Louis Nowra - Sydney: A Biography

Louis Nowra is a playwright, novelist, essayist and screenwriter. Some of his plays are Inner Voices, The Golden Age, Inside the Island, The Boyce Trilogy, Radiance and The Lewis Trilogy (Summer of the Aliens, Cos, This Much is True). Screen credits include Map of the Human Heart, Radiance, Black and White, Heavens Burning, K-19: The Widowmaker and Cos. His novels are The Misery of Beauty, Palu, Red Nights, Abaza and Ice. He was the principal writer for the 2008 television series First Australians and has written two memoirs, The Twelfth of Never and Shooting the Moon. With Mandy Sayer, he co-edited the influential anthology about Kings Cross, In the Gutter Looking at the Stars. His recent non-fiction includes Kings Cross: a biography (2013), Woolloomooloo: a biography (2017), fiction Into that Forest, Prince of Afghanistan and Collected Stories, plus the Audible audio dramas The Divine Hammer, The Goodbye Party and Beatrice Dark. He lives on the border between Kings Cross and Woolloomooloo and is married to the writer Mandy Sayer.

Craig Handley, Karoline Chardon and Ali Nasseri were my helpful guides. Philip Drew, architectural researcher and critic was incisive about architecture and Harry Seidler. Paul Ashton, Adjunct Professor of Public History at UTS, provided invaluable feedback. Many thanks to Ben Naparstek, who commissioned two Amazon Audible audio dramas, The Goodbye Party and Beatrice Dark, little realising I was drawing on much of what I had learned about Sydney during the researching of this book. Many thanks to Phillipa McGuinness who originally commissioned the book, Elspeth Menzies who saw it through, and of course Linda Funnell, whose editorial gifts have helped make my previous two books, Kings Cross: a biography and Woolloomooloo: a biography, better than I could have expected and, as for this one, her brilliant editing and cutting were razor-sharp, invaluable and very much appreciated. As they say, in the classics, all mistakes are mine. And, lastly, my wife, Mandy, who believed in it and had to live with it.

This biography of Sydney is told through three strands: the first is its chronological history, the second considers some of its spaces and places, and the third consists of themes such as sandstone or water. Its through these entwining strands that I tell the story of a constantly evolving city.

Given the huge number of existing suburbs, my four chapters on certain suburbs have been arrived at through choosing, via accident or design, one from each point of the compass, in the hope that they add a special flavour to the history of Sydney as a whole. The first two volumes of this trilogy, Kings Cross: a biography and Woolloomooloo: a biography cover those two suburbs, so I dont duplicate the material here.

My Sydney is basically bounded by Chippendale, Redfern, Ultimo, Walsh Bay, the harbour, Surry Hills, Woolloomooloo and, of course, the Rocks.

IN THE EARLY MONTHS OF LIVING IN SYDNEY I used to visit the Tank Stream bookshop, and the eponymous slightly tacky arcade near the corner of King and Pitt streets. I was puzzled by the name and it took me some time to understand its significance.

The stream is invisible now, and to see it you must go underground, where it is an anaemic version of its former self. Yet this dismal trickle that winds its way through narrow tunnels beneath the high-rise buildings of Pitt and George streets is the reason for Sydneys location.

It soon became clear to Governor Arthur Phillip after the First Fleet anchored in Botany Bay in January 1788 that this wasnt the Edenic harbour Sir Joseph Banks had painted. The bay was exposed to capricious storms and harsh winds, and there was little fresh water to be found for the 1035 men, women and children waiting to disembark in the heat of summer. Just a few miles north another harbour was marked on Captain Cooks map of the east coast, one Cook hadnt entered. Phillip decided to explore it.

The small crew rowed into Port Jackson, amazed by its beauty and its obvious shelter for ships, unlike the open water of Botany Bay. They slowly moved up the harbour, inspecting the many peninsulas, coves and inlets, examining possible anchorage sites for the fleet, hoping to find one that had a ready supply of fresh water. Eleven kilometres into the harbour, after rounding what is now called Bennelong Point, they came upon a cove that was not only deep enough to accommodate the largest ships but, more importantly, had a stream, one more like a rivulet than a river. To Phillip, there was none finer to be found in any of the coves of the harbour. It was exactly the location he needed for the settlement. As David Collins, the deputy judge advocate, put it, the site was at the head of the cove, near the run of fresh water which stole silently along through a very thick wood. At the time the stream was 40 metres wide and at high tide schooners would travel up to what is now Bridge Street. This stream was so important, it would even influence Sydneys social fabric.

The waters source lay in a swampy spring a mile away on a hill in the centre of what is now Hyde Park. The stream, its banks lined with trees, dropped some 30 metres as it meandered northward over sandstone rocks and through a series of small waterfalls to King Street where, sustained by two springs, one at King Street and another at eponymous Spring Street, it flowed directly to Bridge Street, which at that time was the head of a tidal estuary. If you were to dig down around the flagstones of the present-day Customs House, you would find the sandy beach of the original Sydney Cove shoreline.

The new arrivals cared little, if at all, that this creek was also used by the Gadigal people who drank its fresh water, fished from it, and used the bark of the trees on its banks for their canoes. Proof of their occupation has been seen in recent excavations around the stream that have uncovered flaked stone artefacts made from water-worn pebbles.

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In October 1788 a timber bridge was built to span the water at the head of the cove (the site of what is now Bridge Street). However, this proved less solid than expected when an overloaded bullock wagon broke the decking and put the bridge out of action for some time. But the bridge did provide a crucial connection between the two sections of the settlement, with the convicts and soldiers on the western side, and Governor Phillip and colonial officials on the other. This division continues today, with the wealthy congregating in the eastern suburbs, the less fortunate in the west.

It soon became apparent to Phillip that the stream was a precarious resource for the colony and in March, just two months after landing, he decreed:

The run of water which supplies the Settlement was observed to be only a drain from the swamp. To protect it from the sun, the governor forbids the cutting down of any tree within 50 feet of the run.

When a drought came early on in the settlement, it was clear that the precious stream was drying up. In February 1791 soldier and surveyor Augustus Alt deepened the stream near Bridge Street; by November water restrictions were introduced. In his account of the early years of the settlement, David Collins wrote about these fraught times and Phillips solution:

By the dry weather which prevailed the water had been so much affected, besides being lessened by the water of some [ships], that a prohibition was laid by the governor, on the watering of the remainder of Sydney to remedy this evil, the governor had employed the stone masons gang to cut tanks out of the rock which would be reservoirs for the water large enough to supply the settlement for some time.