30 Days in Sydney. A Wildly Distorted Account

Peter Carey. 2001. Bloomsbury

Poetic writing and cities, if that was a genre, it would be one of my favourites. Society seen in the structure and symbolism of the city.

And then, in my dream, I peered down from the top arch of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and had the insight which would never leave me, not even in my waking hours. Asleep in my bed in Wollahra I saw the Central Business District as if for the first time. I saw how it held itself back fro the edge of the beloved harbour as if it understood how vile and crooked it had always been. In a society which values the view above all else, here was the heart of the city, a blind place with no vistas, a dense knot of development and politics and business and law. This was Macartur's monument. A physical expression of two centuries of Sydney's own brand of capitalism, the concrete symbol of an unhealthy anti-democratic alliance between business and those authorities which should have controlled it. p.92

Some of the slurry half-dream-half-drunk macho posturing got on my nerves; not enough to put me off the book.