Australia

I was relieved to watch Bali disappear into a grey-blue haze through the window of our plane as we headed south towards Perth in Western Australia. Looking back at that troubled island I made promise never to return. I’m being a bit melodramatic, truthfully it was time to enjoy western comforts offered by Australia a country that I had visited five times before over a forty year period and which I always associate with an inexplicable sense of freedom, a feeling that I’m being offered a tantalizing chance to be reborn or at least re-invented; leaving the complications, snobbery and unfairness of the old world and stepping into the new with the enquiry and optimism it seems to demand.

It’s both easy and a little lazy when you are familiar with the USA to see Perth as a kind of miniature version of Los Angeles while Sydney and Melbourne on the eastern coast as New York and perhaps Philadelphia or Washington. Perth we quickly discovered is all about the car and the beaches, which are extremely beautiful and seemingly endless with soft pale sand and nearly empty on most week days. There is a pleasant complacency about the city which houses a little over two million people but which, perhaps unsurprisingly, has grown rapidly and is considered a boom town. Its ethnically diverse mix gives the city a unique flavor and entrepreneurial energy; we found that you are likely to be served in a restaurant by young English travelers on short term visa’s, to be driven in an Uber by Indian immigrants and to be fed in most places by the Chinese. Unfortunately my experience in Perth was tainted by the habitual results of Balinese food and hygiene which kept me in bed for much of the time.

We flew on to Sydney which, like the great Eastern cities of the USA, has the advantage of being built before the advent of cars and so it is a city that accommodates our needs better than most. It streets are formed based on a desire to walk rather than to drive and to be sociable, its terraced houses are tightly squeezed together and most still retain the victorian trappings of wrought iron balconies and corrugated iron roofs, humble materials that enclose once reasonably priced homes, forty years ago the could be purchased for 40,000 dollars and today you might need to add two zeros to acquire one. I don’t want to think about it too much. It was the very modesty of the housing stock that first attracted me to the city with its cafe culture and restaurants, bookshops and cinemas all within walking distance, and I loved it mainly for that reason.

The architecture is also the way its booms and busts have been memorialized. The colonial Victorian golden age can be seen in the formality of its government buildings but that British association is increasingly unwelcome. A modern Australian has an uneasy relationship with their past history particularly with the authority these buildings project and quite correctly suggest they would be better suited to the grey sky’s of England. This is not true of the many candy colored Art Deco buildings built between the wars, frequently cinemas for apartment blocks painted in optimistic torquiose’s, pinks and pale blues which the architects must surely have known would harmonize well with deep blue shadows and under steely, cloudless skies.

We should be also grateful for the years of depression and downward business cycles as these played a part in saving what must be hundreds of miles of inner city Victorian workers terraced houses which are now exquisitely preserved, frequently by the disproportionately large gay and artist community and now, I’m guessing, are occupied by Tech and Banking millionaires and although gentrification like this is a target for vitriol in some circles, who doesn’t admire the instinct to make nice homes, functioning neighborhoods particularly when it involves keeping and improving what existed before and not erasing the past carelessly?

When we visualize Sydney however it is two structures that immediate come to mind, the Harbor bridge and the Opera house nestled in the Botanic gardens that run down to the harbor. Both have interesting stories and barely made it in their existing forms, the Opera House was designed by the Scandinavian architect Jorn Utzon who famously resigned his commission prior to the completion of the interior. It was an ambitious design and was difficult to realize but significantly more forward thinking than the other competitors who put forward what we would thin of now as bland looking, low rise modernist structures that would have visibly disappeared on the site. There are images on the web of the competitors for this commission which illustrate how close Sydney came to having an unremarkable and featureless waterfront. Utzon was in is mid thirties when he won the prize and at that time he had already rubbed shoulders with the great architects and designers of this era; Frank Lloyd Wright, Eero Saarinen, Alvar Alto, Gunner Asplund and Charles Eames. His visionary design, like all great works of art could be interpreted in multiple ways and represented sails in the harbor, whales leaping, the buds of nature….it hardly matters, it is an optimistic and dramatic form which will always be an instantly recognizable landmark, symbol even, for the country. I always love walking there on arrival in Sydney, through the Royal Botanical Gardens with its deep shades and foreign tree’s, its helpful if there is a shriek of a parrot or other unworldly bird flashing deep blue’s and green’s around us, and like meeting a celebrity, the place is always a bit smaller in reality than in your imagination. There was bitterness from Utzon when he was pushed out of the project and he never returned to Australia to see his completed masterpiece, dying in 2008, 35 years after its completion.

For me, Sydney is the perfect city. It has the right scale and proportions and just enough energy to make it interesting, but not excessively so. A city that people can walk in, get lost in and make discoveries, admire the care people take over their homes. A city of theatre, galleries and bookstores – the latter easily outnumbering New York City. One of immigrants and new diverse ambition, a place of pubs, where you can socialize at a reasonable cost, an essential component of any civilized society. In Australia they get so many things right, from the moment you breeze through Immigration, to small things like the abundance of public toilets, that are always clean and available, to large things like glorious Botanical Gardens to shelter from the heat.

We drove down the coast of Australia from Sydney to Melbourne over six days. The landscape changed dramatically once we had left the lengthy drab suburbs of Sydney and found single lane roads surrounded by tall trees and signs indicating that straying wildlife requires drivers attention. The first kangaroo’s we saw sadly were dead on the side of the road, not unlike the deer we see in New York State. It wasn’t long before we had found a lodge to stay the night and encountered them in close range and suddenly, by our second night, they were common place.. On another stop we visited an Island where Kawala bears could be seen in the wild, many asleep or at least drowsily clutching the tree branches they had climbed.