We spent New Year's Eve with a tableful of relatives and friends in an Indian restaurant about a half-hour walk from the harbour, then trudged down with the throng to see the fireworks, celebrating this year the 75th anniversary of Sydney's famous harbour bridge, nicknamed "the coathanger." The display from the bridge in these photos was bookended by identical, huge displays over the harbour above the Opera House on one side of the bridge and Darling Harbour on the other. There was much merry-making and general drunkeness, followed by a mad rush to the trains to get home. The threatened rain showers kept away, and it was a balmy 20-something for the 20-somethings who seemed to be the majority of the crowd. Estimates said that a million people watched the show; I always knew I was one in a million.
Happy New Year!

Notes about our Surry Hills terrace, aka Campsite 4 (the fourth temporary place we've occupied since leaving our farm in Langley in mid-August). We're at number 31 -- the beige one -- on Samuel Street, a single block narrow roadway in the Surry Hills neighbourhood immediately adjoining the south end of the Sydney CBD. The highrises of the city dominate the skyline from the top of the street. Surry Hills is the same vintage, more or less, as the much more famous Rocks district in the shadow of the Harbour Bridge near Circular Quay and the Opera House; like the Rocks, it was a slum for much of the 19th-20th centuries (although it didn't have the outbreaks of bubonic plague that made the Rocks so notorious), a backwater of poverty just as ripe as a December mango for urban renewal. Whereas the Rocks was largely restored and converted into a tourist area (like Gastown, e.g.), Surry Hills had random blocks demolished and replaced by a really ugly mix of brick and concrete buildings, some residential, others commercial or institutional.

So it doesn't really work as a neighbourhood compared with most other old Sydney districts: shops like greengrocers and bakeries are all but non-existent, there are dozens of take-aways for by-the-slice pizza, lots of pubs and, along Oxford Street a few blocks away, the city's sleaze strip of fetish shops and other weird businesses thumps and gyrates (plus, it must be noted, the best discount art supply store in Sydney!). So if someone offers you a sublet or rental in Surry Hills and you want a nice middle-class vacation with walking access to Sydney's beautiful harbour, think twice!

Streets like this one are a mix of fixed-up terraces and others awaiting the arrival of the fixer-uppers. Old hobo guys sit in some of the doorways on nearby streets and while away their days. Where they go at night is a mystery to me, but perhaps they doss down at charity hostels and run-down rooming houses nearby. (You don't see homeless people, or binners with shopping carts, like you do in Vancouver. There might be one or two truly homeless characters sleeping on the pavement near Central Station, a 10-minute walk away, but that's all you see in the entire city other than a few panhandlers, and there isn't the desperate poverty or obvious mental illness that we witnessed when we lived from August-November in the South Granville area at Campsite 1.)



Ours is a pretty standard terrace, 10 feet wide by about 50 feet deep on the main floor, 30 feet deep on the 2nd. It's like Dickensian London in the sub-tropics. The idea of how working families lived, mostly Irish with mobs of children, the wife trying to cook over a coal fire in the summer heat, the dunny out the back next to the washing line, the children playing on the ten-metre wide street among the horse cobbles, husbands coming home totalled from the pub on Friday nights yadda yadda, is pretty hard to ignore as we enjoy the indoor plumbing, satellite internet and relatively clean air of 2006.

A street like ours in Surry Hills was the setting of two 1940's Ruth Park novels, The Harp in the South and Poor Man's Orange, of Irish families struggling in the slums, which were made into television series. I read the latter about 15 years ago, and later saw its series. It was rather gritty, people trying to cope and people trying to get out, part of the genre in which Catherine Cookson stories fit.

" ... I can see by this line that Santa's going to bring you everything you've asked for .... "
Later that day:



A "faux-hawk" in a Newtown restaurant.

Rain on Oxford Street, Darlinghurst, the other day. It stopped after 15 minutes or so.

Not the Salvos' band, although they bear a passing resemblance. This is the NSW Railway band, taking a break between playing carols outside Central Station, Sydney.

