Sydney: the beauty and the vice - description of the city and its history - Brief Article

What happens when you live in a city that's a travel agent's dream? You start seeing yourself through tourist eyes, unless you open your umbrella and follow one of the locals around. Then, the mood shifts, but the city loses none of its magnetic power

Sydney is not the city of sunshine the world imagines it to be. It's a dark town. A port town. A damp city of heavy downpours and morning fog. Whole summers can be lost under wet grey skies. Winters are brief but uncomfortable.

Everything travel brochures say about blazing skies and summer heat is true, of course, but like an aunt with a nasty temper, Sydney's character is marked by grim shifts of mood. Winter westerlies cut like a knife. The sun isn't seen for days. Rain buckets down.

Then the umbrellas appear. Even more than London, Sydney is an umbrella town because it's all we need against the weather. Overcoats would be wonderful in those few cold weeks, but in Sydney a good coat is a luxury. Even raincoats aren't strictly necessary. You can live and die without one. In the city we shelter under that most Australian urban detail: shop awnings. But we all have umbrellas.

Those who have grown up here are not surprised by the dark, contradictory moods of the place. But something has changed since the tourists arrived. At first we wondered what they had come to see. Now, more and more, we see ourselves through their commercial eyes. Downpours are a breach of promise. Cold is a civic embarrassment. Poverty and corruption must be hidden from the outside world here on a few days' visit.

Sydney has been a corrupt town since the 1790s when soldiers guarding the convicts brought rum ships down from Calcutta. Booze was the currency of the first years of the colony. Human failings have been a source of corruption ever since: drink, gambling, drugs, prostitution.... Vice has fuelled both the commerce and religions of the town.

One of the strangest contradictions of this almost-Eden is the power of preachers and their talk of damnation and the apocalypse. They fear the beauty of the place will corrupt our souls. Odd prophets appear out of the dark with messages of fear and hope. They paint their slogans on the walls. Heaven and hell are just around the corner. Sydney's light collaborates in this Old Testament mood: the sun blazing under storm clouds, or laying gold over asphalt in the early evenings. Congregations aren't dwindling here.

Beauty can corrupt. Nothing is more characteristic of Sydney than the endless commercial pressure to have a slice of the harbour: a commercial wharf, a beach or a million-dollar view of the water. From the earliest days of white settlement, governments have been selling off the harbour. Sydney has perfected every way known of turning beauty into cash.

For the citizens of this town, the Bridge and Opera House have a special meaning. They are known all over the world: a British steel bridge from the 1930s and a Scandinavian fantasy conceived in the early 1950s that have become the symbols of a South Pacific city. But for Sydney people these two are spectacular, reassuring exceptions to the rule that almost everything built on the harbour is shabby, done for the worst motives, and fails to live up to what might be the most beautiful port in the world.

Not that we spend our lives gawping at them. Just as Parisians live with the Louvre and Cape Towners with Table Mountain, we live with the Bridge and the Opera House with easy pride. We put our heads under umbrellas and slosh past in the rain, aware but not giving them a thought. We're happy--even proud--to leave gawping to the tourists. But then on a winter day of strong sun we drive across the Bridge, or we arrive at the Opera House on an autumn evening when the moon is coming up over the water, and the beauty of the place seems brand new.

But trust Sydney: the mood will change. Thank God. Who would want to live in the city of travel agents' dreams? But the real Sydney is irresistible: dark, shabby and contradictory, full of strange sights and strange voices. As I write these notes on an early winter morning, the rain is pouring down. It's time to leave for work. I've left my umbrella somewhere--who knows where? I'm going to get soaked.

OLYMPIC CITY

Founded in 1788 when 11 convict-bearing ships of Britain's first fleet arrived from England to establish the colony of New South Wales, Sydney officially became a city in 1842. Today, it is a vibrant, multicultural metropolis, which is home to four million people and over 200 nationalities. More than a quarter of its residential population was born overseas--about 28% hail from Asia, 16.5% from Britain and Ireland, 16% from southern Europe and 8.5% from the Middle East, while a further 20% are children of migrants.

During the 2000 Olympics, held from September 15 to October 1, Sydney and its iconic Harbour seized the world stage, attracting nearly four million visitors and 11,000 athletes. A further 3.5 billion television viewers followed the Games, dubbed the "best ever" by the president of the International Olympic Committee.

COPYRIGHT 2001 UNESCO
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