30 Days in Sydney (5 page)
Authors: Peter Carey
The thing about going back, said Kelvin, is that it can be more dangerous than going forward. It's easier to maintain control of your boat if you are not beam on to the weather and the seas. People died going back to Eden . . .
This place, just off Gabo Island, is famous for bad weather.
Famous for shipwrecks.
There has been enormous loss of life in these seas, said Lester. The first time Bass came round the cape in his whaleboat he was trapped here. He went ashore for nine days. Also, if you want to think about it, Peter, this water may be responsible for the settlement of Sydney because when Captain Cook came across this way from New Zealand he poked his nose into Bass Strait and saw one of these gales and he headed north and discovered Sydney.
He might have discovered the Strait.
He might have discovered Melbourne, said Lester. Where the soil is actually much better.
By the time five o'clock came it was a shitfight. On the radio you could hear that people were dying. Lew Carter was the voice on the radio-relay ship. He was the hero. He was so cool. He would say to someone whose boat was sinking, could you hold there please while I take this other call and I'll come back to you as soon as I can. He never lost it.
I was firmly of the opinion, says Lester, that we should turn around. I wanted to get out of there.
I wanted to hang on a bit, said Kelvin. You see, we pulled out of the race the year before and now I know we quit too easily. That time we had big seas but we also had the headsail jammed in its track. It was ripped to shreds and we couldn't get it down and we couldn't get a new sail up. Now, there were two fellows up that mast and they both said it was jammed in the foil of the forestay, and I never thought to doubt them. But when we got back into Eden one of the blokes went to the bow and gave the sail a bit of a tug, and
WHOOSH
the remnants fell right down to the deck.
See, Peter, there's a window there when you make these decisions. Fear is rampant and it seems the logical thing to turn around but you have to push a bit further than that to get there.
But then, a minute later, Kelvin seemed to contradict himself. I remember, he said thoughtfully, when Gordon, our skipper, finally asked the crew's opinion. He and I were both looking out the long porthole, and he saw the same thing I did. This monster wave hit us WHACK. It was like being slapped by God. It was like being hit by a rock. The sea was showing us what it could do and it was prepared to show you more if you were not persuaded.
But Kelvin voted to go on.
We would have been all right.
We would have been fine, agreed Lester, in twenty-twenty hindsight. Now, having seen the satellite streaming video, I think it would have been better to go on. We probably put ourselves at greater risk by turning round. We had waves coming from behind us rather than taking them on the quarter. But I'm here. I feel no regret, believe me.
Kelvin said, I wasn't afraid until I got off the boat and saw the seas on TV in Eden. Janet came into the room and she said my jaw was wide open. Jesus, I could have been killed.
I HAD BEEN AT home in New York on the eve of the millennium celebrations and at seven forty-five on that Friday morning, while my wife and sons were still sleeping, I ran quietly down the stairs to witness my other home enter the year 2000.
Distracted by a man in the street who was angrily eviscerating our household garbage, I almost missed it, but at eight o'clock New York time I finally turned to NBC where I saw the opera house, the harbour bridge. Then Sydney passed into the next century and the bridge suddenly exploded.
Few cities in the turning globe would equal that display at millennium's end, and yet I, the sentimental expatriate, was less than enchanted and my emotion suddenly cooled. I'd seen this trick before. These fireworks were very similar to the display at our bicentenary in 1988. Then too the bridge grew green and fiery hair. OH WHAT A PARTY the
Sydney Morning Herald
had written then, and it had been true, the whole town was pissed. We had a classic Sydney rort and we disgraced ourselves with our total forgetfulness of what exactly it was that had occurred in this sandstone basin just two centuries before.
In the heat of our bicentennial celebration, the 50,000 years that had preceded the arrival of the First Fleet somehow slipped our minds. All right, it's a white-settler culture. It's what you might have expected, but that does not explain why we forgot the white people too, or most of them. In 1988 we commemorated the soldiers, but the men and women beneath the decks just somehow were overlooked in all the excitement. The twin forces of our history, those two cruel vectors which shape us to this very day, had been forgotten and what we celebrated instead was some imperial and bureaucratic past towards which we felt neither affection nor connection.
Twelve years later I stared balefully at the fiery bridge but as the smoke cleared I spotted an unexpected sign. Just a little to the left of the northern pylon, just near the place where my dare-devil friend G. had risen above the level of the roadway as he crawled upwards, like a worm in an apple,
inside
the hollow boxed girders of the bridge's arch, just there, a three-foot-high word was written in an illuminated copperplate:
Eternity
Seeing this, all my spleen was completely washed away, and I was smiling, insanely proud and happy at this secret message from my home, happier still because no one in New York, no one but a Sydneysider, could hope to crack this code, now beamed through space like a message from Tralfamador. What fucked-up Irish things it finally meant to me, I will struggle with later, but I cannot even begin to imagine what it might mean to a New Yorker.
