Sydney and me
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 15: Divided Nation
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Lucy Lehmann
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Lucy Lehmann's biography and other articles by this writer
From the beginning to the end of my twenties, I hated Sydney. It was a city whose high prices dictated the terms of its inhabitants' lives: a week of fast-paced, stressful labour, ending with a short bout of frenetic spending. I was trying to be a writer, an occupation that gradually consumed more and more of my time until there was scarcely any left for work that earned money. At my desk, I knew that what I was doing had value; away from my desk, in my capacity as, for example, a job-sharing receptionist at a disposable nappy delivery company, I was worth approximately one hundred times more than I was as a writer – though it soon turned out that I was not worth even twelve dollars per hour, and I was sacked, either for incompetency or for not wearing deodorant, or both.
In a relationship, especially one that is turning bad, certain trivial events or exchanges can come to represent everything that had previously been formless, though unsettling. In a moment of apparent clarity, something all but material is born out of the swirling miasma of nameless emotions – a boyfriend sits in the driver's seat without asking whether you would like to drive, proving his latent male-chauvinism; a girlfriend – proving her self-absorption – buys a block of Old Jamaica, although you have often told her how, ever since the year 12 after-formal party, you can't stand the flavour of rum. These pieces of anecdotal evidence are recounted for the edification of a close friend or a psychiatrist – a partisan listener only for, although these pieces are supposed to conclusively reveal the truth about a third party, they ultimately provide insight into no one but the speaker.
I collected a catalogue of evidence that, I believed, strengthened my case against Sydney. Here is one commonly cited piece: the state of vacant lots and abandoned houses in Glebe. While I was growing up there, an abandoned house had lurked in every second street, a cause for crossing to the opposite footpath if it were dusk or, if it were a bright day and you were with a friend, a cause for an explorative expedition dissolving, on discovery of a dead cat or a used condom, in a squealing, giggling retreat. A pianola had stood immovably in the front room of Hereford Street's abandoned house, a ghost had been sighted in Boyce Street's, junkies in Bridge Road's, and an ancient man or woman, practically a ghost, had stood unseen in each of the numerous houses that just looked abandoned.
Then there were the vacant lots – the city child's equivalent of bushland – where the growth of castor oil, fennel, asthma weed and pampas grass catered for every activity from building a cubby house, to finding gay porn magazines and playing spin-the-bottle. For years, there was a vacant lot – this phrase having a similar sinister, bureaucratic ring to it as "terra nullius" or "reclaimed land" – in the middle of Glebe Point Road, so spacious that in season a pond appeared, complete with bull-rushes, frogs and waterbirds. Needless to say, eventually it became a shopping court, and the other vacant lots became expensive apartments, while the abandoned or derelict houses were – my most hated word – renovated.
I would appeal to my listener: "Can't you see?" It was clear that this attitude towards land – that earning potential must be fully exploited – would soon be applied to me. A passing developer would cast a merciless eye into my own overgrown and ramshackle landscape of thoughts and ideas, and peremptorily level out this unprofitable mental space to make way for a full-time job and a craving for car and a new kitchen.
MY HATRED FOR SYDNEY EXPLODED with the approach of the Olympic Games, as the last vacant or forgotten public spaces, like the man-hole on the corner of Liverpool and Pitt Streets in which, on bending down and peering through a broken glass brick, you could see a large fern growing, were hastily cleaned up. I moved to the central west of New South Wales, where I could find land that was free – free to carry something as unremunerative as a temporary frog-pond or a cubby-house or a tree. Abandoned houses, unthreatened except by possums or an escapee sheep, rotted peacefully in paddocks everywhere, including ours.
To those I had left behind in "Sydney 2000", I declared: "I'll come back when they have a ticker-tape parade down George Street for an Australian who's just won the Booker Prize."
Living away from Sydney didn't soften my stance against it. In rural New South Wales, where inhabitants were vigilant against the pull of the capital that we revolved around, partisan listeners abounded: "When I was in Sydney last month, I got a haircut and it cost me seventy dollars!" The drivers were angry, and everyone was always in too much of a rush (country people are always busy, but without rushing) to talk to you on public transport or smile as you passed each other on the street. Cities didn't have to be that way; take Melbourne, for a moment – strangers there were always starting up conversations on trams.
After a few years in the central west, I moved to Melbourne, via a sojourn of two months in Sydney where I was victim to such outrages as spending $10.50 in Watson's Bay on a takeaway sandwich, so excessive that I could only eat half of it, and was forced to leave the remains behind on my rock ledge, hoping that some hungry animal would not let it go to waste. Melburnians talked to me on trams and, judging by their clothes and hairstyles, expected to spend their weekend in small galleries or discussing, in a friend's lounge room, a provocative comment posted on mono.net, rather than on a schedule of activities that started in a nearby café with the Big Breakfast plus coffees and juice, progressed to a yoga class, then a bikini-line wax, accommodated unscheduled sallies into incidental shops, took for granted petrol and sundry parking meters and the odd bottle of cold water – the type of weekend that, in a couple of hours, would exhaust my entire weekly budget. And even when, after nine months, my excitement over this new city was tempered by a few episodes of disillusionment, my affections didn't begin to wander back to the place of my birth; only on two points did Melbourne's shortcomings illuminate Sydney's advantages – water and hills.
"You have to understand," I would say apologetically, "I'm used to going for a walk and coming across a sudden view over a dozen suburbs." I had come to expect those panoramic views that are regularly produced for Sydneysiders in all sorts of unlikely places – layers of hills visible from the train to Hurstville, North Shore buildings and the moon rising in an surprising direction at North Bondi, and even, crossing George Street at Central and turning my head to the west, the wide and occasionally trafficless curves, up and down, one of the city's most well-worn thoroughfares. And although the only event at school swimming carnivals that I'd ever had a chance in was the cork scramble, Sydney's muscular waves and its tidal bays that emptied twice a day to a floor of silky mud and oyster shells had still always been part of my life. In Melbourne, I kept it to myself that in the gridded CBD I had walked all the way down Swanston Street only to feel vaguely bewildered when it hadn't ended with a choppy blue harbour.