I didn't mean to blog entirely about cities but I suppose it has come about because of the months I spent in Brisbane. Though a short stay in the scheme of things, it was long enough to begin understanding the city, though I always think of Brisbane as a country town.
When I first arrived, it was the tail end of a long drought and all I remember now is a bleached city of pale blue skies and straw grass, the sun so strong that new paint quickly weathered. Then it rained for much of my stay and I now think of it as humid and damp, the rains bringing about an engulfment of available space by vegetation and clouds of insects. On occasion I saw sudden bursts of mushrooms ranging from a sickly white to iron rust. One day there were enough red worms to get clusters of kookaburras in the trees opposite my house, the first time I had seen so many in one place. In the nights, possums would run the length of my little courtyard. Each day would bring something new - life would quickly bloom and disappear.
In the rains, Brisbane was a thick fog of slowness where time creeps and halts at times. It’s not exactly a dead time which makes one fret and long for some excitement (though with very young people it must, given the many who milled around Queen Street Mall on idle weekends). It’s a slowness that seems to be part of the city so that many hours and minutes later, your pace has slowed to its rhythm. This slowness where each day went by in long discernible stretches of time (unlike the “where did the week go” feeling of Sydney) seemed part of a long forgotten life and time and there are days now I feel wistful for the feeling of a Brisbane day.
The feeling Brisbane evoked was also far different from its Southern cousins, in part because of the tropical nature of the city. Sometimes the slow pace, the lush vegetation, jacaranda trees, its closed society, its secrets, its white houses and slow river seemed evocative of the American South. At other times, the mango trees, the sharp red spikes of gingers, indeed a veritable jungle of red blooms on deciduous trees, the sleepiness of the city made it seem like an extension of Asia.
Staying in Brisbane is like its ferry rides - a long, slow, interminable ride in a pleasant torpor induced both by the city’s heat and rain.
Returning to Sydney on visits reminded me of many of the things I dislike about the city. At the risk of a cliché, Sydney often seems a city of shiny surfaces with little soul (and I speak as someone who has lived there) with endless dreary suburbs of dark brick houses meant to shut out the fierce summer sun. Every city has an inner life, every city escapes stereotypes, this I do not deny. It’s the surface, the sense of the city that I am writing about. Too often Sydney feels banal and I find myself sinking in it too, unable to talk of anything else except property, cuisine, fashion and the like. David Williamson’s oft quoted lines sum up the city- ''No one in Sydney ever wastes time debating the meaning of life -- it's getting yourself a water frontage.”
A few months ago I went to La Perouse, a beach on the south side of Sydney. It's a small beach, not as famous as its better known counterparts. There was a bit of a wind but the sun was out and families had gathered as is common in the city. Nearby the old jail was set down like a little toy on the strangely manicured lawn peculiar to penal buildings in the country. Somewhere up the road was a lighthouse, ice cream stalls. And as is usual in Sydney, a cliff rose from the beach, dense with the peculiar clot of grey-green vegetation so common here. A forgotten sensation swept over me, one evoked by the thrillingly mysterious landscape of the city. Amidst the modern city and its modern concerns, there is something ancient, perfect and complete in this setting of bush and sea. The purity of the sensation renders any description of it free of the cliché. That moment in time where everything, life, emotion, land, people is so completely and harmoniously synthesized, so completely revealed to you is possible only here. And I am not the first or last to feel this contradiction. D.H. Lawrence wrote the predictably named Kangaroo on a visit here. In the beginning, Sydney is “swarming, teeming….flowing out into these myriads of bungalows, like shallow waters spreading, undyked. And what then? Nothing. No inner life, no high command, no interest in anything, finally." Then later in Thirroul "It seemed to Somers characteristic of Australia, this far-off flesh-rose bank of colour on the sky's horizon, so tender and unvisited, topped with the smoky, beautiful blueness. And then the thickness of the night's stars overhead, and one star very brave in the last effulgence of sunset, westward over the continent. As soon as night came, all the raggle-taggle of amorphous white settlements disappeared, and the continent of the Kangaroo reassumed its strange, unvisited glamour, a kind of virgin sensual aloofness." Eventually Somers/Lawrence is changed by the country - by the simple pounding of the surf and the constant presence of the spectral bush.
On this visit, my 5 month old niece was taken along. At the beach, on my lap, she sat quite still, her sweet calm face and hair a little bestirred by the wind. She too was part of the elements and I felt a moment of gladness that this place with its sea, cliff, bush, wheeling birds and its easy mix of the ordinary and sublime is to be her inheritance.
