Sydneyside Reflections

By Mark Crimmins

An unknown writer lands in Sydney for the first time. He knows nobody and has only one goal … For ten days, his mission is to wander through the city on foot, determined always to record what he sees. Writing on beaches and park benches, in cafés and restaurants, and in long retrospective reveries in his hotel room, he clings relentlessly to his task, reflecting on the cityscape and its denizens, on its public art and neighborhoods. Day by day, page by page, he builds his portrait of a magical city by the sea, digressing into fantastic absorptions, spinning into concentric meditations, but always taking you, dear reader, with him … and making his experience yours.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Everytime Press / Bequem Publishing
• Release date: Feb 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781922427519

Book preview

Sydneyside Reflections

by Mark Crimmins

An Everytime Press eBook

Copyright

*

Sydneyside Reflections copyright © Mark Crimmins

First published as a book June 2020 by Everytime Press

Second eBook edition published February 2021

BP#00090

All rights reserved by the author and publisher. Except for brief excerpts used for review or scholarly purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without express written consent of the publisher or the author. Any historical inaccuracies are made in error.

ISBN: 978-1-922427-51-9

Everytime Press

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Sefton Park  SA  5083

Australia

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Website:  https://www.everytimepress.com

Everytime Press catalogue: 

https://www.everytimepress.com/everytime-press-catalogue

Author photograph by Jennifer Gresham, used by permission

Cover photograph copyright © Patty Jansen

Cover design copyright © Matt Potter

Also available in paperback

ISBN: 978-1-925536-07-2

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Everytime Press is a member of the Bequem Publishing collective  http://www.bequempublishing.com/

Dedication

*

For my father

Dennis Crimmins,

who taught me to read,

who took me

with endless patience

to bookshops and libraries

when I was young,

and who continues

to set an amazing example

of the reading life

and the love of words.

Contents

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Day One

Day Two

Day Three

Day Four

Day Five

Day Six

Day Seven

Day Eight

Day Nine

Day Ten

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Day One

25th January 2019

*

3:30 PM

You zoom out of your Sydney Hotel, turn right onto George Street, walk to the corner of Market Street, turn left, listen to the old musician playing classical guitar on the corner of Market and York, turn left again onto York and then head along the western façade of the Queen Victoria Building. You turn left into the beautiful old building and make a beeline for the Metropole, ordering a ‘French K.I.S.S. Sourdough Baguette’ sandwich, liking the sound of it: Serrano Ham With Camembert Cheese and Fresh Tomato. Even the ‘with’ is capitalised! The meal comes with a fantastic sort of Greek salad coleslaw. You are light-headed with hunger and to some extent ‘out of it,’ bewildered, not jet lagged exactly—for there is no jet lag, supposedly, when you go north to south from Hong Kong to Sydney. But you flew through the night. Anyway, you are exhausted, sleep-deprived, discombobulated, tentative, wonky. However, if you could turn a symphony into a sandwich, it would be (the sandwich) this French baguette with camembert and Serrano ham that you are eating.

Shoppers swirl around you as you crunch and munch the beautiful sandwich that—when you first glimpsed it—reminded you of Paris. You sip your coffee, the eighty percent of it that is left over from the spill that occurred when you tried to make room for your computer on this little table by the cast iron railing, just beneath the uppermost part of the mirrored underside of the escalator leading from this floor to the one above. The mirrors, you soon realise, are there to reflect the splendid tiled mosaics of the basement floor below, which you can also admire by peering over the handrail. You have already seen, here on the menu of the Metropole, the sacred words: Classic Aussie Beef Pie. You resolve to eat a few of these pies while you are here. The Lancashire Lad has a sort of lifelong quest ever to find—in his wanderings over the face of this world—pies even half as good as those he ate in his youth. But for a while, you have had a theory, building slowly over time, that perhaps here in Australia, the art of the pie has been preserved, continued, even perfected. You have been in ‘pie mourning’ for a good three or four years, since your father in the Lakeland village of Arnside, Cumbria, gave you the bad news that the village pie shop proprietor had sold the business to somebody else. The new proprietor not knowing the esoteric art of the great pie, the village had simply slipped into having no good pies at all during your visits. And so you, noble Jason of your own pie-loving life, have come in search of the golden fleece of a great pie here in Sydney, where you honestly believe it can be found.

