Cultural potpourri
As we are celebrating another new year, nostalgia is a somewhat fitting emotion as I revisit the city of my childhood. Some things change, some remain the same.
The iconic image of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Opera House, the glittering waters of the harbour remain part of the unchanging landscape, but time has reversed the journey.
My Sydney was a domestic Sydney, one of ice skating rinks, suburban beaches, trips to Toronga Park Zoo and the thrill of the rickety roller coaster ride at Luna Park. In those days, Sydney was a thrilling destination. It was the city of limitless possibilities, buoyed up with the brash kind of colonial confidence.
Summer is a late arrival in Sydney this year. As my early morning train winds its way towards the city, rain patterns the calm waters of the Hawkesbury River, greening the hills around. Nothing had changed and yet it had all changed. The skyline looks moody and filmic, a monochromatic study of light and dark, architectural lines and mushrooming rain clouds.
Local hotspots
As the train pulls into the station, the clouds open in welcome to this returnee. I decide that memories and ghosts are best left to dark nights and clear skies and I sensibly decide to leave the past where it lies and take advantage of the grown up delights of an interior Sydney, an exploration of the multiple personality of the city of style. In other words, shopping!
At Castlereagh Street, I leave breath marks on the windows of the iconic couture shoe designer Jimmy Choo, eyeball designer jewellery at Tiffany and Co, as I gradually wind my way down to a more realistic level into the shopping heart of George Street. Here, the shopping streets meander off into every direction, international brands intersect with local designers, the buildings mix history with progress in a way that seems almost curated.
The Queen Victoria Building or the QVB, a tastefully restored building from the colonial era, is at the very heart of the city’s shopping centre. I meet one of the many walking tour groups operating around the city. The guide is young and fresh faced, his sense of humour evident in the way his tourists seem happy to follow him around the city.
And despite the cloudbursts, there are smiles and raincoats for the Free Walking Tour of the city. I learn that the building was designed and purpose-built during the Victorian era. In a recessionary phase, the Government project designed to employ many craftsmen who were unemployed at that time.
I follow the walkers for a while until we reach Pitt St Mall. International brands and buskers merge in this traffic-free area where one can rest between shopping frenzies and be entertained or amused. A man in a tuxedo plies his violin offering Vivaldi to the frenzied shoppers for a few coins. A little further down, a “homeless shoe shine just having a go” advertises his service on a handwritten cardboard sign while he sits Buddha-like, awaiting customers or coins.
A man marches through the crowd with all the confidence of a theatre actor shouting a few lines. I think he is a street performance poet and follow him for a block before I realise he hasn’t grown the poem more than those two lines and is quite possibly mad or at least seriously annoyed with the Federal government.
View from the top
The rain and the failed poet send me scuttling back inside where I jump on the monorail to Darling Harbour and further to the once legendary Paddy’s Market. The monorail is an opportunity to look at the city from a height, as it winds between Victorian-styled buildings and around the harbour edge, the harbour front of my childhood. It is here where warehouses once stood, which now offers the usual tourist fare with a particularly Australian twist. The buildings have not been torn down so much as remodelled into tourist attractions and the working port of the city moved out of eyesight further down the line.
There can’t be too many cities in the world where you can go from haute crocodile shoes to meeting the world’s largest crocodile in one city block. Sydney still rocks and rolls from the sublime to the ridiculous, from Vivaldi to street ravers, all before lunch time.
As the sun peeks hesitantly from the clouds, a luxury ocean liner docked at Circular Quay disgorges five star passengers. As they make their way into the historic area of the city, they have a choice of buskers to throw their coins at — indigenous aborigine with a didgeridoo beside a Vietnam veteran singing the blues. I don’t know if Sydney is a city still searching for itself or a city that is happy to try on faces and discard them for the next glittering object. It’s the face of colonialism and immigration that has put on lipstick for her visitors.
It is somehow fitting then that Sydney has become the New Year’s Eve capital of the world. As she has discarded the year that has been in explosive fashion with a massive fireworks display and people dancing on the streets, Sydney is still a city celebrating a glamorous future.
