Sydney In Focus

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday February 23, 2005

Words Catherine Keenan

Six of our best thinkers and opinion-makers discuss what they most admire about Sydney, and suggest some timely improvements.

Sydney is usually loved for her looks, rather than her brains. Her beauty is legendary - the beaches, the harbour, the sun-soaked ease with which she sashays between sophistication and low-key charm.

But what lies behind the pretty facade? There are, of course, plenty of smart people in Sydney. Which other Australian state has a premier known for reading a book at a football match? But what do our public thinkers make of a city often characterised as shiny and shallow? Is there an intellectual life tucked in between the sand and the slick bars, and what is it like?

We asked half a dozen of Sydney's brightest minds and commentators for their thoughts, with some surprising results.

Geraldine Brooks

Previously an award-winning journalist, Brooks is a novelist, whose books include Nine Parts of Desire and Year of Wonders. Her latest novel, March, is out in April.

"What does Sydney do well? Dazzling physical beauty. The sparkle of water when you crest the hill along Mona Vale Road or the rise of the rocky ribs behind the angophoras on the Wakehurst Parkway. The sheen of the Parramatta River meeting glossy mudflats and twisty mangroves.

"But, like a handsome guy who doesn't bother to bathe or a supermodel with a heart of stone, the city lets its inherent gifts do too much of the work. In most places, with the few famous exceptions, the built environment is ghastly and getting worse. Joern Utzon was designing a beautiful house for his family at Bayview when he was shamefully driven away from completing the Opera House. Every time I look at that great, magical thing shimmering above the water, I think of the unbuilt Bayview design, and of all the other marvellous Utzon buildings we might have had. His influence was so lasting on the young architects who worked with him for even a few years - I think especially of the nature-embracing work of Rick Leplastrier, the modest humanism of Peter Myers, the cool elegance of Alex Popov. We could have had dozens more architects coming of age and into their style under his influence. Instead, we've got Pyrmont. Has there ever been a more banal redevelopment of a potentially gorgeous living place?

"I would like to go back to the less glitzy city of my childhood, when backyards mattered more than media rooms and the difference between being rich and poor wasn't so glaringly obvious. When I was growing up in the '60s and early '70s, it was possible for a family like mine - my Dad was the sole breadwinner on a pretty low weekly wage - to own our own home and feel that we had a share in the city's goodies.

"We also had the security of knowing that whatever education we were capable of pursuing would be within our reach. I truly don't think people who make the HECS decisions understand how frightening the idea of starting your working life in deep debt is, especially to kids who come from families like mine, without any kind of financial cushion. So I think we are creating a generation who will feel shut out, and justifiably pissed off, by people of my age who have had the benefits of free education and affordable housing.

"In some ways, I think we of the lucky generation are glutting ourselves on our own good fortune. I like reading Domain as much as the next person, and yes, I renovated. But sometimes, when I look at the latest sleek Sydney dwelling, I get nostalgic for the old Aussie 'use it up, wear it out, make it do, do without' ethos. There's a lot to be said for lino and fibro and bindi-filled buffalo grass. They made great surfaces against which to have a deliriously happy childhood. Will the children of the cool stainless-steel kitchens, the tung-oiled blackbutt floors and the polished concrete courtyards have as many happy memories as I do?

"I characterise Sydney as home. I love the heat shimmer on the bitumen, the crackle of drought-affected grass under my feet. And always, the sudden, gasp-inducing beauty of the harbour. I hope it is still a good place to live a creative life. When I was a student, it was a city that was very kind to people's dreams. Friends who wanted to be actors or directors or even opera librettists all managed to achieve those dreams. And part of the reason comes back to the free education - you're more likely, and more able, to take a shot at something risky if you're not burdened by debt."

Adam Spencer

Media host and science populariser, Spencer studied and taught pure mathematics before becoming a comedian. He has presented Triple J's breakfast radio show, fronted science programs and annually spreads the word about science with fellow "sleek geek'', Dr Karl Kruszelnicki.

"How would I characterise Sydney? Like an episode of the British comedy, The League of Gentlemen. Tough to get your head around the first time you take it on, but tremendous once you get used to it. I've always said that my friends from inner-city Melbourne would watch an episode of The Secret Life of Us and say: 'Hey, I've sipped on a mochaccino at that trendy St Kilda baguette-house,' while my neighbours would watch the police drama Blue Murder and say: 'Hey, I used to drink beers in the pub on the street where the cops shot that smack dealer.'

