curtain just . . . breathed.

  The room was a civilised abstraction of Jack's camp on Pittwater where, once the tick had been safely removed from the foreskin, we sat feasting on the crabs he and the kids had brought in from their trap.

  You always hated the westerly, Jack laughed. So you tell the story of the lamp flying across the street, I'll tell you the story of the southerly, and we'll be square. But I think we should do it in the boat and I also think you should know what it's like to catch a kingfish. No book about Sydney is complete without a kingfish.

  I slept with the tape recorder beneath my pillow, and when Jack shook me awake before dawn I tucked it in my trousers. It was dark and cold and we had drunk too much wine the night before and I followed Jack down the slippery dew-wet path to the mooring where he kept th
e skiff that had nearly killed him. It was slim and elegant and famously unstable. It was a working boat, with mast and sail and nets and fishing lines all lying open in the dark damp air.

  Jack pulled the skiff in to the jetty and I got aboard. He threw me the handlines and squid then passed me the long oars and soon he was rowing through the pearly water in the direction of the pale dawn sky. Pittwater is a kind of paradise with its little coves, inlets, mangroves and the forests of glistening silver-trunked eucalyptus which come right down to the water. You could not look into this bush without imagining the past.

  Men caught fish from the rocks, wrote Vincent Keith Smith, using long fishing spears with four or more hardwood prongs tipped and barbed with sharp fish and animal bones. Lying across their canoes with their faces below the water, they waited patiently . . . Women sat in canoes, fishing by hand with lines made of twisted strands of bark . . . the women talked, sang, laughed together as they fished, chewing mussels and cockles which they spat in to the water as a berley to attract fish.

  Five minutes later, ten yards off the sandstone shore, Jack spilled tuna oil on to the water and, while we waited for those three green glistening kingfish which were presently nosing their way around the promontory towards their death, I finally produced my tape recorder, only to discover that the back panel had fallen off and one of the two batteries was missing.