An Aussie brandname? Something to do with time? Something to do with the millennium? Something, perhaps, to do with those 50,000 years of culture that this city is built on top of? But although 50,000 years is a very long time, it is not an eternity, and it is not why the people of Sydney love this word, or why the artist Martin Sharp has spent a lifetime painting and repainting it.
Martin is famous in Sydney, and like most painters his reputation is more local than international. If you live in Sydney you know he is obsessed with a 1930s funfair (Luna Park), a strange campy singer (Tiny Tim) and a word (Eternity). But if you are from somewhere else it may mean something that Martin Sharp wrote the lyrics for 'Tales of Brave Ulysses' which he gave to Eric Clapton in a pub one afternoon.
The secret of Eternity does not belong to Martin but he has been one of its custodians and I was determined to talk to him about it.
Kelvin groaned when he heard what I planned to do.
Mate, you're making a big mistake talking to all these men. You're ignoring the women. Listening to you, it's as if they don't exist.
I thought this was pretty rich, coming from a guy who calls his female crew members 'slotted personnel'.
My novels are filled with women, I said.
But no one reads novels, Peter. The world has changed, in case you haven't noticed.
Everyone is reading
Vogue
and
Elle?
You're going to take a lot of shit for this, he said, and don't forget I warned you.
This exasperating argument continued and it was two hours before I was able to visit Martin. I found him, at midday, wandering, a little shakily, around his dusty inheritance, his mansion. His assistant had not yet arrived and he was trying to 'organise' a cup of tea. The man who designed Cream's album covers for
Wheels of Fire
and
Disraeli Gears
looked all of sixty when I saw him, hungover, with his handsome face unshaved, and creased with a classic smoker's skin. But I am of an age myself, and if I noticed the creases, I noted with envy that his hair, though greying, was thick and strong.
I first saw Eternity when I was a kid, he told me as he rolled his second cigarette. I came out of my house and discovered this chalk calligraphy on the footpath. No one ever wrote anything on the streets in those days. I thought, what's
that?
I didn't think about what it meant. I didn't analyse it. It was just beautiful and mysterious.
For years and years no one knew who wrote this word, said Martin. It would just spring up overnight. We now know the writer's name was Arthur Stace. We know he was a very little bloke, just five foot three inches tall, with wispy white hair and he went off to the First World War as a stretcher-bearer. Later he was a 'cockatoo', a look-out for his sisters who ran a brothel. Then he became an alcoholic. By the 1930s, when he walked into a church in Pyrmont, he was drinking methylated spirits.
The church had a sign offering rock cakes and tea for the down and out.
Well, Arthur went in for the cakes but he found himself kneeling down and joining in the prayers. That is how he gave up the grog and got 'saved' but the God-given task of his life would be granted to him at another church, the Baptist Tabernacle on Burton Street in Darlinghurst.
On the day Arthur came into the Tabernacle the Reverend John Ridley had chosen Isaiah 57:15 as his text. For thus sayeth the high and lofty One who inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.
Eternity, the preacher said, I would like to shout the word Eternity through the streets of Sydney.
And that was it, said Martin. Arthur's brain just went BANG. He staggered out of the church in tears. In the street he reached in his pocket and there he found a piece of chalk. Who knows how it got there? He knelt, and wrote Eternity on the footpath.
According to the story, he could hardly write his own name until this moment, but now he found his hand forming this perfect copperplate. That was sign enough. And from then on he would go wherever he felt God call him. He wrote his message as much as fifty times a day; in Martin Place, in Parramatta, all over Sydney people would come out on to their street and there it would be: Eternity. Arthur didn't like the concrete footpaths because the chalk did not show up so well. His favourite place was Kings Cross where the pavements were black.
Actually, God did not always send Arthur to write on the footpaths. Once, for instance, He instructed him to write Eternity inside the bell at the GPO although, Martin Sharp told me, the dark forces may have tried to rub it out since then. Of course he didn't have permission. Arthur always felt he had permission 'from a higher force'.
I didn't have anything directly to do with that word appearing on the bridge, said Martin, but I have kept it alive; I suppose you could say that I have continued Arthur's work. The paintings you know, but I have also just finished a tapestry of Eternity for the library in Sydney. I'm pleased Arthur's work is finally in a library. He was our greatest writer. He said it all, in just one word. Of course he would be amazed to find himself in a library. And imagine, Peter, imagine what he would have felt, on that first day in Darlinghurst, to think that this copperplate he was miraculously forming on the footpath would not only be famous in the streets of Sydney but beamed out into space and sent all around the world.
