Destination: Adelaide - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 15: Divided Nation
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Tracy Crisp
PEOPLE SAY ADELAIDE IS A DIFFICULT PLACE TO break into. Our defensive parochialism is notorious, our establishment infamous, our history littered with people who – depending on your perspective – either left in a huff or were driven out. Peter Sellars in the arts, Gary Ayers in sport.
When I first moved to Adelaide, I was seduced by my potential anonymity. I had been living in a provincial city, defined by my relationship to my parents, both of them teachers and one of them in politics. "Oh. You're Crispy's daughter," people said, not always with a smile.
In the city, I could drink and smoke and kiss whoever I liked and my parents would never know. But a million people isn't as many as you might think, especially not in a city-state. South Australians weave their way in and out of Adelaide. There's a city-versus-country divide, but there are 1.5 million South Australians, and 1.1 million of them live in Adelaide. We come here for appointments with the specialist, for trade school, to find a wedding dress, a job. Sooner or later you will know someone who knows someone standing next to you in the queue.
At the same time, you can know a lot of people in Adelaide, and still not know enough. In my first week at university, I learnt that the girls who carried dark green or navy blue Country Road bags would join the Foreign Affairs Department and had already been to France. I hadn't known that France was somewhere you could go. I was on the edges of the Adelaide Establishment where no one cared that I was the "daughter of Denis".
Whatever their weaknesses, networks do have enormous strengths. Adelaide's first Circle of Friends was established in 2002. Within a year, there were twenty-two, all supporting refugees and asylum seekers living in detention or finding their way into our community. And Adelaide's establishment is not impenetrable. Mike Rann, Jane Lomax-Smith, Robert Champion de Crespigny, Carole Whitelock – none of them are from these parts originally. And if that list sounds elitist, class is not a barrier to success in Adelaide. Robyn Archer, writer, singer, festival director, and Mark Bickley, Crows premiership captain, Chair of SA Great – they aren't establishment names.
Mark Bickley. I grew up around the corner from him.
I was in Sydney on the last day of Juan Davila's exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Breakfast in Glebe, then Crown Street, Hyde Park, a ferry, cicadas, humidity. A Sydney day. Until the MCA.
I had forgotten that Davila had painted Adelaide. "The Institute of Architects Bombs Adelaide" and "The Ruins of Adelaide City Council Real Estate Office at Victoria Square" took me by surprise. His essay, "The Ruins of Adelaide", reproduced in the newly-published book, jolted me.
"Colonel William Light's 1837 plan for the city of Adelaide has been a curse." Like his paintings, Davila's words are harsh. "This virtual city plan is a fortress – copied from Europe – to exclude disorder ... Adelaide's master plan sanitises the city, violently excluding presentations of histories, ideas and behaviour outside the Anglo-Saxon experience."
Davila's Victoria Square is disorderly. Its foreground flooded, the Hilton and Town Hall toppling, the three rivers fountain being filled with urine from atop.
This is the place where – several times a week – my children and I get on and off the tram. It is the place where the Aboriginal flag first flew, and it is now flown here permanently. I have heard, in a welcome to country, that Light knew what this place meant to the Kaurna people when he made it the centre of his Adelaide.
It has two official names -Tarndanyangga and Victoria Square – but most people call it Victoria Square. Here is Davila again: "The declaration of dry zones – no drinking alcohol in the public spaces – as an affirmation of a will for order can be read as a perversion, given the dependence of the economy on the wine industry. It also targets those forced to drink in the city squares, unlike those who drink in grand settings." Can't argue with that.
I bought the Davila book, retreated to the airport, sat in the departure lounge. I smiled at the friend of a friend, at the person who seemed to recognise me although I did not recognise him, then chatted with two people I haven't seen for years. "So you're still living in Adelaide." I nodded, then said it back.
On the plane, I read Davila's essay again.
"The River Torrens area was appropriated and dominated by a free settler's concept of urban space, one which has denied people since the beginning – particularly minorities – the right to decide their own lifestyles ... The River Torrens is an odd refuge for children that are delinquents. It has become a scenario for the splendours of crime and also for its misery. The church and the accommodated classes in Adelaide favour charity: that is to say, to give to someone lesser than you that you never meet, of course."
