Human civilisation is built on the fact that human bodies are not able to survive and flourish “in the wild”. We are not as at home on the surface of the earth as we ought to be, or as we think we are. The great poet T.S. Eliot recognised the deep ambivalence at the heart of human civilization when he wrote in the 1930s:

O weariness of men who turn from God
To the grandeur of your mind and the glory of your action,
To arts and inventions and daring enterprises,
To schemes of human greatness thoroughly discredited.
Binding the earth and the water to your service,
Exploiting the seas and developing the mountains.
Dividing the stars into common and preferred,
Engaged in devising the perfect refrigerator,
Engaged in working out a rational morality,
Engaged in printing as many books as possible,
Plotting of happiness and flinging empty bottles,
Turning from your vacancy to fevered enthusiasm
For nation or race or what you call humanity;
Though you forget the way to the Temple,
There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
You shall not deny the Stranger.

With Christian and strangely prophetic eyes he was able to see that the human civilisation is rooted in violence and greed, fear and desire. 

For his part, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote: “Life in the state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” That is, without the necessary evil of society and technology, human beings are not the survivors they ought to be. The world is not as ergonomic as we would like. It chills, starves, drowns, bakes and bites us: necessitating an artificial development – such as politics, government, clothes, walls, air-conditioning, and food preservatives. Our bodies are vulnerable to violence from others and to the elements. Our relationship with nature is compromised: rather than a gentle taking of care, we just take. We have exchanged dominion for domination: out of fear, because we know how savage nature can be: how thin our skins, how naked our bodies, how tender our lungs.

Civilisation compensates. It is designed to give us the feeling of security: to create artificial nature so that our fragile bodily existence is not threatened. That is how the story of the first cities is told in Genesis 4 -11 - a narrative climaxing with the attempt to build an enormous tower to the heavens. Because civilisation makes us believe heaven on earth has been achieved. Security can so easily become salvation.

This too, is the story of Sydney: a celestial city with a dark heart, a beautiful city built first on fearful desperation and then on greed. It is a city I love deeply and feel completely at home in. It is a remarkable city: beautiful, prosperous and temperate. It glistens like a jewel on a sunny day, with the water and the mountains and the fingers of sandstone jutting out into the harbour, where the natural is marvellously adorned by the man-made. In it dwell a hundred nations, people of nearly every tribe and tongue and cuisine. There is no need for walls around our city. And she delivers prosperity and delight. Life in her feels like it has got be the ultimate, if you own the right piece of real estate, anyway. And as you pop the cork on another bottle of Chardonnay and turn the steaks sizzling on your barbecue and gaze up into the azure sky from your backyard, you could be forgiven for thinking that heaven was already there. Playwright David Williamson called her “the Emerald City”.

But the outward appearance conceals a heart of darkness. Beneath the civilization is an unbridled savagery. Author John Birmingham called his biography of Sydney “Leviathan” because he found beastly and monstrous things everywhere. The city itself was founded on brutality and theft; built on the bones of the indigenous inhabitants by the brutalised criminal classes of England. Although it looks as if nature has been subdued, she periodically threatens to burn us to death in one almighty urban conflagration; and every beautiful cloudless winter’s day comes at a cost of more dryness. Will we become the first ghost city of the 21st century, as futurist Tim Flannery has suggested? The city has been synonymous with police corruption from the Rum Rebellion to Roger Rogerson. A “colourful” Sydney identity is not a snappy dresser. The city has run basically by the principle that so long as middle class voters can keep sipping their lattes and singeing their sausages and imagining that they live in a prosperous and fair society, then those that want to do evil can with relative impunity. We wake every morning to the news of another spray of bullets in the west, but who really cares? And far from being a united nations, the ethnic ghettoes of Sydney remain a visible sign of division right among us.

It is as gorgeous as Melburnian Paul Kelly depicted it:

Have you ever seen Sydney from a 727 at night?
Sydney shines such a beautiful light
And I can see Bondi through my window way off to the right
And the curling waves on a distant break
And the sleeping city just about to wake
Have you ever seen Sydney from a 727 at night?

But at the same time, that beauty is sometimes for sale. This is how Tim Friedman of the Whitlams puts it:

My city is a whore, opened herself to the world
Jumped up and down in pastel shirts
And lathered up thinking about designs for T-shirts.
You gotta love this city for its body and not its brain.

My proposal is then to map the soul of Sydney – to take its spiritual temperature - over a series of posts entitled ‘Seven Sins of Sydney’:

1. The pursuit of space
2. In the thrall of luck
3. Loyalty to mates
4. Brawling
5. Smutty little secrets
6. The second last is not the last
7. Work till you drop