Australia’s troubadour laureate, Paul Kelly, sings of a Sydney in sunshine that’s “cold as sin”.
“Everyone walks leaning into the wind.”
You need to live here for a while to understand how poignant this truth is.
If you haven’t, if you’ve only relished the sun on your skin and seen our clear, cloudless sky from the deck of a green and gold ferry on the azure harbour while on summer holiday or on tourism TV from the northern hemisphere, you’ll never know the occasional bitterness of a Sydney winter.
And this – now that Sydney’s Covid-19 lockdown has been extended because of the ever-spreading Delta strain – is to be the most bitter, the most discontented of the glimmering city’s winters.
It’s raining outside right now. Unseasonably cold. The shimmering dark roads – including the usually crammed six-lane arterials – are sparse with traffic. The footpaths are empty and the shops that remained open during Sydney’s lockdown lite – for lingerie and luxury handbags and all sorts of other discretionary “essentials” – are shuttering.
The mood is sombre. An emotional ennui is descending upon the city to match the dreary weather. It promises to thicken like the heavy fogs that, unusually, for three consecutive mornings last week, enveloped the harbour.
Suddenly the lockdown is a tough one. Almost as brutal as Melbourne’s notorious ones and those we’ve observed with horror and disbelief in London and elsewhere.
Households can’t mix. Only one family member should go to the supermarket. Exercise must only be taken within 10km of home. Definitionally, exercise itself can no longer extend to an al fresco picnic for 15, touchless touch rugby for 12 or a barbecue with extended family in the local park.
Without the traffic, without the planes, you could almost hear the heavy metallic echo on Friday as premier Gladys Berejiklian ever so reluctantly twisted the key inside Sydney’s heavy new lock.
On Thursday, in contrast, as I walked the dogs by the harbour, people were everywhere, cheek-by-jowl, strolling the bridges in perspiring pelotons of a dozen, mask-less and bare-skinned, aspirating blithely on lovers and strangers alike.
It was as if many about the harbourside felt inured to the virus that was well out of the bag and spreading like a Mallee grassfire through south-west Sydney – geographically close as the cockatoo flies, though effectively a continent away in the great socio-, wealth- and ethnic-divide that is greater Sydney. Never mind that super-virulent Delta first escaped the bag in the prosperous east. It was as if this was a city of two viruses, where the first had been beaten and the other was another city’s problem. That’s Sydney through and through.
I got out of there, choosing doggy solitude and the reassurance of less scenic, near deserted residential streets. I walked and I listened, as I have daily this past fortnight of Claytons lockdown, to the callers on talkback radio. The emotional temperature was rising, the division ever more acute between those appalled that the state government was unwilling to lock the city down harder and others decrying the looming erosion of liberty who said we needed no hard, enforced rules to take collective responsibility for combatting the virus.
Sydney is many things to many. Including a hedonist’s paradise. Give people the freedom to choose and they will. But tell them clearly what to do and they usually will, as evidenced by the way huge crowds decorously, albeit drunkenly, behave on that most telegenic of global moments, New Year’s Eve around the harbour.
Now the rules, enforced by a far heavier police presence, are clear. While the future is anything but.
And, so, we stay indoors, as the rain pours down outside. And look inwards and elsewhere to find the light and the colour that might get us through this early stage of real lockdown.
I’ve lived through a few glorious English summers of balmy days and endless luminous twilights. But I’ve never pondered the possibility that, having moved to glorious, glowing Sydney with its languorous summers and mostly mild winters, I’d look back to London for warmth and mood stabilisation.
But this weekend, as the rain glistens on Sydney’s dark, cold empty streets, I’ll be finding warmth in SW19 and HA19, the two W’s – Wimbledon and Wembley. Ash Barty already bears the weight of national hope on her shoulders as she contests Saturday’s final. But what – oh what – a gift of warmth to sullen, anxious Sydney her victory would be. No pressure, Ash.
And then to the men’s final on Sunday evening here before England versus Italy on Monday morning our time.
There will be the people of London, after their nation’s near criminally imperfect Covid response, emergent from so much of the austerity and suffering. There will be the vaccinated Londoners on our TVs as they mingle, relishing life, having emerged from their own anxious, bitter winter of discontent. Just as we, the great unvaccinated, enter ours.
I’ll smile for them. A little enviously.
And when Wimbledon and the European Championship final are over next Monday, some of us will wander out to a clearer day with a little reassurance that, no matter how difficult things may yet become, there will, eventually, be light.
We will, meanwhile, lean into the wind.
