To get us in the mood, have a listen to punkists Frenzal Rhomb’s take on Bobby Troup’s classic ‘My City of Sydney’:

My city of Sydney,
I love the warmth of you.
Love the heart of your people,
That little church steeple in Woolloomooloo.

Sail boats white polka-dotting the blue of the bay
as they glide on their way through a clear afternoon
Night folks thirsting for fun,
meeting most everyone at the Cross
as they toss in their merry balloon.

My city of Sydney,
I love your glow at dark.
Love the Opera House lights from the Bridge
And the nights in a quiet Hyde Park.

When I'm thousands of miles from the surfers and smiles,
Of your laugh-loving children at play,
My warm city of Sydney,
I've never been away.
                 Bobby Troup

Maps
The Street Directories of Sydney, the Gregory’s and the UBD, are disappearing from our cars, now that we have GPS systems. I am a bit sorry for that: I could easily spend a happy hour pondering the way Sydney has been described: with the name ‘mount’ given to flat places (where is ‘Mount’ Druitt?), and with names of London suburbs or English villages finding themselves duplicated, sometimes incongruously (Lewisham, Kensington, Paddington, St Ives). In many cases, these names represent the erasure of the aboriginal name for a place.

But not always: the thick smattering of aboriginal place names, often near water (Bondi, Coogee, Cammaray, Curl Curl, Parramatta, Cronulla), are a ghostly reminder in a now unspoken tongue that this place was once seen with very different eyes.

Invasion
The land was more than strange: it was incomprehensible to people from the other side of the world.
       Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance

Why did Europeans come here, to this strange place?

On 13th May 1787 11 ships loaded to the gunwales with a human cargo set sail from Portsmouth for Botany Bay, in the land of New South Wales discovered by Captain James Cook some seventeen years previously. The 1420 souls aboard – somewhat more than that arrived at the other end – were to begin a colony in the form of a prison under the governorship of Captain Arthur Phillip – a colony built by forced labour at the barrel of the gun and at the crack of the cat o’ nine tails.

Their journey must have been as terrifying in prospect as it was remarkable in completion. What could a poorly educated horse thief or pickpocket have imagined lay before him across the sea?

Transportation was not a new punishment in 1787. But Cook’s discovery of an apparently empty and vast island at the other end of the globe made it a more attractive solution to the perennial problem of punishment. The prisons of the day were notoriously overcrowded and disease-ridden; and in fact the government had resorted to putting its prisoners in prison-hulks moored on the Thames. More space was needed.

More space. But that space was already occupied. Before European settlement, the lands of the Sydney Basin were roamed by the people known to history as the Eora. That name, meaning ‘people’, was derived from the word for ‘yes’ and the word the ‘this place’. Their identity, and indeed their spirituality, was tied to the land.

Eradication did not take long, and it was not through any particular policy of aggression from the Europeans – though there were occasional skirmishes. Smallpox carried off more than half the Eora within a few short years of the arrival of the First Fleet.

We have long wrestled with these events which cast such a pall over the founding of our city, and from which we continue to benefit - particularly the Anglican Church, which received huge bequests of land that only tenuously belonged to those who gave it away. Yet it is too morally simplistic to assign blame to the Europeans for the cataclysm that occurred. There was no recognition of the possibility of a native sense of ownership of the land in the same way that Europeans thought of it. The anthropological concepts with which they might have begun to understand the relationship of the Eora peoples to the land were simply not available.

Likewise, with no understanding of immunology of epidemiology, the Europeans could not have foreseen or understood the genocide that was caused by the smallpox virus. They were simply spreading the human stain. Greed, incompetence and fear played their part. The sad thing is that it is impossible to imagine an alternative history in which colonisers from Europe arrived and did not devastate black Australia.

If Sydney has an original sin, it lies somewhere in the brutality of the exile of the convicts from England and the dispossession of the aboriginal inhabitants of their home.

