Monthly Archives: April 2018

A tale of one city

26 Thursday Apr 2018

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Up until 1787 Warrane was an important food source for about 30 clans. In 1788, part of the area occupied by the Cadigal was suddenly called ‘Sydney Cove’ instead of Warrane. Suddenly more than a thousand people (accounts vary) had to be fed and housed and subdued in this area. By 1860 – only a lifespan of 72 years later – there were 95,789 people in Sydney, and it provided everything from grand houses to workers’ cottages to slums. The housing and population booms of the next two decades brought the population up to 224,939 in 1880, a figure which itself was nearly doubled by 1890 to 383,283 and ‘Sydney’ covered an area of more than ‘150 square miles’.[i]

‘Sydney’, as defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (the Sydney Statistical Division), spreads from the east coast to Blackheath and Mt Victoria in the west, Bargo in the south and the bottom of Lake Macquarie in the north.[ii]It covers an area of over 12,000 square kilometres and has a population of just over 5 million – nearly two-thirds of the population in 1.5% of the area of NSW.[iii]

Various schemes have tried to impose order on this expansion. The first governor, Governor Philip, devised a plan for the town, specifying the size of the allotments and streets, even protecting the environs of the Tank Stream by a band of 15 metres on either side that was not to be used for tree-cutting or cattle-grazing. When Philip left in 1792 his plans and orders lost their potency, setting the pattern for ideals with short lives.

Marjorie Barnard described Sydney in 1947 as a creation of profiteering and ostentation.

Macquarie’s was the last effort to plan Sydney. After him it just grew. It accumulated amenities and swelled to the idea of progress. Profiteering and ostentation left their marks indelible and heavy on the material fabric of the city. The well-to-do and worthy citizens – it was overwhelmingly their city – made no concessions to geography or climate. They built a city in the spirit of no surrender.[iv]

Mrs Charles Meredith, travelling with her husband in 1839, noted the ‘spirit of no surrender’, as well as the ‘ostentation’: “I never saw any native fish at a Sydney dinner-table – the preserved or cured cod and salmon from England being served instead, at a considerable expense, and, to my taste, it is not comparable with the cheap fresh fish, but being expensive, it has become ‘fashionable’, and that circumstance reconciles all things.”[v]

But Macquarie’s wasn’t the last to attempt to plan Sydney. After over a hundred years of private developers, a Royal Commission for the Improvement of Sydney and Its Suburbsin 1909 produced recommendations for improvements to roads, public transport, slums, children’s playgrounds and building regulations. Private individuals in the 1910s lobbied to improve life for the masses through improved public health, housing, transport and civic design. ‘City beautiful’ ideas and reforms in cities in Europe and America inspired developments around Australia, with soldier repatriation after WW1 becoming a major theme of town planning.

In 1946 a new body, theCumberland County Council, was set up.The 1948 Cumberland County Council planbecame state policy in 1951, but the push from land developers, keen to cash in on the attraction of suburban living and the new goals of consumerism, and the state government’s own Housing Commission, saw encroachments on the ‘green belts’. Cars and highways were favoured over public transport, suburbs over decentralisation.

Plans for Sydney have proliferated since: in 1968, Sydney Region Outline Plan, in 1988, Sydney into Its Third Century, in 1995,Cities for the 21stCentury, in 1997, A Framework for Growth and Change.[vi]In 2010 it was Investing in a Better Future, which had a certain hopeful ring about it, but in March 2018 the Dickensian-sounding A Metropolis of Three Citieswas launched. ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness …’

 

[i]Ashton, P & Waterson, D. Sydney takes shape: a history in maps. Hema Maps, 2000, p78

[ii]http://www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/ausstats/nrpmaps.nsf/NEW+GmapPages/national+regional+profile?opendocumentviewed 26/4/18

[iii]http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/1338.1Main+Features9Dec+2010

[iv]The Sydney Book. Written by Marjorie Barnard, drawings by Sydney Ure Smith. Ure Smith, 1947, p22.

[v]Mrs Charles Meredith, Notes and Sketches of New South Wales. First published by John Murray 1844. Facsimile edition Penguin Books 1973. P43.

[vi]The Australian metropolis: a planning history. S Hamnett and R Freestone (eds). Allen & Unwin, 2000.

Terra nullius

20 Friday Apr 2018

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A ferry ride on Sydney Harbour is always a little holiday, a period of delight, rocking gently on the waves while the glinting buildings, the swathes of bushland, the waves at the shore, the yachts and warships and tugs and cruisers pass by.

Today is no exception. The ferry chugs its way out of Circular Quay, past the exuberant flamboyance of the Opera House. I’ve seen it blue, and pink; covered in paisley patterns and butterflies; I’ve seen it with ‘No War’ gallantly painted on its sails, the red paint dripping. Today it is gleaming white.

