Sydney shouts

First and foremost Vanessa, for her generous hospitality, rides to the airport (when the car was licensed), hanging out the washing, and providing a limitless supply of tea and white toast for an Englishman abroad. Elizabeth and Eric for two gorgeous Sundays spent exploring the bush, animals in the wild and seeing things I’d never have seen otherwise. Saskia and Adriana for a night out in several very dubious venues. Ngaire, for Cinque coffee and a chat about how things are in Australia. Max for rescuing me from torrential rain in the convertible Smart, and for a potted history of Newtown. And Jacinta, back in blighty, for the rough rough rough rough rough guide, the maps, the hints, the explanations and the inspirations.

Oh, such a perfect day….

A perfect last day in Sydney. It begins at 8am with a BridgeClimb. Overpriced and overhyped it may be, but there are few structures as nakedly impressive as the Sydney Harbour Bridge whose owners are happy to let you clamber over it like a playground climbing frame. The whole trip takes three and a half hours: after an induction you get dressed up in shiny boiler suits, remove anything that can possibly fall off your body (even large earrings), and hook yourself onto a continuous rail that runs all the way along the underhanging walkways beyond the pylons, up one side of the southern half of the bridge and down the other. A mixed group of eleven (it would be twelve, but there’s no other singletons to pair up with Lonely Guy) includes Howard from Oxford, a retired structural engineer who can’t get over saying how primitive and crude the engineering of the bridge is (to me it has weight and character the flimsy glamour of the Anzac Bridge can’t match), some butch Americans and a couple of other English people; no ozzies, natch.

The actual climb is almost disappointingly unscary; the closest it gets is looking down from the planked walkways to the road. There are stories on the way up as we pause for the groups ahead (look up at the bridge any clear day and you’ll see at least three groups of climbers on each other’s heels – they pack them in at quarter-hour intervals), including one about a falling bridge worker who cheated impending death by throwing his wrench into the water below him to break the surface tension that otherwise would have killed him. The view from the top is truly stunning, the Opera House below, tiny ships tracing fluffy troughs in the water, and the incomprehensible maze of inlets and bays that is the harbour stretching westwards and upriver.

Strength refortified by an emu pizza at the Australian hotel in the rocks (Emu? It’s at the beefy end of chicken), I head once again beneath the banner marked ‘Manly departures’ and across the water. I can’t face joining the crowded conga line of swimmers bouncing up and down in the surf in the narrow space between the life-saving flags on Manly beach itself, and head instead to the calm of Shelly beach and its snorkellers and scuba divers. It’s almost at a 90-degree angle to Manly beach, and protected by rocks: there’s no surf to manage, and I bob up and down in the water for 45 minutes, stretch my arms swimming a little, and duck my head right under the water to envelop myself in a tiny little bit of pacific. I’m only slightly unnerved by a German-sounding lady who tells me that two-foot long sharks may be in the vicinity, and warns me not to pick up any shells that may contain tiny blue-ringed octupi that will kill me in five minutes. Beautiful beach, she says. I come here every day.

I’ve been warned…

The reason why the monorail is evil is because it was the first big private/public project in NSW. It was built by a private company that went bust because they couldn’t make any money off it and then the state government had to take over the debt. And it’s ugly. It’s alright when you’re on it but it just hangs over the street looking shit the rest of the time.

but I take the controversial step of a ride on the monorail. I don’t mind the rails hanging over the street… I think it looks quite cool ducking in and out of buildings, and there’s not much could make the CBD any uglier. I spin round twice, and get off where I got on (that’s a fairground ride, not public transport) to meet Vanessa for dinner on Stanley Street at the original no-name Italian restaurant, hidden upstairs in a little gelato parlour. When you order a schnitzel, just that comes: two tasty slices of hot breaded veal on a plate, in about two minutes.

We meet Steven, and jump a cab to the Opera House to meet Max and collect our tickets to Kiki + Herb, a deranged and dark cabaret drag act that begins with The Cure’s Let’s Go To Bed, then gets deeper and weirder: a pet cow from the original manger, immortal absorbers of Mary’s placenta, a lost biracial child, and lots of Canadian Club with a whisper of soda. Inside, we’re sitting cabaret-style, and Bob Downe is at the next table. Outside, we stand on the terrace drinking champagne, watching the sunset drift across the bridge and the hills of the North shore.

