There is a pleasure for readers in walking streets known from the pages of books. Taking literary walking tours in London, Paris, New York or Dublin, readers conjure the worlds of Woolf, Hemingway, Whitman or Joyce. We move through the streets in the here and now, but also amid characters from other times and versions of the city. Our cities are given back to us, expanded and enriched.
Australian writing, once dominated by European settler bush mythologies, has in recent decades seen a major focus on urban and suburban lives. We know ourselves now through the Melbourne of Tony Birch, Helen Garner and Christos Tsiolkas; the Brisbane of David Malouf, Andrew McGahan and Ellen van Neerven; the Perth of Sally Morgan, Tim Winton and Robert Drewe.
The explosion of urban writing set in the cities and towns of Australia allows us to walk amid history, subcultures and alternative visions of urban places – these other lives of the city mingling with our own.
As a reader and a writer, I am fascinated by how writers know and imagine cities. In Sydney, the city in which I’ve lived for nearly 30 years, writing has sprung up over that time from every corner, and from communities previously underrepresented in Australian literature.
In addition to the Sydney of 20th-century writers like Kenneth Slessor, Patrick White, Ruth Park and Jessica Anderson, we now have the endless riches of the city’s First Nations and diasporic writers.
We learn of Aboriginal sovereignty and activism in Larissa Behrendt’s novels of the inner city. Vivian Pham’s Coconut Children tells of a Vietnamese-Australian childhood in Cabramatta. In Amnesty, Booker Prize-winner Aravind Adiga introduces us to a Sri Lankan asylum seeker slipping by unseen on the streets of Glebe and Newtown. To read these books is to know the city in ways we did not before.
Wanting to know more about how writers know cities, I embarked on a project – Walking Sydney – an extended literary walking tour that unearths the histories and lives, real and imagined, of the many very different areas of Sydney amid the rapidly changing forms of a contemporary city.
There is a strong tradition of walking to understand cities. Proponents of psychogeography urge us to “get lost” in the city, to resist its commercial imperatives in “drifts”, as the French theorist Guy Debord termed these counterflows.
In this way, we can go beyond surfaces, understanding the city as palimpsest, seeing through to deeper meanings.
Walking with writers allowed me to see the city differently. Just as reading books empowers us to know what it means to be human beyond our own limited perspective, reading the city through the eyes of others helped me see the city anew.
Walking slowly and respectfully on Country
The first walk was on Gadigal land with poet, filmmaker and artist Jazz Money, of Wiradjuri and Irish heritage. We strolled around the old railway yards of Carriageworks in Eveleigh. The broad flat lot of massive brickwork sheds is now the site of markets, theatre and festivals – including the Sydney Writers’ Festival.
Jazz’s poetry, though, is ever conscious of Australian places, including cities, as Country.
On our walk, Jazz explains that before colonisation, this was a gathering place for local community, a vantage point from which you could see the water to the east, with valuable ochre pits all around.
It is an important place in more recent history too; thousands of workers came from far afield to work in the railyards, a large proportion of them Aboriginal, and so the inner-south of Sydney has been heartland for much of the city’s history.
As we walk among the repurposed buildings and through the streets of terraces and workers’ cottages, a poem of Jazz’s provides context for the site’s colonial history. £100,000, previously presented as a site-specific work in the Carriageworks gallery, tells the story of the sale of this land for a vast sum.
The site was once the estate of James Chisholm, a soldier involved in quelling Aboriginal resistance on the Hawkesbury. His family sold the land to the New South Wales government in the 19th century for the construction of the railyards. In the poem, Jazz commemorates the loss and desecration of stolen Country for the purposes of industry:
a place all riches all sand dune water way banksia safe of ceremony of song of care of always
wiped razed and poured.
Reflecting on the stories and art that remind us of the true histories of the lands on which we walk, Jazz explains the Wiradjuri concept of Yindyamarra: “at its simplest it means to go slowly and respectfully”.
Thinking and being with this in mind allows Jazz to understand the knowledge contained and expressed by place:
If you’re interested in story, and the way that stories operate, there isn’t a square centimetre of this continent that isn’t rich with it, and with story that goes back to the first sunrise.
Razor gangs and warehouse parties
In another post-industrial inner suburb, Surry Hills, different histories unfold among the steep streets of terraces and former warehouses and factories.
Fiona Kelly McGregor, writer, artist and critic, is the author of Iris, based on the life of petty criminal Iris Weber, once dubbed “the most violent woman in Sydney”. As well as a gripping novel, Iris is an important work of queer history, providing a fresh angle on the familiar story of razor gangs and sly groggeries of Depression-era Sydney.
As we walk among the streets of Iris and associates’ criminal activities and violent altercations, Fiona explains the appeal of this figure. She had always been interested in the interwar period, its politics and art.
It was an era in which it seemed as though queer people had “a kind of cultural community in some parts of the world”. But “it’s hard to find working-class women who lived openly as queer […] to discover someone from this grungy old working-class criminal world who was open about her relationships with women – I’d never found anything like that anywhere”.
The stories Fiona tells as we walk the steep streets infuses them with Iris’s story – of shootings and violence, but also of Black Ada’s: dancing academy by day, queer club by night.
She speaks too of her own artistic and social life in this place. We move among vivid threads of memory: warehouse parties at the turn of the millennium, friendship, music, art. When Fiona walks through these streets, laid over with her memories and discoveries, she finds them “boiling with layers of life”.
