Sydney

I recently learned (was it from Martin Amis?) that ‘pulchritude’ is a synonym for ‘beauty’. How can such an ugly word be associated with beauty? I feel the same way about ‘Sydney’, named by Governor Phillip for the British Secretary of State who had suggested an Australian colony. An ugly word that is the name of a beautiful topography, a geologically complex and weathered arrangement of water and land, and more water and land, and a spread of fragmented populations that are in many cases discrete, so discrete that where a person lives and works in this city, defines and confines them. Infrastructure and transport must cope as best they can, and with as much money as government can muster.

The Western, colonial, patriarchal hegemony having eroded somewhat in recent years, the purposes and methods of art and of museum management and curatorship are undergoing fundamental change. Formerly unchallenged Anglophone-transatlantic canons and practices have been undermined by broader international perspectives, by the impact of digital technologies, and by the politics of identity – in ethnicity and nation, gender and sexuality.

Poor old Sydney. If it isn’t being described as crass and culturally superficial, it’s being condemned for allowing developers to obliterate whatever natural beauty it ever had. Is it doomed, will it survive, and if so, what kind of city is it likely to be?

Cities are essentially palimpsests, layered with overlapping lives, structures, and stories. Constantly in flux, each city is a sprawling and unwieldy text that is continually being rewritten. In Mirror Sydney, Vanessa Berry peels back many of the Harbour City’s layers, to reveal a tangle of hidden meanings and bygone ...

Public Sydney: Drawing the City is a large and beautiful book. Its size recalls William Hardy Wilson’s Old Colonial Architecture in New South Wales and Tasmania (1924) and other folio-sized books produced by architect–authors such as Andrea Palladio, James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, and Richard Phené Spiers. Their luxurious size was dictated by the reproduction of drawings at a scale where maximum information might be imparted – like the encyclopedic data provided by a map or an atlas, or an architect’s working drawing. The size of Public Sydney has been determined by the scale of Sydney’s plan view, and special note should be made of the book’s consistent placement of historic drawings – very carefully done – so that, at various moments, one can deduce a longitudinal account of the city’s development.

Symbolist art has received an unusual amount of attention recently. First there was Denise Mimmocchi’s Australian Symbolism: The Art of Dreams at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (which Jane Clark reviewed in the September 2012 issue of ABR). Now Sydney Long: The Spirit of the Land celebrates Australia’s foremost exponent of the movement. Sydney Long (1871–1955) was born in Goulburn, so the National Gallery in Canberra can claim him as a local talent. More importantly, they have staff with relevant expertise to mount this major retrospective. Anne Gray, the exhibition’s curator, is an authority on Edwardian Australian art. Ron Radford, the NGA director, was one of the first to look seriously at Art Nouveau in Australia; he curated a landmark exhibition on the subject as far back as 1981.

When I became an adjunct professor at the University of Sydney in 2004, I knew nothing of its history, and little of the ideological battles that had taken place there. These two books provide a rich narrative of both, and made me appreciate the privilege I have, even as a marginal player, in belonging to such a significant institution.

Witnesses as diverse as Plato in the Republic, James Joyce in Ulysses and Lewis Mumford in The City in History have testified that ultimately, in some metaphorical if not metaphysical sense, the City is, above all else, an expression of love. Terry Irving and Rowan Cahill, luminaries of the New Left in the 1960s and 1970s, currently associated with the University of Wollongong, are assuredly in love with Radical Sydney, a city which may or may not be with us still. There is, however, a whiff of Yeats’s ‘Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, it’s with O’Leary in the grave’, as there is of Beckett’s borrowing from the French: ‘The only true Paradises are lost Paradises’. Yet Irving and Cahill are anything but Romantics. Radical Realists, rather. They are not afraid to quote those who disagree with them: for example, the head of the Australian Bureau of Crime Intelligence who described the Sydney of the 1950s as ‘a stinking city, one of the most corrupt in the world’. Indeed, as the soundtrack of Underbelly insists: ‘It’s a jungle out there.’

This is a celebration of Aboriginal survival on the Georges River, a river which snakes through the south-western suburbs of Sydney and disgorges into Botany Bay.

‘Sydney in verse’: this anthology, arranged chronologically, presents the country’s oldest European settlement in a variety of guises – from place of exile (‘Botany Bay’) to site resistant to the colonising discourses of English Romanticism (W.C. Wentworth, Charles Harpur) to new city viewed through the lenses of symbolism (Christopher Brennan) and modernism (Kenneth Slessor), and from there to the locus of the universal, crossnational themes of joy, suffering and loss.