"If there's one aspect of another city that I'd love to incorporate into Sydney, it'd be Melbourne's culture of going out to see stuff. It's often still easier to sell out a comedy show or live music gig in Melbourne on a Tuesday night in winter than it is on a Thursday night in the Sydney summer. Though please let nothing in this statement give the impression that I think there is any conceivable way in which Sydney doesn't absolutely whip Melbourne's arse. I don't know what came over me, fellow Sydneysiders. Sorry.

"What do I wish I could change about Sydney? That the increasingly cramped and brutally functional inner city would develop more of a sense of community. Or, more precisely, a sense of hundreds of little local communities, where people knew each other's names and shared the occasional barbecue or street party. The management of Sydney as it spreads inexorably into a giant semi-circular segment radiating from Newcastle to Wollongong, via Penrith and Richmond, is a colossal challenge and from my limited exposure to this area of public life, the planning of this stage of our city's history has been haphazard at best.

"I'd love a Sydney where regular public lectures were given by the world-class researchers toiling away at the universities in Sydney. The public should be flocking to hear our best astrophysicists, neuropsychologists, archaeologists, mathematicians, historians and the like excite and illuminate to packed houses. The potential is there, and I've seen it first-hand when Dr Karl Kruszelnicki and I do our annual 'sleek geek' pilgrimage around the traps. It would be great to harness this untapped 'public intellectualism'. We're the city that's got four major universities within 15 minutes' drive of each other, and such an incredible concentration of talent. But not much of this is seen outside universities. I would like to make what goes on in universities more accessible to the entire public, so people can understand why universities exist, why people do that sort of stuff, and why it's important to have it.

"The biggest issues facing the city are climate change, climate change and climate change. I read an article recently where someone said the only scientific principle he knows that has more agreement than global warming is Newton's second law of motion. How is Sydney dealing with these issues? There is, to my mind, a depressing lack of national leadership on it. I was encouraged by Victoria coming out recently and saying they're looking at a carbon emissions trading program across all of Victoria. I think the very least we need is all the states in Australia to do that, so you get a viable emissions trading scheme across all of Australia.''

Gene Sherman

Born in South Africa, Sherman spent some time in England and has been in Sydney for nearly 30 years. Before starting Sherman Galleries in Paddington, she taught French literature. As well as being an art dealer, she is heavily involved in teaching others about art by holding seminars and giving talks.

"Sydney embraces the margins with a speed that few places match. Artist Guan Wei, for example, arrived here in 1989 from Beijing without English, family or resources of any kind and in 10 years has had a solo Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition and an extraordinarily wide cross-section of people embrace and celebrate his work. That says a lot about Sydney, I think, and about Australia. Can you imagine arriving in Paris without a word of French?

"But Sydney sometimes exaggerates the national psyche's reluctance to anticipate or validate deserved success. My husband, Brian Sherman, was on the SOCOG board and he chaired the finance committee. I saw how much work went into it, how much thought went into it. But the press was negative beyond what was reasonable. I opened the paper every morning and measured it against what I saw around me being done, and I just could not believe that this community was knocking a thing that hadn't even happened yet. It's a kind of inability to enjoy success or the feeling that success might be around the corner.

"Every achievement obviously hinges to some extent on luck, but often it's hard work, focus, forward plan. I've never been in any culture where people say they're 'lucky' to have achieved in the way people in Sydney do. I think Australians generally, and Sydneysiders in particular, do not claim achievement comfortably. It's part of the charm, because the opposite is charmless, people patting themselves on the back and saying how wonderful they are. But I think a happy medium is probably desirable.

"Is Sydney a good city to be an artist in? I think it's increasingly interesting. It has, and has had since the Australia Council started in the '70s, a wonderfully supportive infrastructure. Then you've got a surprisingly supportive private sector. They are amazing in the intensity with which they engage with the work. And there are more art magazines than there might be, given the size of our population. So I think on the one hand, it's fabulous, but where there's been difficulty is we've been so far from the main centres of practice. The tyranny of distance has meant Australian artists have been more isolated than their peers elsewhere. That's changing, though. A lot of art now is produced by the new technologies and images can be sent via the new technologies.