The point on which it stands, Bennelong Point, was named for Bennelong, an Aboriginal man of the Wangal people captured by Governor Phillip in late 1789 in a desperate attempt to communicate with the Aborigines. The first Aboriginal man kidnapped for the same purpose, Arabanoo, had died of the smallpox in May 1789. A house was built for Bennelong on Bennelong Point; since then, it has been Fort Macquarie, and a tram shed.

Fort Denison comes into view on our right hand side and the woman behind us excitedly tells her little girl, ‘That’s Fort Denison. We can go there too. That was here when the convicts used to come to Australia. Before anyone was here.’ The myth of terra nullius, so convenient in the 19thcentury, rejected in the Australian High Court in 1992, lives on.

It’s not true that no-one was here before ‘the convicts used to come to Australia’.

[there were] Colbee … Bereewan, Bondel, Imeerawanyee, Deedora, Wolarawaree, or Baneelon, among the men; … Wereeweea, Gooreedeeana, Milba, or Matilba, among the women. Parramatta, Gweea, Cameera, Cadi, and Memel, are names of places.[i]

The Cadigal, the people whose land was immediately usurped by the colonists, was a clan of about 60 people. Jakelin Troy calls their language ‘the Sydney language’, and defines it as being spoken by a tribe that lived across an area from the coast to the Hawkesbury and Nepean Rivers to the north and west, and as far south as Appin[ii]. According to Troy there were at least two dialects of the Sydney Language spoken by the various clans within the tribe, and the name ‘Eora’ or ‘Iyora’ is now given to the people who lived on the coast, and their dialect[iii]. A number of the early colonists were interested to record this language, despite the difficulties on both sides in understanding particular sounds. Troy points out that only the officers of the First Fleet recorded the Sydney Language. A contact language, New South Wales pidgin, rapidly took its place. The Aboriginal people were much more linguistically adept than the British, picking up both English and the pidgin. David Collins (deputy judge-advocate in Sydney 1788-1796) wrote in April 1792 that the Aboriginals, “conversed with us in a mutilated and incorrect language formed entirely on our imperfect knowledge and improper application of their words.”[iv]

Jakelin Troy’s book, The Sydney Language, provides a 50 page wordlist, bringing to life the people who spoke the language. Their words for people and kin, body parts, weapons, implements and other made objects, plants and animals show the priorities that they had – three words for different types of baskets, four types of shields, ten types of spears.  They had five different ways of saying ‘stop’, from ‘wari wari’, meaning to stop something being done that you don’t like, to ‘mayalya’ meaning ‘a little stop’.  It’s when you read their words for tickle (‘gidi gidi’), shiver, embrace, afraid, pick teeth, laugh, sexual desire, breathe, snore, love … that you feel the connection.[v]

 

[i]Tench, W. 1788. First published 1789 and 1793. Reproduced in Flannery, T, Two Classic Tales of Australian Exploration. Text Publishing, 2002, p265.

[ii]Troy, J. The Sydney Language. Produced with the assistance of the Australian Dictionaries project and AIATSIS, Canberra 1993 p8.

[iii]Troy, J. The Sydney Language. Produced with the assistance of the Australian Dictionaries project and AIATSIS, Canberra 1993 p9.

[iv]Collins, 28 April 1792. Quoted in Jack Egan, Buried alive: Sydney 1788-92, Allen & Unwin 1999 p287.

[v]Troy, J. The Sydney Language. Produced with the assistance of the Australian Dictionaries project and AIATSIS, Canberra 1993 p33-84.

The farm

20 Friday Apr 2018

Posted by in At the farm

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In 2002 I bought a farm with two other people. Nine hundred acres of beauty. One failed friendship, one wedding and hundreds of phone calls later, we had permission from the local council to establish a community with eight houses. A further five years after that, on September 7, 2012, I sat at my desk, in my new house, for the first time. The farm project had started for me with a vision of a desk, with a large window and a large view outside. The vision hadn’t included the years of negotiation and discussion, of obstructive agencies and files that go ‘missing’. It hadn’t included the turmoil and heat of decision-making. But on September 7, 2012, at my desk, as I had imagined, there was an eagle high up in the sky, drifting on the air currents. The wind had been blowing, gusting all day but had finally calmed, and the eagle was gliding without being buffeted around. The trees were almost still, with the occasional shake a reminder of the day’s wildness.

Now that dream is over. Our share in the farm is sold, and someone else will be living in our house. They will see the bluewrens and the firetails. They will see frogs on the windows and snakes in the garden. They will hear wallabies at night, and watch the kookaburras ring the house, on gutters and fenceposts, at the right time of year. I hope they fill the birdbath with water, and let the swallows roost under the eaves.