Authors: Peter Carey
30 Days in Sydney (7 page)
Now there were many steps, including a court case too complicated to go into here, that led to the moment when Macarthur wrote that letter which would open him to the charge of treason, to the moment when Governor Bligh was dragged out from under the bed where he had so ignobly fled the rebels, but his not unreasonable insistence on town planning played some part in his downfall.
For in his attempt to tidy up the mess which Sydney had become, he had given his most powerful adversary joint cause with the common people who were already in a panic lest the land they thought theirs should be taken away from them.
In the story of the so-called Rum Rebellion it is always Bligh who is the bad guy, and while we would never want another Captain Bligh we might at least allow that there is no one else in our history who had the balls to stand up against the opportunism and cronyism of the Rum Corps or those spiritual descendants who the libel laws forbid us to name.
The modern CBD is their living monument, a tribute to an élite which places very little value on the public good.
If there were not that opera house and that harbour just down the road you might accept that you were somewhere provincial and uninspired, but Sydney is not uninspired and on the edges of the CBD, on the rocks at Bennelong Point, you get some glimpse not only of what we were, but what we might yet become.
On this sunny April morning it was a great relief to escape the chill of the monorail, to walk briskly under the deep senseless shadows of the Cahill Expressway, and out on to the quay, down the number three wharf, and to board the Manly Ferry with just twenty seconds to spare.
Climbing to the top deck I find myself in a different world, one in which even the harbour bridge seems to me a thing of joy, its two hinges joining beneath a blinking red aviation light.
In a sea of dancing silver flashes the ferry pulls around that great pink platform on which the opera house stands. That any city would have this masterpiece is extraordinary, but in the city of the Rum Corps it is a miracle.
JACK LEDOUX HAD PROMISED that his friend Peter Myers would talk about Earth, and that was the only reason I came to Sydney University at six o'clock on a rainy autumn evening. I took a seat in a steep raked lecture theatre in the Faculty of Architecture. When Peter Myers appeared, I obediently opened my notebook and uncapped my pen. No student was ever more eager to hear about midden heaps and lime and convict clay.
Myers was a bearded grizzled man of average build with a friendly appearance and a dry understated humour. I wished he would speak a little more loudly and would not refer to presumably famous people by first names but he was, after all, an architect talking with other architects and no one had invited me to eavesdrop.
Eschewing projection or anything overly actorly, he began, in the manner of one resuming an old conversation, by recalling his visit to an exhibition of Alvar Aalto's work in London and finding it, well, very
ordinary,
and intuiting that there was something missing in this narrative of Alvar Aalto's success. So he said to his friend who had worked with Alvar Aalto, did Aalto have blue eyes?
And his friend said, oh yes, intensely blue. He was very charismatic.
QED, said Peter Myers, it was proven.
What was?
Why, Peter Myers' belief that you should trust your hunches, and what he was to talk about tonight (although this would be a big surprise to me) was how it was that the opera-house competition jury selected the work of a Dane, Joern Utzon.
Now the generally accepted explanation is that the American architect Eero Saarinen used his authority to PUSH this design through the reluctant jury. What is implicit here is the commonly shared assumption that we would never, not in a million years, have selected this building without a lot of outside help.
Graham Jahn's
Sydney Architecture
puts it like this: An extraordinary site on Sydney Harbour at Bennelong Point, an ambitious state premier (Joe Cahill), a visiting American architect (Eero Saar-inen) and a young Dane's billowy sketches were the key factors which generated one of the most important modern buildings.
Vincent Smith, in
The Sydney Opera House,
tells the story thus: The winning design had been already marked down to go on the shortlist when Saarinen arrived (late) for the judging.
When, writes Smith, he saw Joern Utzon's drawings - having been on the site only hours before - he was wildly enthusiastic. It was an extraordinary and complex proposal and the other judges had their reservations. But to every objection they made Saarinen had an answer. He convinced them, though it's hard to believe that their objections to the design were terribly strong. They WERE looking at a monumental building.
It was already obvious that Peter Myers was not someone to burst into an argument directly through the front door. Whatever his thesis was, he was
sidling
into it, telling us that he had been a student in London in the late 1960s and had demonstrated outside that great brutal concrete fort, the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, and that the designer of that building had been Eero Saarinen.
