Sydney by Jan Morris

Author:Jan Morris [Jan Morris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571265954
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2010-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

There is a café at the opulent suburb of Double Bay (‘Double Pay’ to the wags) which Sydneysiders from Central Europe frequent. I like to go there too, to observe in his fulfilment a minority figure who was not so long ago called The New Australian – the first-generation immigrant, that is, from a country other than Britain. On the terrace at the Cosmopolitan the New Australians are no longer new, and have clearly prospered since they first came to Sydney thirty or forty years ago. Their children are absolute Australians by now, but they themselves behave just as though they are in their distant capitals of long ago. Here four men with coats slung over their shoulders smoke small cigars and passionately argue about politics – generally in still heavily accented English, sometimes in Ruritanian. Here a couple of leathery ladles, furred and proudly diamonded, sit in lofty silence over aperitifs. There is a smell of coffee and continental cigarettes. A few solitary men with signet rings read papers that ought to be called something like Y Sblygod, but are really Sydney Morning Heralds.

Yet there in the winter sunshine they all look complacently at home, and they are indeed essential to the Sydney idiom. I engaged a couple of them in conversation once. They were Hungarians, who had come to Sydney half a lifetime before out of a shambled Europe, had astutely enriched themselves and lived happily ever after. When I remarked that they seemed very fortunate people, they heartily agreed: they were extremely fortunate, Sydney was incomparably beautiful, and Australia was without question the Best Country in the World.1

Thirty years ago the New Australian was still an exotic and possibly a threat, even though in those days the immigrants all came from Europe. When the Sydney Municipal Board took to advertising itself in the various languages of its tax-paying citizenry – MESTSKA RADA SYDNEY, or SYDNEY VAVOSI TANBACS – old-school Sydneysiders thought the worst had happened. After all, I was told at the time, some of the immigrants had come from ‘the kind of country you take pills for’. Yet in fact foreigners had always played important roles in the development of Sydney – beginning with the half-German Phillip himself. Phillip’s Surveyor General, Augustus Alt, was a native of the Duchy of Hesse (and liked to call himself Baron), and his Superintendent of Convicts was a Rhinelander named Phillip Schaffer, who went on to start a thriving vineyard and was thus the Father of the Australian Wine Industry.

There were foreigners among the First Fleet convicts, too. Scooped out of the London underworld, their lives took a queer turn indeed when they found themselves shackled and confined on the other side of the world. There were two Swedes, two Frenchmen, a Norwegian, an Indian, a pair of unfortunates classified as ‘probably Scandinavian’ and ‘probably Dutch’, and at least twelve black men of various provenances. One of these, Black Caesar from Madagascar, was among those who never did knuckle under to authority.

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