Sydney is brown. This is because Australia's geology is so boring. In New Zealand, plates thrust mightily against plates, wrinkling the earth into new mountains and boiling islands up out of the sea. Australia lies and rusts. Weathering exposes iron, the iron rusts, and the stone available for building things out of is brown and pink.
I was up at 4am on the first morning here. Moving slowly westward through the time zones is almost as magical as going from winter to summer. You wake up naturally and can yawn and drink coffee for three hours before even beginning to feel like there are other things you should be doing. Dawn comes, and you tsk at the lazy city that hasn't even opened its cafes yet. While it was still dark, I sat out on the little balcony and looked at the southern stars: Thinking, I'm here, I might as well have a look at the bottom half of the universe. They formed a huge and obvious cross, which I decided, wrongly, must be the southern cross that half the southern hemisphere's countries stuck on their flags. (The actual cross, it turns out, is a tiny thing that was interesting to 18th century navigators but not obvious enough for tourists.)
When it was light, I walked up George St. and through one of its malls. Flip-flop vending machines, self-serve sushi restaurants, and "Massage" signs pointing down dirty hallways. On the sidewalk, two ibises stalked back and forth by a garbage bin. Thanks to the internet, I know that these are Australian white ibises, and that they lived in the swamps until the 70s, when, as though apprehending suddenly that the swamp kind of sucked, they left en masse for the disco music and colour televisions of the city.
They hang out in parks in great gangs, shaking down pigeons and nicking sandwiches. Ancient Egyptians associated ibises with wisdom and magic. And they are mysterious birds. They move calmly, probe for invisible things in the ground with long delicate bills, pause at random moments as though struck by profound thoughts, meditate in odd postures like yogis. Then someone drops a french fry and they go bananas. The Egyptians perhaps never saw this side of them, French fries being unknown. It's odd to see new species moving suddenly into cities in large numbers. You wonder what might be next. Whether the city parks of the future will be overrun with buzzards and monkey-eating eagles and cassowaries.
Hyde Park is the start of parks and gardens that extend out to the harbour. Its Anzac Memorial is the largest and oddest WWI memorial I can think of, in that it's a) modernist or Art Deco or something, and b) pink. It houses a flame, a bronze sculpture, signs pleading with visitors to not skateboard, four lists of battles -- three of them famous ones, one of them actions from the little Pacific theatre, where the Anzacs fought Germany over New Guinea and other colonies, basically because they were the nearest Germans to fight with.
It also has one of Sydney's many strange fountains, with gods and heroes of classical myth having water spewed at them from the mouths and noses of various animals. Built in the 1920s, it's a strange gasp of the classical tradition in a strange place, and isn't made any less odd by being brown. A few blocks away is the Porcellino, a copy of a copy of an ancient sculpture of the Calydonian Boar. Or, if you haven't taken the trouble to look into it, it's a bronze pig slobbering into a little pool. A sign says that rubbing the snout is good luck, and the snout has been duly polished to a bright sheen.
The opera house seemed like it had to be disappointing, but is actually stupendous. Moderately strange things were going on in the lower level by the harbour. A man waddled from a 'Zoomobile' van into a side door with something like a bucket of cockatoos in one hand and a cage stuffed with brown fur in the other. Next to that was a Veuve Clicquot pop up bar, where blonde women who looked sick with malnutrition and fake-tanner poisoning were offering $29 flutes of champagne to jean-shorted tourists at ten in the morning.
George Street on Saturday is crowded like a subway car. You're swept past beggars with cardboard signs there's no time to read, sidewalk muralists, dueling buskers -- a singer-songwriter battles an accordion player while someone offering public drum lessons waits to take on the victor. In an arcade, a chess busker in a silly hat plays six or eight simultaneous matches. A row of imposing bank buildings now tenanted by luxury stores -- banks now have better ways to establish their creditworthiness, and have sold on the prestige to retailers who need a setting that will persuade people to pay $1000 for a handbag. Wedding parties in the parks try to take pictures without too many tourists or ibises in them. The homeless collect in shaded, hidden places. A lot of people are wearing yellow and gold. I think for a while that it must be leftover patriotism from Australia Day, which was a few days ago, but it turns out that Australia's just won soccer's Asian Cup.
The best of the tourist sites is the Hyde Park prisoner barracks, where transported convicts were once warehoused, and the most interesting part of that is the 1828 census of prisoners it displays. It's a list of short men in their 20s convicted of minor property crimes. A number of them stole pigs. How do you steal a pig? I mean, logistically. How do you move it? Where do you conceal it? How do you fence it? Or is this why so many pig thieves were caught? The saddest in the list of tiny crimes is that of the man transported for stealing "slops", though perhaps it was just groundwork for a grander pig heist.
There aren't many cities with a curiouser collection of reasons for existence: Loss of the American colonies as a dumping ground for convicts, the insanity of 18th and 19th century British penalties for property crime, smallpox, geostrategy, and the basic human drive to steal pigs.
Chats with passport control officers: An ongoing series
- What's a methodologist?
