Sydney began its existence as the place you were sent to to rot when Mother England didn’t want you. On Jan. 26, 1788, sailors raised a British flag on the shore of a sheltered inlet they called Sydney Cove. Today this is the business district, flanked on one side by the great cast iron span of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and on the other by the even more famous Opera House. The sailors came from 11 small ships bringing convicts from England and Ireland to start a penal colony. Among them were good men who wanted freedom for Ireland, children who had stolen a loaf of bread, servant girls who had lifted a handkerchief. Most were petty crooks (for Britain then hanged all the serious ones) and their influence on the money-first culture of Sydney is still profound.
That’s not to say they haven’t come a long way. Sydney today is one of the richest, hottest cities in the world, a hedonistic mixing pot for immigrants from every quarter of the globe, and every lifestyle. How many other cities would offer a guide to gay night clubs in their official Olympic literature, including advice like this: “The Midnight Shift is meat market central, but be sure to maintain your quality control, as things can look a lot more attractive in the dark”? The New York Times recently placed Sydney up there with Paris, New York and London as a cosmopolitan cookery capital, “the home port of the good life.” The great curving surf beach at the heart of the city is dotted with so many beautiful, topless blondes that Australian Playboy recently folded. Who needs it? Sydney realtor John McGrath has a new Web site advertising harborfront apartments that start at more than $1 million, and he’s gotten more than 100,000 hits from the United States alone. “Though we’re talking millions, that doesn’t faze foreigners,” says McGrath.
Yet only a 10-minute walk from the waterfront, the other Sydney unfolds in Kings Cross. Pastor Ray Richmond of the local Wayside Chapel calls this red-light district “a place where people come to abuse drugs, alcohol and women.” Young hookers bearing black and blue marks cruise virtually in the shadow of luxury harbor hotels. Paul Dillon of the National Alcohol and Drug Research Centre says Kings Cross “might be the only place in the world where drug addicts and teenage prostitutes are a major tourist attraction.”
Drunks abound. Junkies slump on the street, zonked on some of the cheapest dope in the world–as low as $15 a “cap” for a dose of 65 percent pure white heroin. Around noon one recent day, in a doorway off the main Bayswater Road, a teenage girl dug a hole in the plaster cast on her girlfriend’s broken leg, mining for a vein with one hand and shakily gripping a heroin syringe in the other. Says Dillon, “These kids don’t tell you they want to get high. They use words like ‘wasted’ and ‘obliterated.’ They don’t like the everyday world they live in.”
Street heroin was introduced to Australia by American troops on R&R during the Vietnam War, and the Vietnam connection remains strong. Vietnamese gangs deal heroin from the Sydney suburb of Cabramatta, now widely known as “Vietnamatta.” It’s one of many rough Sydney edges. Consider Hurstville, which state Premier Bob Carr recently dubbed “Worstville,” and compared unfavorably to ancient Pompeii after the lava flow. This is nothing new: after a visit in 1895, Mark Twain wrote of a local who told him: “God made the harbor and that’s all right, but Satan made Sydney.”
It’s a material city. The Whitlams, one of Sydney’s most popular groups, sing, “You gotta love this city for its body, not its brain.” John Birmingham traces the city’s attitudes back to its roots as a society of “tenth rate Englishmen acting as jailers to the no-rate convicts.” In that town “wealth was the only measure of worth, and until that wealth started to grow from the land, which was taken from the Aborigines, it probably came illegally, from bribery, smuggling and booze distilling,” says Birmingham. “So from day one you see strands developing that persist today, the tendency to ignore the less fortunate, corruption in the police, mistreatment of Aborigines, the growth of gangs. And the belief that wealth is the only source of power and respect.”
In Sydney, no one asks what you’re worth–they ask where you live. If you dwell, say, in the Macquarie Apartments, most locals will know you are at least a millionaire, and many will know that the value goes up with the view–by $130,000 per floor. “Real estate is an obsession,” says McGrath. “I’m in the business and I’m always meeting people who know more about real estate prices than I can. They’ll give you the value to the dollar of a place halfway across town.”
The least fortunate are hidden away in areas like Redfern, an inner suburb where dispossessed Aboriginals live with substandard everything, from housing to education. And they are only now starting to protest. In early April the Australian government issued a report denying what many regard as established historical fact: that from the 1920s to the 1960s, it took thousands of children away from “primitive” parents, on the grounds that the young were better off in white-run institutions.
Furious at the denial, Aboriginal leader Charles Perkins issued a threat that was broadcast worldwide on the BBC. Perkins warned those coming for the Games: “If you want to see burning cars and burning buildings, then come over.” He has since said he was quoted out of context, but still warns “there could be trouble.”
Olympic organizers are worried, but this is a smug city that shrugs off attacks–with one exception. Crusading reporter Alex Mitchell of Sydney’s Sun-Herald has skewered many a local icon, but never got so much angry mail as when he dared call Rio’s harbor the greatest he had ever seen. “Mate, the protests came by bagful,” says Mitchell. “If I’d said I was going to barbecue a live koala on the steps of the Opera House I wouldn’t have got one tenth the outcry.” So if you’re coming for the Games, perhaps it’s best to do as Sydneysiders do: devote yourself to the view.