The View
Elaine: Sydney is different. Money is more important here.
Colin: Why more so than Melbourne?
Elaine: To edge yourself closer to a view. In Melbourne all views are equally depressing, so there’s no point.
         David Williamson, Emerald City

The aesthetic beauty of the harbour was immediately noted by the new settlers, or at least, those who had sensibility enough to notice. Ever since then, the city of Sydney has been a bun-fight over who has access to the best view. Real estate brochures crow over the sight of a patch of water the size of a ten cent coin only visible from the bathroom window. The annual fireworks serve to remind everybody that the class system in Sydney can be easily read from which area has the best spot for spectators. Corner offices that face the harbour are where the big bosses of industry and commerce sit and make their conference calls.

The great artists of Sydney have tried to make something of the harbour, though it is difficult to do so without lapsing into sheer postcardism. Brett Whitely somehow got the blue just right, before he succumbed to the blues. Grace Cossington-Smith was another who managed to find something new to say about it. The man-made structures of the Bridge and then the Opera House by some extraordinary miracle enhanced God’s work, but have made it harder to paint, since human artistry has already done its best.

But the truth is, we’ll kill for a harbour view - others, or ourselves. Looking at the harbour is the secret to the envy that makes Sydney the town it is. When it comes to views, in Sydney, size definitely matters. We'll work so hard to have it, we'll never have the time to see it.

The Burbs
…on the surface not even the sufferings endured in the two world wars of 1914-1918 and 1939-1945, the dropping of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima in August 1945, the depth of the crisis in capitalist society during the great depression, or the loosening of the conventions of previous decades seems to have shaken the faith of the average Australian in the capacity of both the land and the society to provide every adult with the opportunity to become the owner of property, a house, a plot of land, a car, and all the gadgets deemed essential for the gratification of the senses in an age given over to surface delights and titillations.
    Manning Clark, A Short History of Australia

People, wasting away in paradise…
Too much of sunshine too much of sky
It's just enough to make you wanna cry
I see buildings, clothing the sky, in paradise
Sydney, nights are warm
Daytime telly, blue rinse dawn
And Dad's so bad he lives in the pub, it's a underarms and football club
    Midnight Oil, The Power and the Passion

But all these little dog-kennels – awful piggling suburban place – and sort of lousy. Is this all men can do with a new country?
    D.H. Lawrence, Kangaroo

When the great English novelist D.H. Lawrence arrived in Sydney in 1922 he was on a quest for a new world free of the tired old customs of Europe. He was instantly disappointed. What had Sydney-siders done but build row after row of cramped and charmless London-style homes? They had not had the imagination to develop a new way of living on the new land. Back from the harbour were acres of houses without any daring. The roads were dusty and windy. Though there was space to burn, it seemed as if the inhabitants of the New World had been too terrified to inhabit it. 

Back from the harbour, Sydney seems to have squandered its opportunity. Some of its suburbs are ugly as sin. The evidence of quick bucks earned by property developers in the 60s and then again in the 80s - all with the collusion of local councils - is everywhere. 

The Australian dream is not as nakedly rapacious as the American one: it is not to make a million dollars, but to own your own plot of suburban land and to live quietly on it. In fact, it isn’t really a dream – that’s too grand a term. It is an expectation that the land on which we stand will yield its bounty readily and not ask too much in return. The myths of hardship all stem from the inland. Down at the coast, we know we have it easy.
Trouble is, the ease of life has caused us to lose our imaginations. It is too easy to believe that this is all there is. 

Maps 2

Unlike Americans, Sydney-siders have no ceremony of thanksgiving for the place they now inhabit. We don't tend to regard the space we inhabit as a gift. We look at the view, if we do, because we earned the position through talent and hard work. There is the danger, too, of sounding a note which unpleasantly triumphalistic: we are not somehow like Israel entering the promised land and dispossessing the locals at God's express command. 

But Richard Johnson, the first chaplain of the colony, is perhaps the voice we need to remember here. In his first sermon on Australian soil - the first sermon on Australian soil - Johnson expounded the text from Psalm 116: What shall I render to the Lord for all his benefits to me? They are remarkable words considering the context in which they were first preached.

But they could be words of ongoing significance for Sydney-siders. They do not strike a note of triumph. They rather ask: what does the possession of this marvellous gift - this city - mean for me? What is my response to the giver?