Sydney through Carey's eyes

Sydney on New Year's Eve 1999: a fine place to be. First there was the smug sense of being in the first of the world's beautiful and glamorous cities to see in the year 2000. Secondly there was the even smugger sense of having escaped the Dublin winter weather and the unbelievably limp (for such a party city) effort of a celebration there.

The crowd at the 9 p.m. fireworks (for the kids) in Darling Harbour was a model of how to go out and have fun at night en masse without getting plastered and smashing your neighbour's nose. When the real thing, the mega fireworks, happened at midnight, it was almost impossible to get near the famous Coat-Hanger, the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Back in our high-rise apartment, peering out from the balcony at the bridge, one could just make out the word "Eternity", in an elegant curved script, lit up between curved struts. Appropriate enough it seemed, but at the time I didn't know the story behind it, now related by Australian novelist Peter Carey in 30 Days in Sydney: a wildly distorted account.

The timeless word on the bridge was, Carey says, a wonderful coded message to all Sydneysiders who beheld it around the world, such as he watching television in New York, where he has lived for the past decade. The original man who wrote "Eternity" on the pavements and walls of Sydney for many years was Arthur Stace, an alcoholic reformed by the Baptist Tabernacle Church in the Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst. He took, rather literally, the advice of the preacher one Sunday to "shout the word 'Eternity' through the streets of Sydney". "He wrote his message," writes Carey, "as much as 50 times a day, in Martin Place, in Parramatta, all over Sydney." This was in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. When Sydney turned the corner in to the 2000s, Arthur's memento was in pride of place. This is one of a number of charming if sketchy anecdotes in this impressionistic little book from London's Bloomsbury Publishing House. Bloomsbury's wheeze is an "occasional series" called "The Writer and the City": you can work out the details for yourself.

Carey is Australian and the author of wonderful novels such as Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and Illywhacker (1985). His latest is the True History of the Kelly Gang, done in the alleged writing style of the famous outlaw Ned himself. One could say he practises a type of Antipodean magic realism, like his lesser-known colleague Rodney Hall. Some of this style is brought rather awkwardly to bear in Thirty Days in Sydney, making for a book which is often unsatisfying yet studded with gems of information and insight about Sydney and Australian life in general. And is it really distorted, or have only the names been changed? But then, Bloomsbury would cry, it's only intended to be a snack. This is the literary equivalent of breakfast at Sydney's Fish Market in Pyrmont, an unsuitable delight of squid rings and sushi at 9 a.m. (you have to eat it that early or there's none left). Not that Bloomsbury might say this, but the book also echoes the clever, shallow quality of a "stuff-you" city. A colleague recently told me of the time he tripped and fell flat while getting off a bus in Kobe, Japan, and how the Kobeans all carefully stepped over him in silence to board their transport. Now that would never happen in Sydney. At least one person would cry "You all right mate?" while another hollered "Get outa the bloody way" and a third removed the prone one's wallet.

This is the sort of image Carey portrays of Sydney. It is in the long tradition of the Australian larrikin, the cheeky bad kid who will do no real evil (unless you are on the wrong end of a corrupt police force).

Carey tells the story, for example, of a woman whose expensive trail bike disappeared from outside her house in suburban Sydney. Heartbroken, she scraped together enough money to buy a replacement, which she insured this time. No matter: it too was stolen. However one day shortly afterwards a young man in Gucci loafers knocked at her front door. He told her, "I know where your bike is." With the (second) bike returned he came in for a cup of tea and explained that he felt a bit sorry for the woman so decided to write off that business venture and return the second bike he nicked. When the woman's partner protested and said he intended to call the police, the bicycle thief shrugged. "It won't do you any good." And indeed, the police had much better things to be thinking about - probably fending off the next corruption inquiry, as such events have been a regular occurrence in modern Australian law enforcement history.

Carey has a bicycle theme revolving in his brain, for one of the recurring motifs is the narrator of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, who keeps on popping in to the book to converse with him. The rationale is that Carey finds a copy of the novel in the home of some strictly non-fiction reading friends. O'Brien should most definitely be read by everyone possessed of a sense of the ridiculous, but it is a bit of a stretch to parachute him in to a book about Sydney, except as the fanciful whim of a very successful author fulfilling contractual obligation.

A number of wealthy or talented middle-class friends are the stars of the narrative (no women, except for a token aborigine) and much of the book is spent drinking wine on the deck of someone's fabulous architect-designed house with a view, or in the back of some rich/brilliant bloke's top-of-the-range/totally beat up but desirable car. Espresso machines splutter and puff nearby. Well, that indeed is Sydney's reputation. The author also puts in a fair bit of historical detail and encompasses fire and water (it's an elements book) in a brief account of the devastating bushfires of 1994 and the horrifying Sydney-Hobart yacht race of 1998.

Carey lived in Sydney for about 10 years, and refers to himself in the text as a Sydneysider, but has since 1990 decamped to New York. However, his real home town is Bacchus Marsh, a charmingly-named place of some 5,000 inhabitants half way between Melbourne, the capital of Victoria, and Ballarat, its third city. Bacchus Marsh is chiefly notable for its wonderful memorial parade (to the glorious dead) of plane trees on the road approaching the town, and, well, for producing Peter Carey. Think of Naas and you begin to get the picture. It owes its name to a military man, Captain William Bacchus, who helped establish the area in the 1830s. Today it boasts a centre of devotion to a Maltese Madonna (Our Lady, not the singer) and the delights of the nearby Lerderderg Gorge. But the real challenge for a magic realist would be to write 30 Days in Bacchus Marsh. I look forward to that.

Angela Long is an Irish Times journalist