- Like, biostatistics.
- Oh, yeah? You any good?
- Not really.
- OK. Enjoy your little trip.
I was up at 4am on the first morning here. Moving slowly westward through the time zones is almost as magical as going from winter to summer. You wake up naturally and can yawn and drink coffee for three hours before even beginning to feel like there are other things you should be doing. Dawn comes, and you tsk at the lazy city that hasn't even opened its cafes yet. While it was still dark, I sat out on the little balcony and looked at the southern stars: Thinking, I'm here, I might as well have a look at the bottom half of the universe. They formed a huge and obvious cross, which I decided, wrongly, must be the southern cross that half the southern hemisphere's countries stuck on their flags. (The actual cross, it turns out, is a tiny thing that was interesting to 18th century navigators but not obvious enough for tourists.)
When it was light, I walked up George St. and through one of its malls. Flip-flop vending machines, self-serve sushi restaurants, and "Massage" signs pointing down dirty hallways. On the sidewalk, two ibises stalked back and forth by a garbage bin. Thanks to the internet, I know that these are Australian white ibises, and that they lived in the swamps until the 70s, when, as though apprehending suddenly that the swamp kind of sucked, they left en masse for the disco music and colour televisions of the city.
They hang out in parks in great gangs, shaking down pigeons and nicking sandwiches. Ancient Egyptians associated ibises with wisdom and magic. And they are mysterious birds. They move calmly, probe for invisible things in the ground with long delicate bills, pause at random moments as though struck by profound thoughts, meditate in odd postures like yogis. Then someone drops a french fry and they go bananas. The Egyptians perhaps never saw this side of them, French fries being unknown. It's odd to see new species moving suddenly into cities in large numbers. You wonder what might be next. Whether the city parks of the future will be overrun with buzzards and monkey-eating eagles and cassowaries.
Hyde Park is the start of parks and gardens that extend out to the harbour. Its Anzac Memorial is the largest and oddest WWI memorial I can think of, in that it's a) modernist or Art Deco or something, and b) pink. It houses a flame, a bronze sculpture, signs pleading with visitors to not skateboard, four lists of battles -- three of them famous ones, one of them actions from the little Pacific theatre, where the Anzacs fought Germany over New Guinea and other colonies, basically because they were the nearest Germans to fight with.
It also has one of Sydney's many strange fountains, with gods and heroes of classical myth having water spewed at them from the mouths and noses of various animals. Built in the 1920s, it's a strange gasp of the classical tradition in a strange place, and isn't made any less odd by being brown. A few blocks away is the Porcellino, a copy of a copy of an ancient sculpture of the Calydonian Boar. Or, if you haven't taken the trouble to look into it, it's a bronze pig slobbering into a little pool. A sign says that rubbing the snout is good luck, and the snout has been duly polished to a bright sheen.
The opera house seemed like it had to be disappointing, but is actually stupendous. Moderately strange things were going on in the lower level by the harbour. A man waddled from a 'Zoomobile' van into a side door with something like a bucket of cockatoos in one hand and a cage stuffed with brown fur in the other. Next to that was a Veuve Clicquot pop up bar, where blonde women who looked sick with malnutrition and fake-tanner poisoning were offering $29 flutes of champagne to jean-shorted tourists at ten in the morning.
George Street on Saturday is crowded like a subway car. You're swept past beggars with cardboard signs there's no time to read, sidewalk muralists, dueling buskers -- a singer-songwriter battles an accordion player while someone offering public drum lessons waits to take on the victor. In an arcade, a chess busker in a silly hat plays six or eight simultaneous matches. A row of imposing bank buildings now tenanted by luxury stores -- banks now have better ways to establish their creditworthiness, and have sold on the prestige to retailers who need a setting that will persuade people to pay $1000 for a handbag. Wedding parties in the parks try to take pictures without too many tourists or ibises in them. The homeless collect in shaded, hidden places. A lot of people are wearing yellow and gold. I think for a while that it must be leftover patriotism from Australia Day, which was a few days ago, but it turns out that Australia's just won soccer's Asian Cup.
The best of the tourist sites is the Hyde Park prisoner barracks, where transported convicts were once warehoused, and the most interesting part of that is the 1828 census of prisoners it displays. It's a list of short men in their 20s convicted of minor property crimes. A number of them stole pigs. How do you steal a pig? I mean, logistically. How do you move it? Where do you conceal it? How do you fence it? Or is this why so many pig thieves were caught? The saddest in the list of tiny crimes is that of the man transported for stealing "slops", though perhaps it was just groundwork for a grander pig heist.
There aren't many cities with a curiouser collection of reasons for existence: Loss of the American colonies as a dumping ground for convicts, the insanity of 18th and 19th century British penalties for property crime, smallpox, geostrategy, and the basic human drive to steal pigs.
Chats with passport control officers: An ongoing series
- What's a methodologist?
- Like, biostatistics.
- Oh, yeah? You any good?
- Not really.
- OK. Enjoy your little trip.
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| Everyone gets a legal wig for Christmas this year. No arguments. |