 

A tiny hipped-roof cottage in Leichhardt, burning electricity with seasonal abandon. Inner Sydney has few such displays, and this was the only house for blocks that had any lights on it at all. But apparently, once you get out into the western subs, lots of people have lights on their houses. The "westies," as they're called, are the butt of many jokes, a kind of suburban version of Trailer Park Boys. For example, if you drink VB (Victoria Bitter), a cheap beer like what Lucky Lager used to be in Vancouver, you might be branded a westie.
Nearly the entire country will down tools this weekend and go on summer hols, with little reopening until some point after New Year's. But I'm unsure whether there are the mega-after Christmas sales -- whether the stores will be dumping their stock on Boxing Day [note from Dec. 26: the stores were so mobbed that one, Grace Brothers, had to close its doors and only allow in as many people as left].

 

 

*as you might deduce, a hoon is a fast driver

 

No, we haven't gone completely nuts. But we did go to a climbing gym with Sarah Jane, who is a rock-climbing enthusiast, and each scaled a 10-metre wall a couple of times, and practised belaying, to get a better understanding of how she spends her time (and how safe it is .... ).


Above: a couple of photos from Enmore, which adjoins Newtown and is still edgy and feral.

Above: typical Sydney-area local post office, and kittycorner across the street (below) a typical postwar deco Aussie hotel/pub.


Trafalgar Terrace, the rowhouses below, are sort of low-end but typical of the Inner West. There are actually 16 of them in the terrace. One, which is fairly well fixed up, is on the market for $515K Australian -- subtract 10 % for the Canadian equivalent. They're actually two levels, as the land drops away sharply behind them, and very narrow, with dark interior rooms but a deep back yard.

Further to the comment earlier about Aussies and their antipathy for/rivalry with the pommy bastards, the sign above is in the window of the Tab shops, of which there is one on every shopping street for all kinds of betting or punting, including horses, dogs, you name it. The Ashes is the cricket series between Australia and England; as reflected in a column in the Sydney paper on the weekend, there were two events that had to be avenged: Gallipoli in 1915 (with Winston Churchill specifically singled out for hatred) and the "Body Line Bowling" in the early 1930s by the English team. In the legend, the aristocratic English team captain was mortally offended by being called a bastard by a member of the Australian team, and stormed into the Australian dressing room to demand an apology. The Australian captain, turning to his mates, asked: "Okay, which one of you bastards called this bastard a bastard?"
Australia is ahead 2 games to zero, or is it 3 to 1?

Australians all let us rejoice
For we are young and free
We've golden soil and wealth for toil,
Our home is girt by sea:
Our land abounds in nature's gifts
Of beauty rich and rare,
In history's page let every stage
Advance Australia fair,
In joyful strains then let us sing
Advance Australia fair.

Beneath our radiant Southern Cross,
 We'll toil with hearts and hands,
To make this Commonwealth of ours
Renowned of all the lands,
For those who've come across the seas
We've boundless plains to share,
With courage let us all combine
To advance Australia fair.
In joyful strains then let us sing,
Advance Australia fair.

(Of further interest, he noted that the lyrics of the New Zealand national anthem fitted perfectly into "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.")
To hear the proper melody, go to http://www.imagesaustralia.com/australiannationalanthem.htm

This puts me in mind of an essay by John Updike in the NY Review of Books (Nov 30/06), in which he reviews a photographic exhibition of the aftermath of Katrina -- photos that invade the abandoned homes of flood victims. The exhibition reflects on "two of the tenets of Susan Sontag's book of essays On Photography: 'There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera,' and 'the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.' From this second observation she argued that photography as an art is intrinsically surreal, presenting us with reality not as filtered through the humanity of a painter or wordsmith but as captured by an emotionless, thoughtless mechanism, in a moment of time that instantly begins to recede."
In these terms, did I invade the private space of people in a public place? Or is everyone fair game?
Apropos of this, an article in the Sydney Morning Herald described how a well-known photographer named Rex Dupain, who was working on a book called The Colour of Bondi "and wanted to capture the authentic look of the beach by photographing people who were relaxed and unaware they were being snapped," had been questioned by lifeguards and police, who briefly confiscated his camera. "They regard anyone with a camera as a potential pervert," he said. "We sit at home and watch the close-up of people's lives on disturbing television reality shows but someone taking pictures at the beach is seen as a threat Our days as a free society are completely over."