Irrepressible geography
A distinctive feature of Sydney is its dramatic topography and natural life. Delia Falconer, in her personal account Sydney, writes of its sandstone cliffs and its “water, which penetrates the city with bright fingers, filters constantly through its foundations, and weighs down the air”.
Walking from Rushcutters Bay Park up through Elizabeth Bay towards Kings Cross, we are walking through the deep time of geological change, known and experienced by the area’s Aboriginal people, and the more recent bohemian and literary history of the art-deco apartments climbing towards the gritty glamour of Kings Cross. This is the Sydney of Kenneth Slessor, Sumner Locke Elliot and countless other writers, artists and adventurers.
Delia, whose recent essays are concerned with the threat to our natural world from climate change, takes us on a favourite circuit.
We visit stands of trees and flying fox colonies, “checking to see if everyone’s home”. She notes the “Milo-like” layer of seeds and crushed fruit under the Moreton Bay figs in summer, the flaky paperbarks, the barnacles clinging to the seawall.
Everywhere, colonial attempts to shape and give order to the land are evident: the curved sandstone wall of Rushcutters Bay Park, its flat green lawns where once were rushes; the grand form of Elizabeth Bay House looking out over the Harbour, with the remnants of its formal gardens tucked between apartment buildings in the form of exotic trees and hidden grottos.
It is an area that has, since its bohemian days, “seen a seismic shift socioeconomically, but there’s something hard to contain and irrepressible about the geography itself”.
Book bazaars and goth picnics
No stranger to an urban walk among the curiosities and layers of time is writer, artist and zine-maker Vanessa Berry. In her blog and book Mirror Sydney, Vanessa chronicles the curiosities of Sydney’s past and present. In doing so, she unearths deep significance in the overlooked corners of the city.
A walk from the city end of King Street to Sydney Park in St Peters takes us through the heart of Newtown, with its colourful Victorian terraces and grand old theatres. Above the shop awnings, the walls are adorned with street art and sprouting with hardy ferns.
We begin at the old Gould’s Book Arcade, empty now, but for decades a chaotic bazaar of used books, run by anti-Vietnam war campaigner and socialist Bob Gould.
When the shop lost its lease, there was community outcry. As Vanessa explains:
Something happens as certain shops become more than a commercial enterprise in people’s minds […] You’re losing a place where you could go and feel connected with a world, or a subculture.
King Street and the surrounding area enjoy many such points of connection: the “I have a dream mural” near the junction with Enmore Road, the graveyard at Camperdown Memorial Park where the goth kids gather, the street’s pubs and restaurants, its second-hand bookstores.
Vanessa points out the curious shop windows, the old theatres, the op shops that lure wanderers in to browse their treasures. We finish our stroll at Sydney Park in St Peters, where raves and punks’ picnics used to pop up amid the brickwork towers.
Different scenes and sites animate the area now, but it is one of those places that continues to draw waves of young people, seeking a home in the city, finding their tribe.
Ancient way, modern city
Parramatta, named for the Burramattagal, a clan of the Dharug people, feels simultaneously old and new. The ancient river, once rich with the eels that gave the local people their name, winds through a site of continual urban renewal.
Turkish-Australian writer and researcher Eda Gunaydin is an observant guide to this dynamic area of Sydney. She has written about Parramatta in her essay Second City as the “home ground” of her Blacktown childhood, and as a place of rapid development and social change.
Eda notes different representations of authority as we make a circuit: the large and busy court district, the police in Parramatta Square, and Old Government House in Parramatta Park, an imposing early site of colonial presence.
Parramatta’s streets are full of striking contrasts. Our walk takes us past the Lancer Barracks, the oldest army barracks on mainland Australia and the next-door neighbour to New South Wales’ first high rise school, Arthur Phillip. Around the corner on George Street, the Spanish Baroque Roxy Theatre clings on at the edge of the huge construction zone for the Metro West project.
Eda discusses the shifts in her “mental geography” brought about by Parramatta’s continual development. We navigate construction sites and dead ends, the once familiar streets re-forming around us.
As well as a place of rapid urban development, Parramatta is a vibrant site of art and community. At Phive and Riverside Theatres, Eda has staged community arts events with Finishing School Collective, a group of women writers gathering the art and storytelling of western Sydney and beyond.
It’s a place, too, where the deeper past is visible if you know where to look. In the riverside park, within sight of the huge new stadium, Eda points out a stand of “scar trees”, from which the Burramatta people used bark for canoes.
Eda explains that what she finds so striking about the trees
is that you get a sense of just how recently this place was colonised […] Parramatta has some of the oldest colonial history in New South Wales and it’s still not particularly old.
Slowing down to experience deep time
In these walks and the many others I took with writers, it was the slow, drifting quality of walking and reading the city together that revealed its layers of meaning.
Writer, teacher and traveller Beth Yahp, walking on the windblown cliff path between Bronte and Clovelly, discussed the importance of
slow[ing] down your walk to the point that you feel each part of your foot on the ground […] it forces you into a different experience of time. The world becomes different.
This was especially the case in the walks I took with First Nations writers. Moving slowly through urban and suburban streets opened up a sense of time much deeper than the perpetual rush of the city clock.
My final walk, through the city and Redfern with writer, filmmaker and law professor Larissa Behrendt, left me to reflect on the fact of Aboriginal creativity and endurance over tens of millennia:
To be part of the world’s oldest living culture is miraculous […] Those places are still here […] We’re still here.
This essay was adapted from Walking Sydney: Fifteen walks with a city’s writers (University of New South Wales Press)
Belinda Castles has funding from Creative Australia and City of Sydney for this project.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
