30 Days in Sydney Read online

  Just after lunch, says Lester, I am on the nav table when I hear Rager report they're getting fifty to sixty knots with gusts up to seventy-two.

  Then suddenly shit was happening everywhere, then Team Jaguar lost its mast . . .

  Then a loose rope wrapped itself around Team Jaguar's propeller. Jesus!

  Our radio started going mad, said Lester. The news was devastating.

  It was time to get battened down, said Kelvin, to look around the boat to see what will fall over, what will fall out of the shelving. We got the weatherboards across the hatchway. In a full storm you can't have any air down below because you can't let any water in. So it is dark and hot down there. You can't have much light on because you don't want to waste the juice. It's REALLY sweaty. You're dressed in thermal underwear that you will need on top. It's unbearably hot.

  The whole environment is stinky.

  Like most yachts, White Lie 2 is not exactly waterproof so when the water washes across the deck a lot of it finds its way below. When the winds changed everything got very wet very fast. The cleanest and driest place to rest your head was on your hands.

  The two o'clock sked ran for about an hour and a half. And listen to this, this is the forecast: a low centred east of Flinders Island will move to the east-south-east. West, west to south-west twenty-five to thirty knots (greater in gusts) increasing to thirty to forty knots offshore and forty to fifty near the Victorian coast. Swells one to two metres increasing to three metres. Waves two to three metres increasing to four to five.

  We were only off Merimbula and we were getting seas as bad as that. While they were issuing this forecast Stand Aside, one of the leaders, submarines and rolls on a thirty-metre wave. One of the guys is washed off, sucked in, shot like a fucking cannon through the water.

  I remember Sword of Orion, after they reported their position, they said, we don't know where that weather forecast came from. We're getting seventy and eighty knots here.

  When you're on the table, you're really focused on the work, but also this horror began coming out of the radio. Maydays, masts broken, boats rolling over, falling off the top of waves. What was it like, being locked between decks while all this was going on outside? It was frightening, because you don't really know what's going on upstairs. The boat makes some amazing noises. It's like being inside a hollow tin with some lunatic banging on it with a cricket bat. You can't brace yourself.

  At four o'clock we changed course, heading south-east into even deeper water.

  Soon the sky got very white, says Kelvin, and the tops were blowing off the waves and the air was filled with spume pelting at you horizontally, so hard it hurt, like hail. We had waterproof hoods but when we faced the sea the wind just peeled them off.

  I don't know how big the waves were. We didn't have thirty metres, but it was big, and waves were coming from every direction. And the foam was dark, sort of grey, and the water had this weird sort of oil slick, like it had been emulsified. It was very unnatural and yet you're in the thick of it, and adrenalin driven, and there's not that much fear.

  Later I would have a chance to observe Lester working on a yacht off Sydney. I learned things about his character I had never guessed in all the thirty years I'd known him. In the world of business he lacked the killer instinct, but in the face of a violent southerly he was fast and precise and calm and disciplined. This was someone you would want beside you in a war.

  You can't let the fear take you over, said Lester, because you've got a job to do and that's the only thing that is going to get you out of there.

  WORN-NIN, WORN-NIN. There was this idiot on the radio. He had this Kenneth Williams English accent. WORN-NIN. He sounded like he should have been behind the counter of a lolly shop.

  Fuck off, idiot, said Lester. Worn-nin.

  We had a shitload of food, a lot of food from Sheridan's wife, Clara, she's a chef as you know. We had bloody duck confit and Christ knows what else but we couldn't touch any of it, couldn't even get to it. In those storm conditions every movement is an exercise in callisthenics . . .

  Even sitting at the nav desk is hard because you're flung in the chair from pillar to post.

  I look at the chart again and admire Lester's neat annotations of hourly position. The only indication of anxiety is where, about this time, he annotates White Lie 2's position every thirty minutes rather than every hour.

  The three o'clock sked finished at about a quarter to five. We were, at that time, just south off Cape Howe which is almost into Bass Strait. That whole system was starting to spin through here. We were still heading for Hobart but twenty-eight boats had retired and, although it was the skipper's decision as to what we would do, we had our own views which we shared with each other in twos and threes. We had begun to fall into two groups, the Quitters and the Fools.

  The thing about going back, said Kelvin, is that it can be more dangerous than going forward. It's easier to maintain control of your boat if you are not beam on to the weather and the seas. People died going back to Eden . . .

  This place, just off Gabo Island, is famous for bad weather.

  Famous for shipwrecks.

  There has been enormous loss of life in these seas, said Lester. The first time Bass came round the cape in his whaleboat he was trapped here. He went ashore for nine days. Also, if you want to think about it, Peter, this water may be responsible for the settlement of Sydney because when Captain Cook came across this way from New Zealand he poked his nose into Bass Strait and saw one of these gales and he headed north and discovered Sydney.

  He might have discovered the Strait.

  He might have discovered Melbourne, said Lester. Where the soil is actually much better.

  By the time five o'clock came it was a shitfight. On the radio you could hear that people were dying. Lew Carter was the voice on the radio-relay ship. He was the hero. He was so cool. He would say to someone whose boat was sinking, could you hold there please while I take this other call and I'll come back to you as soon as I can. He never lost it.