Everybody in Vancouver knows about the thousands of crows that fly from the west side out to Burnaby at dusk every day. In northern Sydney, it's fruit bats aka flying foxes that leave the city by the thousands and fly northward every evening to roosts near Hornsby. (Above: a sketch from 2001 of fruit bat and palm tree, which was going to be, and may be one day, a woodcut).
Note to Stephanie about language:  You'd find that a lot of Australianisms are common to lower-class Brits -- e.g. prat. And the same for spellings -- almost no z's, e.g. in realise. Thus, it is surprising the disdain Australians feel for the poms, particularly during the multi-week cricket series called the Ashes, which is going on now and dominating most conversations.

Borrowed Sarah Jane's Celica and drove out to the Blueys [the Blue Mountains west of Sydney] for the day, looking for towns where we might want to settle. Cheap prices, mountain air, and all kinds of other advantages that make congested, hot Sydney seem like a second choice -- and, family/cultural events in the city only 2 hours away by train. The City Rail network, with trains about every half hour, extends all the way.



For example, a cottage on a street about 2 blocks from the Katoomba main shopping street, with a block of land extending about 100 metres behind it. Needs work. Cheap. Hmmm .... stay tuned.
Made the obligatory stop at Govett's Leap near Blackheath, which had had a bushfire go through it less than a month ago.


The fire jumped right over the valley, scorching all the trees on the mountain tops.


This photo is from the same spot. All the gums that were scorched will recover and sprout new leaves within 6-8 months or so. One drought-related curiosity that anyone will notice who's been there is that Govett's Leap itself -- the small waterfall that emerged from a cleft in the rockface -- has dried up.

We went to Newtown to meet Sarah Jane for dinner -- she teaches at Sydney Uni nearby, and lives in another Inner West suburb called Annandale. Newtown was always a rather feral area, with lots of poverty, piercings, etc., but like most of inner Sydney has gentrified to a certain degree. Along King Street, which runs from near the CBD outward and eventually becomes the old Princes Highway, there are hundreds of restaurants and shops of all descriptions, from used book and CD places to, well, everything the young and urban need. Like most old Sydney streets, King curves its way through the landscape -- there was never a formal grid -- and is bordered by a warren of little streets with terrace houses and cottages for the workers of 150 years ago.
We settled on the Thai place above, a hole in the street wall (I stood in the road to take the picture). So, dinner in Newtown, which is generally cheaper than elsewhere in Sydney, went like this: after we ordered, I walked a block down the street to the bottle shop attached to the local pub, found a McGuigan's merlot for about $11, brought it back and handed it to the waitress, who had just brought the food to the table. She uncorked it and brought 3 glasses. We ate, drank the wine and then paid the bill of $21.30, which we rounded up to $23, I think. You don't tip, or at least not much more than a few dollars, in Sydney restaurants, and all the prices are tax-included. So it was really cheap.
 The original shock you feel with menu prices in more posh places is mitigated hugely by the fact that taxes aren't added after, that you don't tip more than a few dollars (and never tip in the lunch counter/milk bar sort of place), and that the Aussie dollar is worth about 10 % less than the Canadian one.

A shop near the Rocks in Sydney. The reference is to the acute banana shortage caused by a recent cyclone that tore through Queensland.

Bark on a gum tree in Kirribilli, just across the harbour from the Sydney Opera House. We flew across the continent from Singapore and, other than the colours of the landscape (red) this could have been it.

Jasper, my in-laws' cockatiel. Sarah Jane, our daughter, found him in a bush about 6 years ago. He was obviously a lost domesticated bird -- she put out her hand and he jumped onto it. Because he repeatedly said, "Hello Jasper," he was so named. He quickly learned to mimic the whistle my niece used to call the cats for food, and seemed to enjoy annoying them. Also on his repertoire: car alarms.