When I first arrived, it was the tail end of a long drought and all I remember now is a bleached city of pale blue skies and straw grass, the sun so strong that new paint quickly weathered. Then it rained for much of my stay and I now think of it as humid and damp, the rains bringing about an engulfment of available space by vegetation and clouds of insects. On occasion I saw sudden bursts of mushrooms ranging from a sickly white to iron rust. One day there were enough red worms to get clusters of kookaburras in the trees opposite my house, the first time I had seen so many in one place. In the nights, possums would run the length of my little courtyard. Each day would bring something new - life would quickly bloom and disappear.
In the rains, Brisbane was a thick fog of slowness where time creeps and halts at times. It’s not exactly a dead time which makes one fret and long for some excitement (though with very young people it must, given the many who milled around Queen Street Mall on idle weekends). It’s a slowness that seems to be part of the city so that many hours and minutes later, your pace has slowed to its rhythm. This slowness where each day went by in long discernible stretches of time (unlike the “where did the week go” feeling of Sydney) seemed part of a long forgotten life and time and there are days now I feel wistful for the feeling of a Brisbane day.
The feeling Brisbane evoked was also far different from its Southern cousins, in part because of the tropical nature of the city. Sometimes the slow pace, the lush vegetation, jacaranda trees, its closed society, its secrets, its white houses and slow river seemed evocative of the American South. At other times, the mango trees, the sharp red spikes of gingers, indeed a veritable jungle of red blooms on deciduous trees, the sleepiness of the city made it seem like an extension of Asia.
Staying in Brisbane is like its ferry rides - a long, slow, interminable ride in a pleasant torpor induced both by the city’s heat and rain.
Returning to Sydney on visits reminded me of many of the things I dislike about the city. At the risk of a cliché, Sydney often seems a city of shiny surfaces with little soul (and I speak as someone who has lived there) with endless dreary suburbs of dark brick houses meant to shut out the fierce summer sun. Every city has an inner life, every city escapes stereotypes, this I do not deny. It’s the surface, the sense of the city that I am writing about. Too often Sydney feels banal and I find myself sinking in it too, unable to talk of anything else except property, cuisine, fashion and the like. David Williamson’s oft quoted lines sum up the city- ''No one in Sydney ever wastes time debating the meaning of life -- it's getting yourself a water frontage.”
A few months ago I went to La Perouse, a beach on the south side of Sydney. It's a small beach, not as famous as its better known counterparts. There was a bit of a wind but the sun was out and families had gathered as is common in the city. Nearby the old jail was set down like a little toy on the strangely manicured lawn peculiar to penal buildings in the country. Somewhere up the road was a lighthouse, ice cream stalls. And as is usual in Sydney, a cliff rose from the beach, dense with the peculiar clot of grey-green vegetation so common here. A forgotten sensation swept over me, one evoked by the thrillingly mysterious landscape of the city. Amidst the modern city and its modern concerns, there is something ancient, perfect and complete in this setting of bush and sea. The purity of the sensation renders any description of it free of the cliché. That moment in time where everything, life, emotion, land, people is so completely and harmoniously synthesized, so completely revealed to you is possible only here. And I am not the first or last to feel this contradiction. D.H. Lawrence wrote the predictably named Kangaroo on a visit here. In the beginning, Sydney is “swarming, teeming….flowing out into these myriads of bungalows, like shallow waters spreading, undyked. And what then? Nothing. No inner life, no high command, no interest in anything, finally." Then later in Thirroul "It seemed to Somers characteristic of Australia, this far-off flesh-rose bank of colour on the sky's horizon, so tender and unvisited, topped with the smoky, beautiful blueness. And then the thickness of the night's stars overhead, and one star very brave in the last effulgence of sunset, westward over the continent. As soon as night came, all the raggle-taggle of amorphous white settlements disappeared, and the continent of the Kangaroo reassumed its strange, unvisited glamour, a kind of virgin sensual aloofness." Eventually Somers/Lawrence is changed by the country - by the simple pounding of the surf and the constant presence of the spectral bush.
On this visit, my 5 month old niece was taken along. At the beach, on my lap, she sat quite still, her sweet calm face and hair a little bestirred by the wind. She too was part of the elements and I felt a moment of gladness that this place with its sea, cliff, bush, wheeling birds and its easy mix of the ordinary and sublime is to be her inheritance.