"I'm stimulated intellectually if I'm just in my room. I don't need Sydney to stimulate me. I've got four libraries of several thousand books each. But having said that, we went to the theatre the other night and that was stimulating, and you can't do that from your study. You do, to some extent, need that kind of throb of intellectual life around you.

"Do I think Sydney has that? I do. There's far more to do than one could possibly manage in any given week or any given month. It couldn't have the intellectual life of a city like London, in terms of what comes there, again because of the tyranny of distance. And yet we seem to be managing, don't we? We've got leading talents like Neil Armfield. Our film industry is remarkable, given the power and the might of Hollywood. I think we're in great shape, really.

"You find people coming to the gallery on Saturday afternoons, when they could be going to the beach instead. You can understand them coming to the openings, when there's wine and a party, but on Saturday afternoon they come for two and a half hours and we have to turn people away! There's got to be a healthy intellectual life that's leading into that.''

Owen Harries

Former editor of foreign policy journal The National Interest in Washington, DC, Harries is a senior fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies and a visiting fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy.

"I came back to Sydney three years ago after being away for 20 years. I think what strikes me since returning is what a strong physical and sensual presence the place has. It strikes one as a city of primary colours and very distinctive shapes - obviously, the Opera House and the harbour and bridges. And also a city of sharp wit. That good vernacular wit that Sydney's always had, a streetwise sort of wit.

"I think Sydney is at its best when it's being unselfconsciously itself and not giving a damn about what others think about it. I think it's at its worst when it's worrying about what impression it's making on the world, where it stands in some mythical international table of great cities, when it tries to ape the style of others.

"I think that many of the changes that have happened since I last lived here have been vast improvements, not least the traffic system and these marvellous tunnels that get one across town. I'm still having to adjust my timetable because I tend to allow much more time than it takes to travel. I think the place has a rich and good cultural life, particularly in music, theatre and museums, and the art galleries are very good.

"I'm particularly impressed by the unpretentious cafes that serve excellent lunches in a variety of cuisines. I much prefer that end of the food business to the very self-conscious and rather pretentious going on about top restaurants, which tends to get boring. I think one of the worst things in Sydney, as ever, is the cult of celebrity, which is rather pathetic, to the point that any sane person would pay money to be excluded from its social pages. Again it's part of this self-consciousness and uncertainty about one's status and quality. I think Barry Humphries' well-known crack about 'Sydney society' being an oxymoron still has validity.

"Its intellectual life is very substandard for a city of its size. It seems to me that there's been a striking deterioration in that respect. Forty-five years ago, or 50 years ago, in the despised late fifties and early sixties which are now seen as a Dark Age, Sydney had two interesting fortnightly magazines, The Nation and The Observer, as well as the old Bulletin. Now The Bulletin stands alone. That's rather sad. A place of this size should do better than that. And the universities, for all the impact and input they have to the intellectual life of the general community, might as well not exist. And this is in a city that once had John Anderson, and lesser but still interesting figures like Henry Mayer and Donald Horne. One didn't necessarily agree with a lot of these people, but at least they had a presence and they registered it. One would be hard put now to name off the top of one's head any Sydney academic who had a similar impact. Which is rather sad. Perhaps a sign of the times.

"The city now is much more concerned and worried about crime than the Sydney that we left. And it seems to me that it is in danger of ceasing to be a sort of well-proportioned city with a distinct personality, and becoming a vast conurbation of loosely joined semi-towns, none of them with much of a character. Each with its shopping malls and its poker-machine clubs and drug treatment centres and all that. One is afraid that if things go really bad, Sydney will become like one of those prehistoric monsters with a body the size of a Boeing 747 and a brain about the size of a mobile phone.''

Allan Snyder

Born in Philadelphia, Professor Snyder is director of the Centre for the Mind at the University of Sydney and the ANU. He is a world-renowned science professor who has worked on human creativity, insect vision and fibre optics. He has been in Sydney for more than a decade.