And here was his intuition - that the man who designed this dreadful embassy could not, no matter what he claimed,
possibly
have been the champion of Utzon's opera house.
I was ready to follow him but Myers seemed to lose interest in that line of argument and now he returned to Alvar Aalto, alleging he had stolen the work of an architect. Plisjker? Fisketjon? My hearing had been ruined by the Stihl chainsaw and now I could not get the fellow's name no matter how I strained towards it. Just the same, Myers' point was clear: when Alvar Aalto built his plagiarised building he got great reviews, as if the critics didn't know that he had pinched it.
I was fearful Myers had lost his way, but I underestimated him for now he showed us that Aalto and Saarinen were men in parallel. Saarinen was the architect of that floating shell-like structure, the TWA terminal at JFK, which is always thought of as living proof of his sympathy with Utzon. But no. Trust your intuitions, said Peter Myers. The present TWA building was not Saarinen's original design. Before he flew to Sydney to sit on the opera-house jury Saarinen had a clumpish modernist design for the TWA terminal. After Sydney he redrew the plans.
In a moment Myers would name the English architect Leslie Martin as the man of power amongst the jury and he would chart a dazzling, almost Byzantine map delineating Leslie Martin's lines of artistic and political force, showing a man of taste and discernment well accustomed to quietly wielding influence. But first, casually, almost accidentally, he came to Earth. He reminded us of the site the Sydney Opera House would stand on.
At the time of the competition that sandstone point was occupied by an abandoned tram terminus, a crenulated fort of monumental ugliness, but in 1788 it had been the site of the first shell kiln. There were, said Peter Myers, middens, great piles of shells abandoned after meals, and these middens were twelve METRES HIGH on that site, evidence of ancient occupation. This was the first city of Sydney.
He reminded us that the city of the Rum Corps and the convicts was therefore the
second
historic city of Sydney and explained how the second city died when the Cahill Expressway cut across the quay. The city was blindfolded, he said, only waiting to be executed.
With the city physically isolated from the harbour, only Bennelong Point was left, free, unfettered. The Sydney Opera House competition was the big chance for Sydney to escape the creeping mediocrity it had become.
And it was then I saw what Myers was up to. He was actually addressing the great question of Sydney. By what divine intercession were we granted that opera house? Why us? How come?
The first champion of the Sydney Opera House was clearly Eugene Goossens, the conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and it was he, as early as 1948, who identified this as a perfect site for a performing-arts centre. For years he talked, politicked, addressed the issue in public and in private, and in 1956, with the site chosen and the competition already underway, he was arrested by HM Customs with pornography in his luggage. In what was a spooky funhouse mirror image of Utzon's final departure, Goos-sens was hounded out of Sydney and Australia. Like Utzon, he never returned.
Myers now turned his attention to the jurors, sifting through them, looking for our benefactor.
There was Colin Parkes, the New South Wales state architect, the son of Sir Henry Parkes, the so-called 'father of federation'. Without doubt he was not Utzon's first champion.
The professor of architecture at Sydney University was the second jury member. Professor Ashworth had served with distinction in the Second World War, and was a lieutenant colonel at its end. It was he, Peter Myers explained, who selected Leslie Martin.
Myers then projected a transparency which showed two books, one by Leslie Martin, one by Professor Ashworth, each bearing the same title:
Flats.
Meaning? That their characters and value were here clearly contrasted. On the left, the dull but useful Ashworth. On the right, the elegant designer, the connoisseur Leslie Martin.
Peter Myers then projected an image of a third book,
Circle
. The authors: Leslie Martin and Naum Gabo.
What was this about?Why, open the book and you can find work by Arup, the engineer who would finally work on Utzon's opera house. Thus proving? Thus proving that Arup knew Martin, that it was Martin who brought in Arup at the end, that Martin was the quiet puppet master of the show.
Utzon, according to Peter Myers, always understood that Leslie Martin was the most important judge. Utzon would have read Leslie Martin's book. He would have been aware of Leslie Martin's design for the Royal Festival Hall in London. And now Myers alerted us to the strong similarities between these two large performance spaces, both addressing water, both sitting on a kind of platform.