I stayed with Martin talking for a long time, but we said no more about Arthur Stace. So it was not until much later that night, sleepless above Kelvin's garage, that I attempted to pin down the appeal of his message, not to Martin whose fascination with the word seems both spiritual and hermetic, but to the less mystical more utilitarian people of Sydney.
You might think this no great puzzle. But it is a puzzle - we generally do not like religion in this town, are hostile to
God-botherers
and
wowsers
and
bible-bashers
. We could not like Arthur because he was 'saved', hell no! We like him because he was a cockatoo outside the brothel, because he was drunk, a ratbag, an outcast. He was his own man, a slave to no one on this earth.
Thus, quietly reflecting on what might be the idiosyncratic, very local nature of our feelings for Eternity, I began to follow the vein back to its source until, like someone who dreams the same bad dream each night, 200 years just vanished like sand between my fingers and I was seeing Arthur Stace as one more poor wretch transported to Botany Bay.
And what might Eternity mean in such a place of punishment?
Eternity! O, dread and dire word, wrote James Joyce in that famous hellfire sermon in A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Eternity! What mind of man can understand it?
It is a terrifying exposition of hell and I tried to escape it, to find some more pleasant place for my mind to rest. Typically I imagined the ocean but this Australian ocean was no escape. It was endless, relentless, merciless, and it washed against the sandstone cliffs out at the end of Old South Head Road. I thought of helicopters, cars driven off the cliff beside the British Council. And of course Joyce's sermon is filled, if not with sandstone, then with sand; as he tries to compute eternity he evokes the horror of a mountain of that sand, a million miles high, reaching from the earth to the farthest heavens, and a million miles broad.
Eternity Eternity Eternity.
In Woollahra at two am, looking out across Kelvinator's dirty swimming pool, I was seized by a sort of existential terror which it took a half bottle of Laphroaig to assuage.
WHEN I FIRST CAME to live in Sydney I daily drove from Wharf Road to North Sydney in my Jensen Healey. I careened across the harbour bridge at reckless speed, hood down, hair whipping my face. From May 1974 until January 1975, the bridge was no more than a road to me. But then, without warning, it became a source of terror.
One muggy January morning I drove to work as normal. That night I found I could not return across the bridge, although return I must for I was already in the middle of the centre roadway with trucks to left and right of me and all that great weight of dizzy steel above my head. It was seven o'clock and the traffic heading south was fast and relentless. And here some alien panic took me, rushing through me in a great hot wave, chemical terror, administered direct into my blood. Confused, I braked, accelerated, closed my eyes, drove in a jerky fright, certain that I would cross the centre line and hit a truck. I was unbearably giddy, irrationally terrified of the fall to the water, but also the vertiginous height of the arch above me.
When I finally descended to the Cahill Expressway I was a mess of sweat and shame, but I had little idea of what had happened to me. I certainly did not guess that a second bridge, a minuscule replica of the first, had been formed inside my brain and there it locked fast in place never to be undone, a fast and easy pathway to a previously inaccessible shore of panic.
Why this occurred does not really matter, although it was the opinion of the New York psychologist Arthur Fensterheim that the root cause was, as is so often the case he said, nothing more profound than too much coffee.
When, twenty-five years after this incident, I returned home with the martial-arts team, I had conveniently forgotten that the bridge was my Berlin Wall and that I would not drive myself across it to visit Jack Ledoux. Yet on the night I drank my half bottle of Laphroaig, I dreamed that I climbed the bridge, that I conquered it at last.
In my dream I leap halfway up the Cyclone security fence around the southern pylon at Dawes Point, named for Lieutenant Dawes who had tried to learn the language (
Why are the black men angry?).
For a moment I cling spread-eagled on the wire, and then I swiftly pull myself up to the top. As in life, the security lights in my dream are quartz white. They wash across the face of the pylons, magnets for countless insects which now rise in dense clouds in the warm night air. The insects in turn attract gulls which spiral above my head, their white plumage shining in the dark. I feel, as I cleverly straddle the razor wire, as I drop lightly to the enclosed square of long dew-wet grass, that all of Sydney can see me. But it is three in the morning and the legal part of Sydney is sound asleep and the end of the lower arch, a great open box girder, waits for me as enticing as a rabbit hole in a child's story and I scurry on hands and knees from brightness into the safety of the dark.
I am inside the bottom arch of the bridge. I can stand upright. I am laughing, elated, but my heart is also beating fast and I wait a moment to calm down, short intakes, long exhalations, just as Dr Fensterheim taught me.