"My concept is that great cities of the future will be the cities of creative minds. Creative minds are attracted to a particular kind of city, cities that are rich in everything that you would imagine: entertainment, coffee shops, bookshops, open city life, and especially great universities. How does Sydney stack up? Take the University of Sydney, the oldest university in Australia, which is in close proximity to one of the newer universities, UTS. You would think that would be a corridor that should be rich, beautiful, explosive, dynamic. But I don't think it is. Glebe Point Road, I think, is a beautiful example of something that has it all. It has fabulous bookshops, it has fabulous coffee shops. It has a kind of offbeat life, and that is very much what I think creative minds are attracted to.

"But - and here's the tragedy, and I don't know how to say this in a positive way - it's becoming a dangerous place. Bag-snatchers, homes being broken into, and things like that. It's utterly crucial that the city devises creative ways to make these places safe, because when they crumble, the whole edifice crumbles. I feel very strongly that areas around universities have got to be protected, because they are the lifeblood of this nation. That's how Route 128 in Boston works, that's how Silicon Valley works. We're talking not about little businesses, we're talking about trillion-dollar businesses that have fed off universities and the beautiful environments around them.

"So my message to the mayor of this city is that all effort should go into ensuring a vibrant, safe environment around universities. The great nations of the future will be those that export the products of the mind, so if Australia is to be something, Sydney has got to be a driving force in attracting those minds. Otherwise they'll go elsewhere.

"What would I change about Sydney? I would empower some visionary think tank to invent ways to drop cars by 50 per cent. I think the car problem is one of the biggest issues facing the city. This business about safety is important too: are we going in the direction of New York City?

"The stereotype is that it's non-intellectual. I wouldn't call Sydney anti-intellectual, ever. It is non-intellectual, but it's very much more intellectual than it was 20 years ago. First of all, 30 years ago, no one went to university so there's a big change to begin with. I lived at Harvard Square for years. I don't feel it's as intellectual here, that's for sure. But I think it's growing.''

Maxine McKew

One of Australia's most respected journalists, McKew is a regular presenter on the ABC's Lateline and reporter on The 7.30 Report. This year, she is also writing for the foreign policy journal, The Diplomat.

"I'm on the board of the Research Institute for Asia & the Pacific at Sydney University, which does terrific work but hasn't a high profile in the city. It's not traditionally been a big city for think tanks, but that might start to change with the Lowy Institute. I've never completely bought the line that this is a city where there's nothing between the ears. Look at the Writers' Festival.

"My take on Sydney is a simple one. I have been, up until the last 11 years, a

gypsy all my professional life. I grew up in Brisbane and lived in Adelaide, Canberra, Washington, New York. It's a cliche, but Sydney is the closest we have to New York, in that it's a big, anonymous city and it's the most welcoming city to gypsies and itinerants. Sydney doesn't care where you came from. It's much more crass than that. It's what do you do, and what's your postcode? Whereas Brisbane and Melbourne are still, what school did you go to? That can be pretty superficial, but it's also brutally meritocratic. And I rather like that about Sydney.

"I do think it's fascinating that we have a premier, Bob Carr, who gets raves from people who go to writers' festivals, but he's the guy who can't keep the trains running. It's interesting that Sydney has thrown up a leader like that, because Sydney's image is brash, brutal, and vulgar - and Carr is none of those things.

"My partner is from Melbourne originally and we go there a lot. If you want a tale of two cities, for me Melbourne is a city of wonderful intimate interiors, where a certain kind of intense conversation can take place. Whereas I see Sydney as an exterior city that encourages a lightness of being - but a very bearable one. What keeps me here is its overwhelming physical beauty, which just keeps seducing me.

"What would I change about Sydney? Get half the cars off the road. Get the cars out of the inner city. Much as it pains me, I would support any move to make parking places and fees even more prohibitive in the city. And a light rail. And get the buses out as well.

"I love the summers. The diversity. My favourite walk every morning is from Mosman Bay to Cremorne Point and back again. It's just beautiful. Sydney does glisten in the sunlight. This is a town where I can do the things that I like: fine music, good bookshops, lovely walks, lovely places to catch up with friends. It satisfies the hedonist in me without denying any of the other finer instincts.

"Certainly, and this is more and more true, it's an international city. You feel at the centre of things. I think it's Leo Schofield's line that Sydney is unique in that it's both a thriving CBD and a resort. Ten minutes from the CBD, you are at the beach. There aren't many cities that combine that." (s)

© 2005 Sydney Morning Herald

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