He reminded us that the brief for the Sydney Opera House required two halls, one seating 3,500 and the other 1,200. He showed an image of the Royal Festival Hall and then, presto, he was a magician. He doubled the image, so there were two identical halls side by side, and what did you have?
The Sydney Opera House on the River Thames? Not quite, but imagine a man of genius beginning this way, just as Picasso might take Veliizquez perhaps, and by a series of daring steps arrive at something new. The double image of the festival hall looked like two captives, blocks of stone from which the masterwork would soon be carved.
This is how culture works, asserted Myers. The Sydney Opera House is Joern Utzon recasting the Royal Festival Hall in such a way that Martin will understand. So the opera house is an esoteric letter from the architect to the most powerful member of the jury.
There is not the slightest doubt, said Peter Myers, that Martin would immediately decode this compliment, this fabulously sophisticated, dazzlingly successful attempt to take his own work and turn it into something even more wonderful. Amongst the proofs that he continued to pull out of his sleeve was Utzon's perspective drawing of the opera house.
The Conditions of Competition (item no. 7) required
perspective drawing of such elevation as the competitor may select as his main elevation and/or approach to the building.
Utzon chose, instead, to insist on what he had done, to emphasise the doubling, and he audaciously rendered, not the two halls in perspective, but the space
between
them.
He heightened the drawing with gold leaf, said Peter Myers, which is perhaps one reason none of the drawings were shown to the public. This one with the gold leaf might be deemed to have broken the rules of the competition.
Finally it was Saarinen who rendered the required perspective drawing of Utzon's opera house, and to that extent he was the hero for without this drawing the design could not have won.
Well he had convinced me, but Peter Myers would not leave well enough alone, and now he was driven to prove that both Utzon's and Martin's designs related to a famous building in Copenhagen and that each of their designs were, in a sense, a conversation, a love letter written to another building, invisible to all but them.
Enough.
At past seven, just as he produced issue number two of the
Architects' Yearbook
(of which Leslie Martin was the editor), I had to stand, not just because I was out of my depth, but because I was late for David Williamson's play
The Great Man
which had recently begun its Sydney season in the Drama Theatre of the opera house, a space which was not even indicated in the original brief and which was one of those indications that Utzon would inherit a client who not only gives bad information about the nature of the site but also changes his mind continually.
I slink out of the lecture theatre, out into the dark rainy streets of City Road where - another miracle - I find a taxi.
I WAS MUCH SURPRISED at the fortifications of Sydney Harbour, wrote Anthony Trollope. Fortifications, unless specially inspected, escape even a vigilant seer of sights, but I, luckily for myself, was enabled specially to inspect them. I had previously no idea that the people of New South Wales were either so suspicious of enemies, or so pugnacious in their nature. I found five separate fortresses, armed, or to be armed, to the teeth with numerous guns, - four, five, six at each point; - Armstrong guns, rifled guns, guns of eighteen tons of weight, with loopholed walls, and pits for riflemen as though Sydney were to become another Sebastopol. I was shown how the whole harbour and city were commanded by these guns. There were open batteries and casemented batteries, shell rooms and powder magazines, barracks rising here and trenches dug there. There was a boom to be placed across the harbour and a whole world of torpedoes ready to be sunk beneath the water, all of which were prepared and ready to use in an hour or two. It was explained to me that 'they' could not possibly get across the trenches, or break the boom, or escape the torpedoes, or live for an hour beneath the blaze of guns . . . But in viewing these fortifications, I was most especially struck by the loveliness of the sites chosen. One would almost wish to be a gunner for the sake of being at one of these forts.
Trollope was in my mind as the departing Manly Ferry scraped, iron on wood, along the wharf at Circular Quay that Monday morning.
If only you would get your head out of books, said a by now familiar voice. Look around you. Is it not a lovely sight?
Yes, I answered, but the book helps you see this landscape better. It is the book that shows you that this city has been shaped by its defences. Over there, to the left, where the bridge sticks its claws in the rock, was once Fort Dawes. And there on Bennelong Point, where the opera house is, that was Fort Macquarie, the ugliest thing Greenway ever designed. And a few hundred metres north is Pinchgut . . .
