Sydney was founded by convicts and
flat-out drunks, which is probably why I like it so much. The road
map looks like it was drawn by the wayward hand of a wino and, even
today, it's contours all want to hold you in. But this is the unseen
beauty of a city that, by its essence, wants to fuck it's occupants
out of an easy life. Life shouldn't be easy, least of all city life.
Sydney, as any metropolis worth its salt should, picks a fight with
you, challenges you, demands you conquer it.
I was trying to do just that when I
landed at 19, bush fresh and knowing nothing. I was wearing a red
flannelette shirt in 38 degree weather, I laid 5 dollars at the feet
of a busker who was torturing Dylan and waited for the little green
man to hold my hand across an empty street.
But this was more than my new arena; I
was its new project as much as it was mine. Maybe the challenge of
the city to the young man
was not trying to find yourself there, but lose yourself. Forget
where you came from and become the dog who needed to eat other dogs.
Central
station occupies what was once the site of a cemetery, parsonage,
women's sanctuary and police barracks. The mix is still there;
authority, death, desperation and a good deal of bibles being bashed.
It isn't utopian as a slice of society, but it doesn't belong to
anyone either. Though those with convenience rather than necessity
on their minds tend to look a certain way down their noses.
I hauled up out
and onto Elizabeth St., a long and filthy birth canal that full of
other babes seeking rebirth or abortion. The globe was crammed into
my cheap suitcase, whose wheels struggled under the weight. All of
the things I thought I would need but none of what I did. The street
sparkled with filth, a long and dirty vein through the heart of the
city. A lot of people smoked and I thought maybe I would smoke too.
XX
I smoked another
out of boredom and wondered why I had ever started. They dug into the
lungs more in the heat and it was hot, only a few degrees off its
hottest in a city heralded up north for its horrible weather. As I
watched the grass of a once school yard surrender to brown I wondered
where this famous horrible weather was, it was one of the big appeals
of the place.
The heart of
Melbourne, Australia's cultural capital, beat somewhere in the
distance but I was oblivious. Holed up in an old school house,
thinking of my family and sweating through the spider-manned doona
cover like others had probably done. Melbourne was, to the anal
lining of it's inner-outer suburbs, square and straight. It was the
tireless mother spoon-feeding its new residents.
I walked hoping to
get lost, but I couldn't stop noticing the aggressive signs. Always
telling you where you were, where you are, where you will be. Nothing
was left to guess work. I grew frustrated on a trail that had only
forward and backward and lit another cigarette watching yuppies whack
golf balls.
Another sign
heralding the history of the area. Tom Roberts had painted what was
now the Box Hill golf course, McCubin too. I bounced between the
defaced picture and the scene it was supposed to represent; now
swarming with bulbous-arsed men in plaid shorts, agonising over irons
and woods. What a hundred years could do; I'd have preferred they
concrete the thing to hell, smokestacks, coal and industrial disease.
At least then the imagination could have run a little bit, instead of
having middle aged beer-guts trot through the Heidelberg School and
snuff out its romance like a dead cigar.
XX
My American friend
Jack greeted me at the doorway with a long joint clenched in the
corner of his mouth. An old hand at city life he was typically
unfazed by the families and professionals shuffling in to their
terrace's. My room was upstairs, and up a ladder. For 150 a week my
square of the city, three floors up and overlapping two others below,
was priceless.
Surry Hills runs
onto Central station in the west and Oxford St. in the north.
Initially I felt like an outlier, a rare occupant who found something
rent-controlled, something manageable in a sector of the city that's
exorbitant rents usually ran such riff-raff down the sewer to
Stanmore or St. Peters. But it's high society was simply that element
which shone the brightest, demanded the most attention. There was a
whole wealth of slackers, booze crippled vagrants, degenerates and
wayward children of God that sprung from alleys and rose with the
moon. When I found them, that was where I hitched my wagon.
The city promptly
opened up, as I had prompt money to spend. Bars, brothels and
breakfast; there was nothing that couldn't be done. The guilt of
rapidly spending through an inheritance chewed on me from time to
time, Jack simply said that's what it was for; money was for
spending.
This was not my
element, my element was talking old blue collar drunks through
suicide and onto the next schooner. But the resilience, the
heartiness that grew in country origins made these arseholes easier
to swallow.
I barely thought
of home. We drank, drugged, ate out, went through a million healthy
but temporary diets and regularly slumped our useless pasty bodies
onto bronze beaches. This was a new kind of chaos and was well suited
to a city that had learned to turn a blind eye and cold shoulder to
such mischief. It was the ideal outlet to the teenager with a new
brave confidence and backers on the front.
XX
He approached
smoking a cigarette, which had become all too rare and seemed a good
sign. I was 23 and expecting new friends was a thing of the past. Yet
I craved human interaction.