I need a torch and I have one, a heavy long job such as you buy, in the US anyway, from those mail-order catalogues containing instructions on garrotting and knife-fighting and other useful arts.
All in all, says the voice, that's a useful object.
In my dream I recognise him immediately - the narrator from
The Third Policeman
, the person who begins his narrative thus: Not everybody knows how I killed old Phillip Mathers, smashing his jaw in with my spade; but first it is better to speak of my friendship with John Divney because it was he who first knocked old Mathers down by giving him a great blow in the neck with a special bicycle-pump which he manufactured himself out of a hollow iron bar.
In short, a character you would be wise to be very careful of.
I make some non-committal response to his observation, but at the same time I am confused as to whether he means to say that the torch is 'useful' as a weapon and if I am being challenged to use it against him. I shine the light inside the bridge as if I make this journey every day. I find my view impeded, ten feet in, by a steel plate.
Ah, says my invisible companion, but there is a dirty great hole in the middle of it.
Indeed there is, and soon I am crawling through it. And then what do I find? Why, six feet ahead, there is a second metal plate, a second hole. So this is how it is going to be. My passage to the apex will be through a series of rooms, of steel boxes of gradually diminishing size. The height of these boxes is around seven feet when I set out but soon enough I need to stoop to accommodate myself to the engineer's will. This might be expected to produce resistance, then claustrophobia, but although it is increasingly clammy and hot and there is a musty raggy smell which reminds me of old Bertie Booker who cleaned cars in my father's GM dealership, the containment is unexpectedly comforting. I am the worm in the bridge's spine, the enemy it cannot see. I rise inside the arch unseen by all the world.
If you think to escape the terror, says the voice, then you are seriously mistaken.
I turn sharply towards him and knock my head so hard I drop the torch. It lands with a dreadful clatter but, thank God, is prevented from rolling far by the steel plate.
As I continue, the box beam narrows and I know I previously claimed that I had been comforted by the containment, but as I now come level with the roadway and feel the merciless roar of traffic, I drink deep on a whole cocktail of anxieties. Claustrophobia and vertigo flutter like possibilities around the penumbra of my consciousness. But I do not give in. My body is shaken by the traffic, nothing more.
I had never previously noticed quite how much the arches of the bridge slim as they reach the apex, but the bridge is a structure I have spent a lot of time avoiding. I never knew, for instance, that it is constructed as a mighty hinge, or two hinges bolted together at the apex. I certainly did not know that Jack Ledoux himself had passed along this very route.
I leave the roadway well beneath me and, if it is hotter inside the beam now, it is also quieter. As I approach the apex of the lower arch the white light of my murderous torch is well ahead of me, seeking the two large wing nuts I know to expect above my head. And there they are, one and a half inches in diameter, but fragrant with WD-40 and as effortlessly turned as spinning tops.
Ah, this next bit will test you, boyo.
But I easily push the steel trapdoor aside and lift my eager face into the sky.
The air tastes of rock oysters and I watch with a kind of ecstasy as a great train of white cloud scuds across the heavens.
You are thinking of Van Gogh, the narrator offers. It is
Starry Night
you're seeing.
I admit this is so.
There's madness, he says, that's insanity for you.
I am now at the apex of the lower arch and to reach the upper arch I must climb this stairway which is but three feet from my hand. Foolishly I clamber on to the wide flat section of the arch. I try not to look at anything but the stairway which has been built by some cruel surrealist rising upwards in the middle of the wind.
Now, I cannot deny it, I am afraid. I tell myself it is just a dream and I grasp the two-foot-wide rungs of the ladder and lift my now leaden sneakers up through the nor'-easterly, ascending through three landings to the top arch of the bridge, and there I find my old friend Panic has been waiting for me all the time.
It is just a dream, but now I am whimpering like a child, shutting my eyes, lowering myself flat on to the slippery dew-wet bridge. I try to perform those long J-shaped breaths that Arthur Fensterheim taught me but I am pinned, like a live butterfly fluttering on a board of steel.
And there I stay, for how long I cannot say except that in my dream I fall asleep and dream, and in this dream within the dream I cunningly manage to create my own escape. Through this ruse I am able to actually stand, and stretch, and look down from the bridge, and look out across the small fortified island of Pinchgut. But no sooner have I stood than Flann O'Brien's man is pestering me once again.
Jesus help me, what's that?
I make no answer.
Might a man not ask a civil question? What's that flapping in the breeze down there? Answer me.
It must be Francis Morgan, I admitted.
Who in Christ's name is Francis Morgan?