Don't mention Francis Morgan . . .
. . . who was hung in chains until he fell apart. Pinchgut's proper name is Fort Denison.
Behind Fort Denison is the naval dockyard of Garden Island where you can see that great ugly cream-brick structure, so typical of Australian barracks architecture. This five acres of inner-city waterfront is still controlled by the Defence Department.
On the north shore, directly north of Farm Cove, five acres of splendid gardens tumble down towards the sandstone cliffs and there, behind that armed policeman, is the sandstone mansion of Admiralty House. It was, for many years, the home of the British admiral commanding the British squadron in Australia.
Time and again the armed forces have taken possession of the most beautiful land on Sydney Harbour. Five bays along from Kirribilli House you will find that great scabby finger of Bradleys Head. In 1880 Sydney waited to engage the Russian navy here. We had a proper fortress, mighty cannons, pyramids of balls encased by nets. There are photographs, taken very soon after Trollope's visit. They show three white-helmeted gunners posing at the fortress with folded arms. Behind them - the yellow sandstone cliffs of Sydney Heads.
After Bradleys Head the Manly Ferry passes Chowder Bay and the wild wooded headland of Georges Head. According to the splendid map reproduced on page twenty-five of
Reflection on a Maritime City
-
An Appreciation of the Trust Lands on Sydney Harbour,
an enemy craft following the ferry's present course, north-northeast in twelve fathoms, is passing into a deadly barrage of fire. On the north-west shore, in that forested hillside where those white cockatoos rise in a raucous crowd, those same shell rooms and powder magazines and barracks can still be found, pretty much as Trollope saw them. Together with one hundred and fifteen acres of waterfront bush, they are in the process of being returned to the public.
The map was made in 1880 and revised again in 1917. It shows Trollope's battery as the locus of a radius which swings in a defensive arc across the harbour, a fine grey line intersected by other thicker arcs representing first artillery, then searchlights, and other signs I cannot understand. I can count eleven of these arcs all crowding around the Heads, one with its locus at Georges Head, others at North Head and South Head, one centred at that very place on New South Head Road where Jack Ledoux and I stopped to admire the yellow cliffs above the empty Pacific Ocean. At that time I had grappled for an explanation of those tiny windows in that ugly block of flats - why anyone would place this life-denying style in such a spectacular setting. But when I saw the map of these shore batteries, the style at last made sense.
If Sydney was a fort then would not the barracks be a part of our architectural vernacular? Did not those awful flats on Old South Head Road bear a close resemblance to barracks buildings at Chowder Bay, Garden Island Naval Dockyard and Cockatoo Island as well? You do not join the army to admire the view.
Now, said my persistent companion, you are mocking Sydney.
No, I am explaining some awful architecture.
Yes, but in the end you are claiming the citizens are nervous nellies. 'The Russians are invading!' 'Napoleon is coming!' You make them appear ridiculous. What interest would Napoleon have in it, for Jesus' sake? This was well before the surfing craze.
They were not mistaken at all. As a young man Napoleon sought to ship with La Perouse. If he had had his wish he would have been in Botany Bay at the same time as the First Fleet. We know Napoleon never lost his interest in Sydney.
I suppose the city was teeming with his spies.
You need not smirk. There is evidence of one at least. François Pèron. A famous naturalist. He reported the fortifications of Sydney in great detail. It was invasion that was on his mind.
And you will not refrain from quoting, I suppose?
I will not, no. To the right at the north point of Sydney Cove, you perceive the signal battery, which is built upon a rock difficult of access: six pieces of cannon, protected by a turf entrenchment, cross their fire with that of another battery which I shall presently mention.
He does sound like a spy, I warrant.
Pèron concluded Sydney Harbour was too well fortified a place to attack. But he thought they could invade at Broken Bay.
Correct me if I am wrong, but the only attack in Sydney Harbour was the Japanese in 1942, and that is long ago and best forgotten in the present climate.
That alters nothing. This harbour is a fort. It is this which makes its bones. You can see this in a satellite photograph. Immense fortifications all showing bright red from the Heads to Sydney Cove.
It is only the trees that show bright red.