  I was firmly of the opinion, says Lester, that we should turn around. I wanted to get out of there.

  I wanted to hang on a bit, said Kelvin. You see, we pulled out of the race the year before and now I know we quit too easily. That time we had big seas but we also had the headsail jammed in its track. It was ripped to shreds and we couldn't get it down and we couldn't get a new sail up. Now, there were two fellows up that mast and they both said it was jammed in the foil of the forestay, and I never thought to doubt them. But when we got back into Eden one of the blokes went to the bow and gave the sail a bit of a tug, and WHOOSH the remnants fell right down to the deck.

  See, Peter, there's a window there when you make these decisions. Fear is rampant and it seems the logical thing to turn around but you have to push a bit further than that to get there.

  But then, a minute later, Kelvin seemed to contradict himself. I remember, he said thoughtfully, when Gordon, our skipper, finally asked the crew's opinion. He and I were both looking out the long porthole, and he saw the same thing I did. This monster wave hit us WHACK. It was like being slapped by God. It was like being hit by a rock. The sea was showing us what it could do and it was prepared to show you more if you were not persuaded.

  But Kelvin voted to go on.

  We would have been all right.

  We would have been fine, agreed Lester, in twenty-twenty hindsight. Now, having seen the satellite streaming video, I think it would have been better to go on. We probably put ourselves at greater risk by turning round. We had waves coming from behind us rather than taking them on the quarter. But I'm here. I feel no regret, believe me.

  Kelvin said, I wasn't afraid until I got off the boat and saw the seas on TV in Eden. Janet came into the room and she said my jaw was wide open. Jesus, I could have been killed.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I HAD BEEN AT home in New York on the eve of the millennium celebrations and at seven forty-five on that Friday morning, wh
ile my wife and sons were still sleeping, I ran quietly down the stairs to witness my other home enter the year 2000.

  Distracted by a man in the street who was angrily eviscerating our household garbage, I almost missed it, but at eight o'clock New York time I finally turned to NBC where I saw the opera house, the harbour bridge. Then Sydney passed into the next century and the bridge suddenly exploded.

  Few cities in the turning globe would equal that display at millennium's end, and yet I, the sentimental expatriate, was less than enchanted and my emotion suddenly cooled. I'd seen this trick before. These fireworks were very similar to the display at our bicentenary in 1988. Then too the bridge grew green and fiery hair. OH WHAT A PARTY the Sydney Morning Herald had written then, and it had been true, the whole town was pissed. We had a classic Sydney rort and we disgraced ourselves with our total forgetfulness of what exactly it was that had occurred in this sandstone basin just two centuries before.

  In the heat of our bicentennial celebration, the 50,000 years that had preceded the arrival of the First Fleet somehow slipped our minds. All right, it's a white-settler culture. It's what you might have expected, but that does not explain why we forgot the white people too, or most of them. In 1988 we commemorated the soldiers, but the men and women beneath the decks just somehow were overlooked in all the excitement. The twin forces of our history, those two cruel vectors which shape us to this very day, had been forgotten and what we celebrated instead was some imperial and bureaucratic past towards which we felt neither affection nor connection.

  Twelve years later I stared balefully at the fiery bridge but as the smoke cleared I spotted an unexpected sign. Just a little to the left of the northern pylon, just near the place where my dare-devil friend G. had risen above the level of the roadway as he crawled upwards, like a worm in an apple, inside the hollow boxed girders of the bridge's arch, just there, a three-foot-high word was written in an illuminated copperplate:

  Eternity

  Seeing this, all my spleen was completely washed away, and I was smiling, insanely proud and happy at this secret message from my home, happier still because no one in New York, no one but a Sydneysider, could hope to crack this code, now beamed through space like a message from Tralfamador. What fucked-up Irish things it finally meant to me, I will struggle with later, but I cannot even begin to imagine what it might mean to a New Yorker.

  An Aussie brandname? Something to do with time? Something to do with the millennium? Something, perhaps, to do with those 50,000 years of culture that this city is built on top of? But although 50,000 years is a very long time, it is not an eternity, and it is not why the people of Sydney love this word, or why the artist Martin Sharp has spent a lifetime painting and repainting it.

  Martin is famous in Sydney, and like most painters his reputation is more local than international. If you live in Sydney you know he is obsessed with a 1930s funfair (Luna Park), a strange campy singer (Tiny Tim) and a word (Eternity). But if you are from somewhere else it may mean something that Martin Sharp wrote the lyrics for 'Tales of Brave Ulysses' which he gave to Eric Clapton in a pub one afternoon.

  The secret of Eternity does not belong to Martin but he has been one of its custodians and I was determined to talk to him about it.

  Kelvin groaned when he heard what I planned to do.

  Mate, you're making a big mistake talking to all these men. You're ignoring the women. Listening to you, it's as if they don't exist.

  I thought this was pretty rich, coming from a guy who calls his female crew members 'slotted personnel'.

  My novels are filled with women, I said.

  But no one reads novels, Peter. The world has changed, in case you haven't noticed.