I look out for the Torrens whenever I fly home, for the Festival Centre peaks and the Convention Centre glass. And on other nights, the Torrens' lights feel soft and warm.
FOR A VIEW I LOVE OF ADELAIDE, I go time and again to the intimacy of Barbara Hanrahan's "Weird Adelaide", published in The Adelaide Review in 1988 and "sponsored by the SA Tourism Department".
Hanrahan gives us darkness: "Even in the daytime the streets of classy North Adelaide and Unley Park can be tunnels, enclosed by green leaves. And so quiet, so secretive, all the people shut away behind their high walls ... At night, Adelaide turns film noir, becomes a miniature Cornell Woolrich city, its empty side-streets black and creepy, with a feel of the back lot at Paramount or Universal."
But weird isn't always sinister. "The Spooner girls in their silver-spoon private-school uniforms, just the right degree of wrinkle in their socks, outside Sportsgirl in Rundle Mall. The frog cakes on their paper doilies in Balfours; the naughty R-rated moulds under the counter (ASK ASSISTANT) in the cake shop in Adelaide Arcade." And she rounds the picture out: "weirdness can have a distinctive beauty," she says of the Museum, Botanic Gardens, Beehive Corner, West Terrace Cemetery, hotels "and so much more".
In mourning the continuing loss of the artefacts of the everyday ("generations and generations of working-class people, quite disappeared"), Hanrahan foreshadowed Landry: "What we want now in Adelaide are writers and artists who work from the heart of those commonplace suburban streets, who recognise the weirdness of the ordinary, who record it before the version of it we have now is swept away. We want passion and intensity, an art that comes from places like Port Adelaide and Thebarton and Holden Hill; that stays unofficially weird."
While I am writing this essay, I bump into a friend just returned from a day's work in Melbourne and he says: "Is Adelaide a good place to live?" The question mark is a given. If you live in a place that people leave, you can't help asking yourself: is it me? Every now and then, you're forced to wonder: why do I live here?
Do people in Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, Perth have these conversations over their Saturday shopping brunch?
I live here because Adelaide is good for families. We can afford a better house than we could elsewhere. We're close to town and it's easy to get to the beach. Spring is awful, but autumn is glorious. The Fringe invigorates. I like living in a place that has been so good for women and has a deposit on soft drink cans. I cherish trips to Kangaroo Island, the drive-in at Gepps Cross. I like fishing from the Brighton jetty with my friend on Saturday nights (what a collection of squid jags she has), the pink pig statue on O'Connell Street, and our tall white-barked trees. It costs $2.50 to take a Port River "dolphin cruise".
And remember that first year of fire sculptures at WOMADelaide? A tinder dry summer, the smell of fuel, men from France speaking French. Constrained. But not.
People will come to Adelaide and people will leave. We'll never be Queensland, but we've got submarines, overseas students and the cusp of a mining boom. We make great chocolates, art and wine. London beckoned for Robert Champion de Crespigny, but J.M. Coetzee moved here asking "what kind of place is this ... is this paradise on earth? What does one have to do to live here? Does one have to die first?"
If it really was death that brought me back, if that wasn't an excuse I made to explain my return to myself and to my friends, it's not death that makes me stay.
Six years ago, my grandfather, my husband and I drove past Gepps Cross and Bolivar, through Port Wakefield, then detoured to Port Augusta for home-made iced coffee with friends. Then back we went, out to the Flinders Ranges. They felt ancient, quiet and still. We stayed in the Blinman shack that my grandfather had stayed in every year for years. It was September and already hot. I was pregnant, so I couldn't have gin or beer or antihistamines. My grandfather showed us the wettest creek beds and the best rocks to climb. He showed us quandong trees and fossil beds. He told us the names of every flower we found, every bird we heard. We drank lemonade at the Parachilna Pub and at the end of the day, when the sky changed colour and the kangaroos grazed, my grandfather sat. And I sat next to him.
Six months later, the baby had been born, an unexpected congenital condition diagnosed, surgery proposed, done. My grandfather, then eighty-five, caught the train to the hospital every day for two weeks to hold my baby's hand.
And mine.
Five years after that, the baby is a boy starting school and my grandfather says: "That's where my Uncle Hal went to school." There is a photo of Hal and his classmates at the front of the school and when my grandfather gives that photo to me, I know that's why I left. And that's what brought me back. And that's what keeps me here. ♦