Rambles in Australia

by Edwin Sharpe Grew; Marion Sharpe Grew

When we were sailing from Batavia in Java to Colombo there was a New Yorker on board, who was buying rubber in anticipation of the needs of belligerents, and who knew most of the places in the world where rubber was to be raised or bought. His views on Australia we have forgotten, and his denunciation of the Indies, as places where the white resident must deteriorate, do not matter here. What we do recall is the dislike he expressed, as an Eastern American, for the pretensions of the West, especially of California. “There’s nothing they’ve got,” he would say, “that they don’t want to tell you about. Why, you take a Californian, and he’ll stand there and blow out his chest, and talk to you about his climate and climate! There’s Los Angeles.... I want to tell you right now, that Los Angeles is the one place on God’s earth, where you can get a sunstroke and a frozen foot at the same time.”

Other Americans, Californians, to whom we have repeated this description, attempt to palliate it, but they admit its force; and the fact is that being a people with a sense of humour, they recognise the exaggeration as the recoil which we all experience when anything is over-praised to us. It is very hard for a young country not to praise its possessions, not out of conceit, but from a human desire to elicit praise from a superior critic. We “know you’ve got some great things,” they say by inference to the visitor, “but you’ll admit that this thing of ours is not so bad.” Thus when the citizen of Ballarat points out to you the glories of his main street, he does not ask you to compare it with Piccadilly or the Champs Elysées, but he would like you to think that it is something for a mining community to have cut out of the Bush.

So now to Sydney Harbour. Long before we ever saw it we had heard of it. They think no end of Sydney Harbour, we had been told. They say it’s better than the Bay of Naples. “If ever you meet an Australian, and tell him you’re going to Australia,” Phil May once said to the writer, “he’ll be sure to say, ‘Well, you look out for Sydney Harbour.’ It’s a fine place,” added May reflectively; “but, you know, if you tell an Australian that the only thing you have to complain of in Australia is the toughness of its beef, he’ll say, ‘Tough? Well, what of it? You have to have it tough to sole boots with it.’” With which cryptic observation he left the subject of Sydney Harbour, of which he was quite incapable of giving any further description.

We are in not much better case. But let us say at once that whatever one might expect of Sydney Harbour, whether having heard so much of its beauties, one came to it prepared to deny them, or whether merely eager to confirm one’s expectations, Sydney Harbour would always be ready with its surprise. It reminds one of that Street in Tours to which Balzac paid so affectionate a tribute, the Street where there was always sunshine and shadow and a fountain playing, the Street that was like a coquette ... in brief, the Street where he was born. For Sydney Harbour, too, is everchanging; the Pacific is at its gates; and it has a beauty which captures affection; in brief, it has charm. But it is quite unlike what one expects of it. Our first glimpse of it was from a heavy vehicle ferry, and when we rubbed the rain from the windows of our car, we looked through rain on a prospect that might have been Portsmouth, so little could we see. But if anyone should come to Sydney Harbour by sea, he might arrive at the right first impression. If you will lay your hand on the table with the fingers spread, you will have some sort of a notion of the shape of this noble inlet. From the sea you would come into it at the wrist between Sydney Heads, which are jutting cliffs of sandstone, with the sea breaking at their base. Then far away inland, the fingers of the harbour stretch for miles, fingers very uneven in length and thickness and formation. On one of them stands Sydney and the suburb melodiously named Wooloomooloo, which was once a swamp, and is now as valuable as Brixton. On other fingers are springing up Dulwich’s and Wimbledon’s and Surbiton’s; some fingers dig so far into the continent that their headwaters are lost among tree-clothed hills miles and miles away ... and all this, town and suburb, and garden city and seaside and country village—all is Sydney Harbour. We saw it a bit at a time, as this or that excursion took us along its ramifications, now in a motor drive to Sydney Heads, or in a taxi through the park that runs to the edge of its waters. But it was most familiar to us, as to anyone who lives in Sydney, by its ferry-boats, which run to and from its many promontories and its growing suburbs, and find their terminus at the Charing Cross of the harbour—Circular Quay. At night with their lighted saloons and incessant movement, coming and going, the ferry-boats make Sydney Harbour into a feast of lanterns. In the daytime no one could describe it and convey any impression of it; for it changes so, and has so many aspects:

The haze on the hills northward and westward.

The large and small steamers in motion....

The white wake left by the passage, the quick tremulous whirl of the wheels.

The flags of all nations, the falling of them at sunset.

The scallop-edged waves in the twilight.

The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the grey walls of the houses by the quays.