Back in the 1970s we used to sing: I'd rather live in Melbourne/Although it's not so classy/Sydney's got its strippers/But we've got Ron Barassi/We've got Australian Rules and the Melbourne Cup each year/Sydney's girls are way out front/But we've got stronger beer.
It was an immensely popular ditty, bringing up to date the traditional rivalry between Australia's two major cities. The reader will note the preference for the solid Australian virtues of a foaming cup and a manly ideal - Ron Barassi was an iconic figure, a barrel-chested footballer with a big smile and a fearsome snarl, who featured in such jokes as: Why is God wearing a guernsey with No 31 on the back? He's swollen-headed, he thinks he's Ron Barassi.
Sydney, without Ron, had to console itself with its glamour and its gorgeous girls. Still, a harbour which rendered the great novelist Anthony Trollope speechless ("I despair of being able to convey to any reader my own idea of the beauty of Sydney Harbour") was some small consolation, as is the distinction of being the island continent's oldest city.
Captain James Cook might have stepped ashore at a point on the northern reaches of that fabulous harbour, but the cottage which was the great navigator's home in Middlesbrough, England, was purchased by the more southerly city and shipped there in 1934 to be rebuilt brick by brick in Melbourne's Fitzroy Gardens, where it remains to this day.
The story of Melbourne's capture of Captain's Cook cottage is one of the myriad anecdotes recounted by Geoffrey Moorhouse in his excellent new book. If you know "Sinny" and love it, or if you have never been there, this is a comprehensive and well-written guide. Moorhouse has his finger on Sydney's many pulses. There is the section on Bondi Beach, for example, and the fact that the first person saved after the founding of its famous lifesaving club was the boy Charles Kingsford Smith, who grew up to be one of Australia's greatest aviators, and whose image graces the Australian 20 dollar note. The familiar (to Australians) story of the long-running row over the construction of Joern Utzon's Opera House is summarised, with the information that Utzon's design had been relegated to the pile of also-rans when Eero Saarinen arrived as consultant and, disappointed with the shortlist of entries selected by the city fathers, leafed through the losers. Utzon's design, he told the meeting (presumably when he had recovered his breath at finding it rejected), was the only entry worth the considerable prize money.
Moorhouse, who lived in Sydney in the late 1950s and has been a frequent visitor since, writes sympathetically and well about the plight of the locale's original inhabitants, and traces the slow journey from the "legal fiction of terra nullus" (the idea that the land was empty when the white man arrived) to the efforts of the Labour government under Paul Keating to grant some land rights to aboriginals (an effort almost undermined by the more conservative liberal regime of John Howard).
Another topic, horrifying in a different way, is the despoliation of this glorious city brought about by the destruction of some of its loveliest old buildings, and the granting of planning permission for high-rise buildings. The most recent - and most incredible - example is permission for a block of flats on Bennelong Point, blocking the vista of the Sydney Opera house. It is past reason that those in charge of such a fabulous place should still be hostage to the power of the quick buck rather than the demands of posterity.
Incidentally, Moorhouse recalls that the GPO in Sydney, most of which was demolished to make way for a high-rise, had a solidity and ambience felt perhaps only elsewhere in Dublin's GPO. (He also mentions that the statue of Queen Victoria which stands in plump splendour on Sydney's George Street was "happily passed on to Sydney by Dublin when the statue was no longer thought appropriate to its position outside the Irish parliament".)
Sydney will be among the very first of the world's great cities to welcome in the year 2000. Of greater interest to the locals, I hear, is the Olympics, starting in the southern hemisphere in the spring, and already subjected to a long and controversial gestation. For both these reasons, Sydney is very much in focus in this last year of the 1900s, and this timely book is an immensely satisfying and interesting guide to it. This reviewer will be tracking down Moorhouse's previous books on Istanbul and New York.
Angela Long is an Irish Times journalist