Governor Phillip had him hung in chains until he rotted and fell into the sea.
And what's that blue plastic?
They're building a restaurant.
My God, that hanging chap would kill the appetite.
I gaze pointedly away from him, surveying first the Heads, the mighty incisors that protect the port of Sydney, then the ridges to the north where I can now see the headlights of a single car moving along Military Road, so called because it is the military highway to the batteries down which at Eastertide, with drums beating, colours flying, go the gallant guards of the city and colony.
The gallant guards of the city and colony. That's a quote.
In so saying he reveals that he can read my mind. It is from
A Traveller's Tale,
I confess.
From Manly to the Hawkesbury.
Is not that hanging fellow making you giddy?
But I cannot see the hanging man and I am not giddy in the least. The bridge, it seems, is finally conquered. Now Sydney can be really mine. Now I actually dare to look calmly down into the quay where I can hear the comforting squeak and groan of the big steel ferries protesting their moorings.
And there, sweeping above and behind the ferries, a single motor-cycle comes off the bridge and sweeps down the Cahill Expressway.
Down there is the birthplace of modern Australia, although you would not know it. The expressway is like a steel wall, cutting water off from earth, slicing like a knife across the moment of our birth. Further back, in the midst of all that very ordinary architecture, is the towering building at Australia Square, beneath which runs the Tank Stream, which was our nation's breast, at which our founding fathers and mothers, jailers and jailed, all drank side by side. Now, of course, the Tank Stream is buried, a sandstone drain which will take a week of phone calls to get access to and where, in the freshly disinfected air, cockroaches flee before your light.
Above my head the clouds are racing, but I am in a sort of ecstasy where everything means something and I am awash with the giddy thrilling feelings that must come to schizophrenics when all the secrets of eternity are suddenly laid bare.
Read the signs to me, my companion demands.
Staring down into the Central Business District, I see the street signs have begun to burn like glow-worms in the velvet night.
Phillip Street, I offer.
And who was that?
Our first governor, a naval officer.
Hunter Street?
After the foolish second governor, a naval officer.
King Street? Not the damn King of England?
No. Another naval officer.
Bligh Street. This cannot be the same bastard who drove his poor crew to mutiny?
Yes, the Colonial Office appointed him governor. He was recommended by Sir Joseph Banks in fact.
Why would you celebrate a tyrant with a street name?
Oh, we rose against him, I said.
Ah, at last some heroes. It takes great courage to go against a bastard like that. Were the rebels hung for it? What were the names of the martyrs? Which streets are theirs?
The leader was a Captain John Macarthur. The event was called the Rum Rebellion.
Macarthur? That is not a name I see. There is a lot of arse-licking: Kent and Bathurst and Goul-burn and Sussex and York and Pitt and George. But where is Macarthur?
Well, Macarthur is a complicated figure for us. He's a hard one to embrace. He was a Tory.
But did he get rid of the bastard Bligh or did he not? Was he not a brave man?
Yes, very brave, and headstrong, but he was in no way democratic. His notion of a parliament would be four cronies and himself in charge. The only convicts he had time for were those that worked as slaves for him. He lined his own pockets. He was an army officer but he used his privilege to get rich. He and his officer mates controlled the rum.
Ah, so a man who will not share a drink.
It was a monopoly the soldiers had for themselves. It was like being in charge of the mint. This was a place where a man would work for grog when he gave not a damn about the lash. If you earned twenty shillings you would be paid a pint of grog instead.
Wait a minute. Is this the same Macarthur who is called the father of the Australian wool industry?
The very same man.
And is wool not the business that made the colony feasible? Should you not acknowledge him in some way? A Tory, yes, but is he not worth more to you than Kent and Sussex? Should you not have a monument to him at least?
And then, in my dream, I peered down from the top arch of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and had the insight which would never leave me, not even in my waking hours. Asleep in my bed in Woollahra I saw the Central Business District as if for the first time. I saw how it held itself back from the edge of the beloved harbour as if it understood how vile and crooked it had always been. In a society which values the view above all else, here was the heart of the city, a blind place with no vistas, a dense knot of development and politics and business and law. This was Macarthur's monument. A physical expression of two centuries of Sydney's own brand of capitalism, the concrete symbol of an unhealthy antidemocratic alliance between business and those authorities which should have controlled it.
Staring in horror at this ugly thing that we had made, I heard a pitiless grinding noise, some infernal machine, some engine of gears and chains, grinding very, very slow.
Come on, come on, the voice called, you can't let down your mates.
Far beneath me I heard Kelvinator's garage roller door growling on its axis. It was six am in Woollahra. Time to drive to Bondi Beach to take our morning walk.