  Everyone is reading Vogue and Elle?

  You're going to take a lot of shit for this, he said, and don't forget I warned you.

  This exasperating argument continued and it was two hours before I was able to visit Martin. I found him, at midday, wandering, a little shakily, around his dusty inheritance, his mansion. His assistant had not yet arrived and he was trying to 'organise' a cup of tea. The man who designed Cream's album covers for Wheels of Fire and Disraeli Gears looked all of sixty when I saw him, hungover, with his handsome face unshaved, and creased with a classic smoker's skin. But I am of an age myself, and if I noticed the creases, I noted with envy that his hair, though greying, was thick and strong.

  I first saw Eternity when I was a kid, he told me as he rolled his second cigarette. I came out of my house and discovered this chalk calligraphy on the footpath. No one ever wrote anything on the streets in those days. I thought, what's that? I didn't think about what it meant. I didn't analyse it. It was just beautiful and mysterious.

  For years and years no one knew who wrote this word, said Martin. It would just spring up overnight. We now know the writer's name was Arthur Stace. We know he was a very little bloke, just five foot three inches tall, with wispy white hair and he went off to the First World War as a stretcher-bearer. Later he was a 'cockatoo', a look-out for his sisters who ran a brothel. Then he became an alcoholic. By the 1930s, when he walked into a church in Pyrmont, he was drinking methylated spirits.

  The church had a sign offering rock cakes and tea for the down and out.

  Well, Arthur went in for the cakes but he found himself kneeling down and joining in the prayers. That is how he gave up the grog and got 'saved' but the God-given task of his life would be granted to him at another church, the Baptist Tabernacle on Burton Street in Darlinghurst.

  On the day Arthur came into the Tabernacle the Reverend John Ridley had chosen Isaiah 57:15 as his text. For thus sayeth the high and lofty One who inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.

  Eternity, the preacher said, I would like to shout the word Eternity through the streets of Sydney.

  And that was it, said Martin. Arthur's brain just went BANG. He staggered out of the church in tears. In the street he reached in his pocket and there he found a piece of chalk. Who knows how it got there? He knelt, and wrote Eternity on the footpath.

  According to the story, he could hardly write his own name until this moment, but now he found his hand forming this perfect copperplate. That was sign enough. And from then on he would go wherever he felt God call him. He wrote his message as much as fifty times a day; in Martin Place, in Parramatta, all over Sydney people would come out on to their street and there it would be: Eternity. Arthur didn't like the concrete footpaths because the chalk did not show up so well. His favourite place was Kings Cross where the pavements were black.

  Actually, God did not always send Arthur to write on the footpaths. Once, for instance, He instructed him to write Eternity inside the bell at the GPO although, Martin Sharp told me, the dark forces may have tried to rub it out since then. Of course he didn't have permission. Arthur always felt he had permission 'from a higher force'.

  I didn't have anything directly to do with that word appearing on the bridge, said Martin, but I have kept it alive; I suppose you could say that I have continued Arthur's work. The paintings you know, but I have also just finished a tapestry of Eternity for the library in Sydney. I'm pleased Arthur's work is finally in a library. He was our greatest writer. He said it all, in just one word. Of course he would be amazed to find himself in a library. And imagine, Peter, imagine what he would have felt, on that first day in Darlinghurst, to think that this copperplate he was miraculously forming on the footpath would not only be famous in the streets of Sydney but beamed out into space and sent all around the world.

  I stayed with Martin talking for a long time, but we said no more about Arthur Stace. So it was not until much later that night, sleepless above Kelvin's garage, that I attempted to pin down the appeal of his message, not to Martin whose fascination with the word seems both spiritual and hermetic, but to the less mystical more util
itarian people of Sydney.

  You might think this no great puzzle. But it is a puzzle - we generally do not like religion in this town, are hostile to God-botherers and wowsers and bible-bashers. We could not like Arthur because he was 'saved', hell no! We like him because he was a cockatoo outside the brothel, because he was drunk, a ratbag, an outcast. He was his own man, a slave to no one on this earth.

  Thus, quietly reflecting on what might be the idiosyncratic, very local nature of our feelings for Eternity, I began to follow the vein back to its source until, like someone who dreams the same bad dream each night, 200 years just vanished like sand between my fingers and I was seeing Arthur Stace as one more poor wretch transported to Botany Bay.

  And what might Eternity mean in such a place of punishment?

  Eternity! O, dread and dire word, wrote James Joyce in that famous hellfire sermon in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Eternity! What mind of man can understand it?

  It is a terrifying exposition of hell and I tried to escape it, to find some more pleasant place for my mind to rest. Typically I imagined the ocean but this Australian ocean was no escape. It was endless, relentless, merciless, and it washed against the sandstone cliffs out at the end of Old South Head Road. I thought of helicopters, cars driven off the cliff beside the British Council. And of course Joyce's sermon is filled, if not with sandstone, then with sand; as he tries to compute eternity he evokes the horror of a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad.

  Eternity Eternity Eternity.

  In Woollahra at two am, looking out across Kelvinator's dirty swimming pool, I was seized by a sort of existential terror which it took a half bottle of Laphroaig to assuage.