You grew up in England and emigrated to America when you were nineteen. You lived in America for ten years, becoming a citizen eventually. When you received your American passport—not giving up the British one—you moved to Japan and lived there for four years, working as a consultant. When the Eighties boom was over, the Japanese economy collapsed on your head, so you relocated to Canada and did an MA and PhD in Twentieth Century literature. By the time you had finished those two degrees, you were hopelessly, almost terminally confused by spelling conventions in the different countries in which you had lived: twenty years of British spellings, then ten years of American spellings, and then twenty-one years of the Canadian conventions that are a mixture of British and American spellings. And now the Aussie spelling conventions! You taught literature at the University of Toronto for sixteen years. You moved to Hong Kong in 2013 with your girlfriend, so she could get her PhD at the University of Hong Kong. In 2016, you were hired at a new university in Shenzhen, next door to Hong Kong. For the last three years, you have lived in both places, flitting back and forth between home in Hong Kong and work in Shenzhen. You came to Sydney for the Chinese New Year holidays, seeing a good opportunity to explore the city and write about your explorations. Your girlfriend in Hong Kong only gets a short New Year’s holiday, so you knew you would be here on your own and could write without interruption. You know nobody in Sydney, and there’s nothing in particular you need to do. You just saw a chance to go to a new place and write. You would wander around and write what you saw. That was what you decided.

And here you are. It’s a busy, beautiful, sunny holiday weekend Friday here in Sydney at the Queen Victoria Building, and people are milling about and strolling hither and yon as though they have no cares in this world, and perhaps they don’t. You tilt your neck back and look up at the two galleries above you. Your first food station in Sydney is a good one, one you will be visiting again. Two German tourist ladies of about your age sit at the table next to you and have coffees, laughing and enjoying each other’s company. You type, and then you look again at the ornate iron handrails of the gallery balconies above you. Needless to say, perhaps, the Queen Victoria Building is not just stately and splendidly antique, as well as beautifully restored—it is also very, very English. On your travels around this world as an exile, you have now doubled Ulysses in his count of wandering years, forty years plus one separating you from the country of your birth. And so you find yourself, in a strangely consoling way, feeling ‘at home’ in these places that bear traces of Mother England.

Once again you look around and admire the splendid galleria echoing with the voices of shoppers, families, lovers, tourists, locals, shopkeepers, the whirr and whoosh of espresso machines. Then you crane your head and roll it back almost ninety degrees, and when you do you get a strange little visual surprise. The mirror-bottomed escalator terminates above your head and, when you roll your head all the way back, what you see is a strange aerial picture, a reflection of yourself from an unusual angle: hands stretched over this silver keyboard, face vertically counterposed with your own face, looking back at you—the writer, seen from above as though by a watchful god. Reflection as a sort of muse. The writer as guardian angel of himself. A hard, metallic noise obliterates the visual epiphany: Bing! Bing! Bing! Bing! The great iron clock suspended from the ceiling of the Queen Victoria Building has just announced, very Englishly, the doom of the previous hour: it is four o’clock.

5:01 PM

You walk out of the Queen Victoria Building onto Market Street, turn right, walk to George Street, cross Market, and head north along George Street until you get to the Met Centre. You turn left into the mall, looking at the shops and eyeing the pies and the huge pretzels at the German Bakery. You circle around the shopping centre and exit back onto George Street. You continue north until you get a glimpse of the Sydney Harbour Bridge behind the Four Seasons Hotel, but you are too tired, too dazed and too unsteady on your feet to continue to the bridge and walk across it. For this there will be plenty of time. You note the Dymocks Book Emporium before swerving into yet another beautiful old Victorian shopping centre, the Strand Arcade, where, at The Nut Shop, you buy a ten-dollar bag of curried macadamia nuts, ripping open the bag just outside the shop and munching the curried nuts as you stroll out of the other end of the arcade onto the Pitt Street Mall. Wiping your fingers on your chest, you munch the nuts as you watch (with many others) a street performer, a masked break dancer who also does mime. After this, you return to George Street, noting the billboard photographs of a glacier across the street and reading photographer Timothy Hartland’s explanatory text:

I wanted to capture the awe I felt when I stood at the base of the Perito Moreno Glacier in Argentina, and communicate it to an audience who may not have had the chance to experience it themselves. We can’t save what we don’t know or can’t imagine, so I wanted to bring the majesty and calm of these rivers of ice into the city, while also highlighting the worldwide decline of glaciers due to climate change.

You like the photographer’s explanation and, even more, you admire his stupendous pictures of the glacier dwarfing its tiny human visitors, but you also like knowing that the photographer wanted to bring this vision of the glacier here—to Sydney.

You step into a 7-11 and buy a pack of smokes, astonished at the price—thirty-two dollars. No wonder a homeless guy holding two slushies just offered you a coin for a smoke. You are not surprised to learn that Australia now has the most expensive cigarettes in the world. You walk back along George Street to the hotel, making one of your first observations about the city: Sydney is a city of muscles. You saw a news headline somewhere that said Sydney was going through a steroids epidemic. The headline comes back to you as you pass the muscle-bound behemoths on the sidewalk. Does Sydney really have a steroid problem? You don’t know. It certainly has some big lads. To beef yourself up a bit, perhaps, you buy a Power Nut Bar from the Caffe Cino in the lobby and bring it up to the room. You hope it will give you energy and perhaps make you look stronger, but you fear this is beyond the humble Nut Bar’s powers. You have bought a Sydney Morning Herald to read, but first, this weary traveler—even Homer nods—must take a nap.

