Sydney Dreaming
Sydney Dreaming
Blog Number 16: 16 June 2009
Last week I flew to Sydney from Auckland to visit my son Hamish, his wife Cathy Brennan and their two boys Cameron and Angus.
They live in a beautiful old house known in Sydney as a Federation Villa. It has been extensively renovated but has retained its early twentieth century features. Sometimes I look at my son and I can’t believe that I gave birth to him. He is strong and resilient and he moves through the world with a calm demeanour that belies his true nature; that of an innovative risk-taker.
Sydney. It is always a place of ambivalent feelings for me, a place where I spent the most difficult years of my life in my twenties and early thirties, a place where I discovered what a tough city it can be. And yet, it has a certain cruel beauty that perhaps relates to the violent history of this stolen land now in the grip of land degradation and water wars.
The birds are huge and noisy. Once, during a long drought, I saw dead currawongs fall like hot black rocks from a burning sky. Once, I saw a man lying face down on the stairs leading into the underground railway. People rushing to catch a train walked right over him. One woman stabbed his back with her red stilettos. I tried to help him but was roundly abused by a man in a suit who said don’t be a bloody hero leave the derro alone. As a migrant Fresh off the Boat, I didn’t know what a derro was. Soon learned though when I ended up in a Darlinghurst flop house with bed bugs and roaches and other horrid predators of the desperately poor, aka derelicts…
Sydney. Where there is a sense of excitement and energy on the streets similar to the feeling one gets in New York. We went for a ride on the Manly ferry. It was a gala day in Manly, a food and wine festival. People wore their half-full wine glasses round their necks on a paper chain. The beach was crowded, what was left of it. A massive storm had swept down the coast a week before and taken most of the white sand with it. Sea lettuce formed great drifts of green at the high tide mark.
Like many New Zealander’s I have family connections with Australia. My paternal grandfather Joseph Fletcher was born at Dead Dog Gulley near Bendigo in 1860. His parents were participants in the gold rush of the 1850s. His mother Eliza was born in England and came to New Zealand as a girl in 1846. His father James Fletcher was a convict who arrived in Sydney in 1820.
I love this country; I love the wildness of it; I love the brash people who know how to cut down authority figures with some of the most colourful expressions known in the English language. Australia has always seemed eerily familiar to me, far more than my real homeland, New Zealand/Aotearoa.
I have a fanciful belief that if an ancestor revelled in a particular landscape, found solace there, ate of the fruits and plants and wild meats, then something I call, for want of a better word, genetic memory can remain as an echo passed down to a living breathing descendant. Memory is stretched beyond the limit of one lifetime. I know that scientifically this is a nonsense, but I want to believe it.
And so I do. Passionately.
June 24th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Lovely piece on Sydney, Beryl - catches its strange attraction/repulsion. Like you I have Sydney ancestors, my Napier ancestor marrying an Australian lass in 1838. His Cornish brother was a Sydney convict - his name was Samuel Northey and the name persisted right down the generations. A later Samuel Northey, my grandfather’s best friend, died at Chunuk Bair. And I think subconsciously this was why I chose ‘Samuel’ as the name of my favourite literary character (in my own work) - Samuel Barton. So I think you’re right about genetic memory persisting.