Yes, and for 200 years those we trusted with our city's defence have also defended eighty acres at Bradleys Head from developers and their mates in government. They likewise saved 115 acres at Georges Head in Chowder Bay. There are 183 more acres at North Head, another thirty-odd acres at South Head. They still control that multi-layered midden heap of a site at Cockatoo Island. They have not only saved us priceless green space but a great deal of delicate history as well. I offer as my first exhibit the road to Bungaree's farm.
I know that name. He was the most famous Aboriginal ever born. Did not he go to London and meet the king?
That was Bennelong. This was Bungaree who travelled with Matthew Flinders on his great voyages of exploration. Also he was a great favourite of Governor Macquarie who seems to have had the impertinent idea that he would civilise him. Macquarie got a passion to settle Bungaree and his relatives on a European-style farm.
There's a folly for you.
Indeed it was. On Tuesday January 31, 1815, which was the governor's birthday, Macquarie and his wife and a large party of ladies and gentlemen were rowed the six miles down the harbour to Georges Head, the same place where the battery and arsenal and barracks were later constructed.
Here the governor decorated Bungaree with a brass gorget, declaring him 'Chief of the Broken Bay Tribe', and he showed Bungaree his farm on which he had constructed huts for his people.
Bungaree must have thought this a mighty joke.
Bungaree's people starting working with great zeal, but soon they sold off their tools and returned to their earlier way of life.
You began telling this because you claimed some delicate history had been saved by these military occupations?
Yes, Macquarie made a road from the beach up to the farm.
Now you're going to say the road is still there?
I think it is. I walked across the abandoned submarine base at Chowder Bay, up across the bitumen, into the bush where I was shown a steep overgrown path about six feet wide.
What a foolish sentimental monument. What a thing to be preserved.
Geoff Bailey, who is the head of the interim planning committee for these old defence sites, would not make an absolute claim but there is no other good explanation for the road's existence. It starts out from the best place for the ladies and gentlemen to come ashore, it is the right width for a cart, it leads to the place where the farm seems to have been. The farm itself was bulldozed years ago and turned into a playing field.
You were foolish to be so complimentary about the military.
Yes, but if you ever should be permitted to visit Cockatoo Island you'll see how the defence forces leave us a thousand times more history than real-estate developers.
What is it like? Take your time now.
A great plateau of sandstone which has been eroded and extended with successive landfills. Forsaken nineteenth-century prisons and barracks still occupy its crown. Down on the southern waterfront a desolate direct-current power station, its walls lined with mercury vapour flasks, sits waiting for its Frankenstein or Spielberg. A great tunnel cuts through its centre, from north to south, the most direct way for workers to pass from one side to the other. Two huge dry docks, where apprentices dived and swam in the boiling Sydney summers, lie abandoned. Cockatoo Island occupies less than one square mile, but it is difficult to imagine a more complex or satisfying historical site. Here you'll find convict barracks adapted as Second World War air-raid shelters, with nineteenth-century sandstone walls topped by brutal concrete three foot thick.
No respect for history here.
Yes, the disrespect is perfect. Let me give you another example. The first convicts were put to work, cutting huge narrow-necked grain silos into the living rock of the plateau.
Years later a new machine shop was needed so a great slice of the mother rock, from plateau to sea level, was carved away. That this destroyed six of the convict silos was, naturally enough, no obstacle, but that great brutal slice through the rock now shows the silo better than any curator might have dreamed. If the visitor pushes his back hard against the corrugated-iron wall of the abandoned machine shop, if he shades his eye against the sun, he can see in transverse section a twelve-foot-high carafe carved from the top of the plateau.
Now, of course, we must decide what will be done with these sites the defence forces have kept for us.
Shut up.
I'll not shut up. Did I say parts of the island are very beautiful, tree-lined walks with cottages and views the equal of nothing in the world?
Shut up, stop talking to yourself. That fellow with the beard is staring at you.
My God, it's Sheridan, my friend.
Not another word to me.
As the shambolic man with the greying beard came walking towards me, grinning lopsidedly, the ferry arrived at Manly Wharf with such force that he staggered sideways.
Perfect, he cried as we embraced, completely fucking perfect.