9:08 PM

Amazingly, not only did you wake up after your nap but it was still light outside when you did. You’re still out of it enough that you thought perhaps it could be tomorrow already, but it’s still today—hurray! Outside, it’s not dark, not even close, at seven, as it always is in Hong Kong. You get dressed and head the hell out into them thar Sydney streets. You walk up George to Park, turn left and wander east along Park, passing Castlereagh, crossing Elizabeth Street, and walking into Hyde Park. You trail along the diagonal to the mall and track north to the Archibald Fountain, which is stunning in the twilight, especially with the elegant silhouette of Saint Mary’s Cathedral behind it. You stop and take a few photos before continuing north to where Prince Albert Road morphs into St. James Road. You follow St. James west until it collides again with Elizabeth Street, which you cross before continuing west along Market Street, passing Castlereagh again and turning right onto the Pitt Street Mall and heading north to King Street, turning left and then heading west along King. You cross George Street, cross York Street, and stop at P. J. O’Brien’s Pub and Bar at King and Clarence, unable to continue on once the chalk words on the menu board have wriggled into your brain: Beef and Guinness Pie with Mashed Potatoes & Smashed Peas.

In you go. You sit at a table and wait for service, which doesn’t materialise. Finally, you go to the bar, buy the dinner and a Carlsberg and wait for your food. When it arrives, it’s a very welcome sight, especially the pie, with its golden crown of puffy pastry. It’s all gone, the meal, in no time. The pie is amazing. On one of the bar’s screens, Djokovic is slaughtering his opponent in Melbourne, on another Tottenham Hotspur is scoring a cheeky goal against Chelsea, and on yet another screen, as well as on a big screen behind you and over your head, Australia is bowling against Sri Lanka in a test match. The musician with the guitar and the rousing folksy country songs takes a break and is replaced by two women, one playing guitar, the other a fiddle. They proceed to sing songs, the first being a cover of the Zutons 2006 hit, Valerie, which—like all Amy Winehouse fans—you like. You write little notes to yourself, wash down the meal with a long Copenhagen glug, and go back out onto the street, Clarence. You are unable to light your expensive Aussie cigarette and so throw your lighter away. A couple staggers out of the King’s Lounge across King Street and weaves across the street towards you. You walk past the Royal Lounge and turn right onto York Street, buying a Bic lighter for five dollars at a variety store, after which you retrace your steps down Clarence and turn right onto King, walking up to George Street to see if Dymocks is open, which it isn’t. Nine o’clock is approaching.

Then you turn back and enter the Queen Victoria Building again, its galleries open but all the shops closed or closing, and walk through its basement to Town Hall Station, which is like a subway station, though Sydney doesn’t have a subway yet. You turn left at the turnstiles and, passing under George and connecting to the underground mall of The Galleries, emerge on George Street again, where a man with a panda mask over his head is playing a full drum set. To you, the bleary-eyed traveler, the animal-musician seems like a hallucination. Street musicians are legion today in downtown Sydney, including a guy who sang Tosca at the corner of George and Market, before transitioning—unpredictably, it seemed to you—into The Girl from Ipanema. You turn into the Hilton, glad to be home and ready for your bath, bed. Your first ten thousand steps in Sydney just about killed ya. It’s time to go way down under—into the psychic antipodes of sleep.

Day Two

26th January 2019

*

9:55 AM

You take a table by the doors here at Caffe Cino in the Hilton lobby and look at the people walking down George Street as you sip your excellent long black coffee. You see people in discontinuous flashes from the street. A man in a hat with a little Australian flag sticking out of the top. A blonde transvestite in sunglasses and tight black-giant-polka-dotted tights. Four big muscle-bound guys in tank tops. An Asian girl in high heels. A man speaking loud Mandarin with his wife. Two indigenous Australian guys dressed in black—mourning colours perhaps because for indigenous Australians this is not Australia Day but Invasion Day: a huge national debate is raging over whether the date should be changed. Can a day be picked or named that will be inclusive and celebratory for all? Nobody has an answer that will please all but much ink is being spilled in the national press on the subject. A man with two little Australian flags sticking out of his baseball cap signals his view on the subject as he walks north towards the Harbour Bridge with his family. He is followed by a man with a bushy black and white beard in sunglasses (the man) and a man of about sixty in a bush hat.