How could you leave Sydney in a better way than that?

Bush

An early start: Elizabeth arrives at 7am to pick me up while it’s still cool (though all-too-rapidly getting warmer) and drive the hour or so north to Narrabeen where we pick up Eric (a Southender who moved to Australia in the 1950s), and then head north further still to Ku-Ring-Gai National Park, a sprawling area of bush that runs up the west side of Pittwater, preserved as bush since the late nineteenth century.

The park is riddled with wide tracks, compacted rubble over sandstone, kept clear not for walkers like us, but as fire breaks and for firefighters to make their way through the dense and scrubby vegetation. There are not only eucalypts, but other dark and straggly bushes, among which the gum trees stand tall and crooked. Some are blackened by recent forest fires and are beginning to grow their leaves out again in bunches. The ‘scribble gums’ look exactly as if they have been scribbled on in wormy brown felt pen against their white bark. The landscape is the driest I have ever seen: no slugs or snails, only ants; even where a gum tree has been injured and its dark ruby sab exposed to the air, though it glistens it’s already hard and crystallised. As the air heats up, and even the 8km trek to Soldiers’ Point feels like a weary labour, the smell of the bush starts to rise from the trees: minty, dry and peculiarly smoky.

Thanks to Eric’s experienced bushwalking eagle-eyes we even spot some wildlife. On a gum, a goanna, a lizard three or four feet long, has frozen, its long and variegated tail blending in with the dark-and-light bark, so you can hardly see where it ends. The reflex action of a wallaby is also to freeze when it sees you, invariably before you see it, where its dark outline and stubby ears could easily be just another part of the bush. As you approach it it remains still, until you get too close and then it bounds away. I’m reassured that any spiders I see in webs will be harmless: the redbacks and funnel webs hide under wood and stone in wrapped-up webs. Strung across the track we do see a spider and her web, with a row of bundled-up flies strung out like an eight-course banquet.

Aboriginal rock drawings are hard to decipher in the overhead sun, but the shapes of wallabies and fish, and stylised men and women (groin protruberance for a man, breast protruberances for a woman, and both for a hermaphrodite) are distinguishable with the help of the guide plaques. The rock plateau where they’re carved is the highest point for some distance around: this must have been a very special place.

At West Head at the top of the park, you can see across to Barrenjoey lighthouse on the other head, north of Palm Beach, which is at the northern end of what’s called the ‘insular peninsula’. Running along the eastern edge of Pittwater and narrow enough in parts for ocean and harbour beaches to be in view of each other, it’s much wealthier than the Shire to the south, but just as white and white-bread. At Palm Beach we avoid the jetskiers and walk along the strand with our feet just in the water and watch seaplanes depart and arrive, ferrying passengers to and from $300 lunch packages, surely not as perfect a day out as a day in the bush. 

 

Bars

She barely knows me, apart from a couple of meetings back in London, but Saskia agrees to meet me after work and take me to the Opera Bar which edges the harbour below the mighty shells of the Opera House itself. It’s Friday night and it’s rammed: the view and the sunset are beautiful, but perhaps so many people are here for some kind of wake for tax cheat Packer? We find seats, and a cushion even, right on the edge of the water, and drink white wine at a rate that’s usual for London and for me, but apparently not here, as I spend the night rapidly becoming convinced that by prevailing local standards I’m an unredeemable alcoholic.

