Many years ago I started writing a book about Sydney. Now that unpublished book has become the Seeking Sydney podcast. It looks at parts of Sydney, then looks at them again, adding the layers of people and stories. It is not a history, although it draws on histories. It is not an attempt to lay down facts as solid objects, but it does rely on truths – the truths of observation. This is a recording of Sydney as I, and others, see, hear and remember it. Together we show where it has come from, and the past that it relies on for its existence. History’s web of connections stretches tight, and that’s what interests me.

Seeking Sydney comes from reading something like this.

The University grounds are on part of a broad ridge system which forms the watershed between Port Jackson and Botany Bay. An arm of the ridge system extends north from the watershed down between Blackwattle Bay and Rozelle Bay and their respective tributaries.[i] 

That makes me rethink everything. To me, the university grounds (University of Sydney) are not ever ‘part of a broad ridge system’. Nor is that high bit of Sydney, for me, ‘the watershed between Port Jackson Bay and Botany Bay’. The University of Sydney is a cluttered collection of buildings and people, with narrow winding roads that I can only negotiate to reach Fisher Library. The university grounds are the bits of lawn and road that I walk through to get to the books.

Seeking Sydney also comes from reading something like this.

Albions? For kids who lived on the southside, Albions were regarded as queer old buses from the north. They didn’t even sound like buses. After all, we came from Leyland territory and Leylands sounded like a bus should. Any contact with an Albion was almost always an unfortunate experience, usually associated with homeward journeys on hot summer Sundays …[ii]

This shows me how big Sydney is, with groupings and tribes running across any number of lines – in this case, the type of bus you catch.

And then Sydney is small – small enough for me to be reading a book about one 19^th century businessman – Thomas Holt – at night, while researching the University of Sydney during the day, and discovering that Holt and William Windeyer and John Le Gay Brereton (the father) all shared a passion for Turkish baths.

And Seeking Sydney comes from standing in a field in Brittany, France, and looking at megaliths that are, at most, 7000 years old – megaliths that are viewed by countless numbers of people every year, revered for their age and mystery – and knowing that back home in Australia we have much more ancient carvings and paintings. We can see them on rock ledges, in caves and overhangs, and they have a direct link to a living culture.

It’s thrilling to finally see this project come to life, and in a different form to what I originally intended. Thanks to Bronwyn Mehan of Spineless Wonders for suggesting a podcast in the first place; thanks to Martin Gallagher of Echidna Audio for sound design and to Zoe Hercus for recording the studio interviews, and for publicity. Thanks to Bettina Kaiser for the wonderful artwork. Thanks to all the people I interviewed. I’m sorry I had to cut out any of your words. They were all so inspiring.

---

[i] http://www.facilities.usyd.edu.au/documents/docs/gcp_chapter2.pdf. Summary History Of The Development Of The University Of Sydney

[ii] Neil Munro quoted in Greg Travers, From City to Suburb … a fifty year journey, The Sydney Tramway Museum, 1982, p164.