Next to your table, in front and behind it, are two handsome glass and steel display pillars featuring various forms of UGGs. The classic fur-lined UGG, which people won’t be buying in large numbers today: the heatwave striking Australia continues apace, though you learned a new Aussie phrase in the papers this morning: a fast cool hit Melbourne yesterday, dropping the temperature twelve degrees in fifteen minutes. You find this hard to believe, but many wrote about it. Another Aussie phrase: an article in the paper describes a man who belonged to a bikie gang. In the Canadian English of your past, this would be biker gang. Across the street, you glimpse a man in a display window who is actually a picture of a man in a display window. A moment of perceptual misprision. Next: a man with surgical plasters over what must be cuts on his neck. A homeless man, bare chested and incredibly thin, his pants held up by string, staggering from spot to spot, looking for cigarette butts. The squarish, bodybuilt torsos that are the preferred physique, clearly, for many Aussie men or perhaps just Sydneysiders. A question: do men from Perth, for example, when they are pretending to be Sydney men, stuff wads of newspaper up their shirts to give themselves mock muscles? Or are they themselves equally muscle-bound? Or, god forbid, even huger?

But back to the UGGs. A fur-lined slipper, also not going to be a big seller, as the heatwave is now predicted to afflict New South Wales, though Sydney itself may be cooled by a ‘harbour breeze.’ You continue your stroboscopic glances at the street. Couples of every age in casual dress. Soft colours seem to be preferred in Sydney. The T-shirts are light green, light yellow, light brown, light blue, and grey. The UGGs: another boot destined not to sell many: a sort of jeweled bling UGG high top with a platform sole.

On your first night in Sydney, you slept well, then badly, then well again. Your problem was perhaps the curried macadamia nuts you necked before you went to bed. The powdered curry seemed to give you a little bit of acid reflux. You got up, drank a bottle of water, had trouble breathing, rearranged your pillows so that your torso was more propped up. Then, after a bit of discomfort, you dropped off and slept like a baby.

Outside the window: another man in a bush hat. Sort of a Crocodile Dundee hat. You don’t know much about Crocodile Dundee and never even watched the film, but when the film came out you were going to nightclubs and discos almost every night and it was a rare one you went to where the American girls didn’t say you looked like Crocodile Dundee. A girl you asked to dance once interrupted your introduction: You don’t have to tell me where you’re from—you’re obviously one of those cool Australian surfer dudes. A few years later, women said you looked like the Marlboro Man, though you had never smoked a cigarette. Oddly enough, when you started smoking at thirty-five, the cigarettes that tasted best to you were Marlies. You had been a Marlboro Man all along, a Marlboro Man waiting to happen.

But to return to the window. A girl in shorts looking at her phone as she walks. Two middle-aged Chinese women in floral clothes, chatting and laughing. A tall surfer-looking dude with a topknot. Three South Asian guys in untucked cotton shirts with collars. A huge waddling bodybuilder. A girl in flip flops with her own hair up in a topknot. The huge waddling bodybuilder coming back the other way and walking through the revolving doors to the right of the fancy UGGs. You feel momentarily guilty as you look at him to see if you think his head looks too small for his body, which it does. An old lady in a straw hat. A guy with a pigtail, his sunglasses up on his baseball hat. For some reason, there haven’t been any more Australian flag hats for a while. Perhaps there was a specific event happening earlier, where the flag hat people were headed. Another old lady in a straw hat. A girl in sandals stopping to take a picture of Queen Victoria on top of her (the queen’s) building with her (the girl’s) phone. A very Australian looking lady in a flowing white skirt, a yellow shirt, and a straw bush hat, wearing sunglasses (the lady). A girl, one of many, in a beige skirt. Sydney is definitely a city of beiges. To prove this hypothesis: in quick succession, a couple, both of them in beige T-shirts, a man in a beige Izod shirt, two husbands in beige shirts with collars (the shirts). Hurray: a girl with two Aussie flags sticking out of her baseball cap like ears that flap in the breeze. Perhaps they flap from the momentum of her walk.

No cars of any description are driving up—or down—George Street right now: there is a massive construction site outside. The road is torn up and sits behind wire fences. You guess that this is the beginning of the Sydney Metro that is planned for 2024. You were surprised to learn, before you came, that the city didn’t have a metro, but in English-speaking countries, or English-influenced countries—you often notice—the thinking about subway systems is sometimes conservative. The English way is to talk about building a subway for a hundred years before building one and then not to build it anyway. China is a great contrast in this respect. There’s an economic slowdown? Build ten more subway lines and you’ll see an uptick right quick! The thinking seems to work in China itself, where infra-structural projects are often announced in response to economic downturns. You like this thinking, you like it a lot, much more than the thinking in Manchester, where a subway between Piccadilly Station and Victoria Station would