Adriana and her boyfriend Scott come and pick us up and we bomb through the Rocks where the “Lebbos used to dragrace their ‘fully sick’ cars”, towards Darling Harbour, and the bars along King Street Wharf, where a comedy of dresscode errors ensues: while Scott parks the car we go to the Cargo Bar but can’t get in because I’m wearing shorts; while the door are off duty we sneak into the Pontoon but when Scott turns up he can’t get in because he’s wearing thongs (of the toe-cleavage rather than arse-cleavage variety); but it’s OK because Scott knows the guys on the door at Cargo and we can get in despite being underdressed; meanwhile I’ve texted Vanessa to ask her to bring some chinos of mine from her place, and I become aware that you’re never fully prepared in Sydney unless you are carrying/wearing three different types of legwear: shorts and trunks and jeans. In any case, it’s all the young and the beautiful, wearing t-shirts over their bikinis and listening to too-loud, not-too-good music. Vanessa’s friend Jennifer pays a visit to the ladies to scare some straight girls.

Over in King’s Cross it’s a different scene entirely. Kebab shops, sex shops, sleazy clubs and not-so-sleazy clubs, backpackers with guitars and bright lights. Scott’s on the door at Lady Luck’s and we escape the $20 entrance to get red velvet and low seats, a proper dancefloor and something musically a bit more tasteful in the soul/funk area. There might have been some C-listers in, but I wouldn’t have recognised them. The evening ends very well when Adriana generously takes me all the way back to Petersham via a drive-thru McDonald’s caramel sundae, yum.

Back in Newtown, things are a little more relaxed, and a bit more gay: a mixture of upmarket bookshops and tradestores, coffeeshops and hotels (ie large bars), Thai restaurants and pie shops. It’s in the slightly-irrepressibly-shabby, Stoke Newington mode, with perhaps even a little more emphasis on faddy health-food shops. On my very first day I get royally bollocked for having a cocoa in Gloria Jean’s (How was I to know? It looked friendly! It looked cool! There was a rainbow flag outside!), which is not only a chain, but a chain owned by an evangelical church — they’re very supportive of their small businesses on King Street. Zanzi-bar is a bit more lively, and the Thai food in ThaiLand is gorgeous. You can still smoke inside, in designated areas, but not for much longer. Disappointingly, the legendary Bank Hotel is closed and boarded up for redevelopment.

Beaches

Crenelated along all its edges with shallow yellow crescents, it’s like they built Sydney here so that the beaches would be local. They really are city beaches: there’s a long way to go before reaching the redneck hinterland of the Shire’s Cronulla, the other side of Botany Bay. The city goes right up to the water, then it’s playtime.

Freaked out a little by the heat and oppressive concrete of Circular Quay, the QE2 watchers waiting for Cunard’s flagship to set sail from its mooring right next to the harbour bridge, and tax cheat Kerry Packer’s memorial service taking place in the Sydney Opera House, I get the ferry half an hour across the bay to Manly, a rather more genteel place, and home to the first surf lifesaving club. On the beach, reactions are firstly fear of inadvertent voyeurism in every direction I look, and secondly the feeling that I am far too fat and ugly to ever live in this city. Wandering round Cabbage Tree Bay towards the North Head it gets a little quieter at Shelly beach (so-called because, er, the sand is full of shells, sharp on naked feet) and I dip my shins in the waters of the pacific, lapping gently towards the rocks. Northwards, a seemingly endless fractal repetition of yellow crescents fades into the distance. Back at Manly, the lifeguards are loudhailing the entire beach, warning that a flotilla of bluebottles is being blown in, and advising all bathers to leave the water: “There is no cure for this. It will hurt for half an hour”.

Eastwards and south of the harbour, for the westies they may be, but the southern beaches have softer sand. With Vanessa and Kerry I walk from Bronte to Bondi: in the park behind Bronte a very inexpert game of volleyball is going on, there are little wooden gazebos, and what Vanessa assures me are coin-operated barbies. It’s Saturday, but there’s a suburban Sunday afternoon atmosphere of people out to play for the weekend without any of the attendant shadow of depression I feel in England. A hovering flock of gulls just beyond the railings is explained when we see a man below throwing chunks of bread up into the sky. We pass Tamarama (also known as Glamorama, but I’m not yet fine-tuned enough to distinguish one group of bronzed beach bunnies from another), which is narrow and at an angle to the surf; the shape of a tight croissant rather than a new moon, and more for swimming than surfing. When we round the corner, there’s Bondi: the Bondi, but from here it just looks like another beach.

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