Sydney: A postmortem

“Most people I know who came to Melbourne are emotional refugees,” my mate said last Friday night. We had visited the German Tivoli Club for the same reason most people did, in the hope of finding something like we knew back home. In Sydney that is, not Germany. There we had regularly dined on the giant schnitzels and pork knuckles at Tempe’s Conchordia club. We visited lots of ethnic clubs. They are a good way to pop your bubble and interact with the city’s ethnic groups on their own terms and turf. During the Rio world cup we even did a tour, visiting any club of a national team that was playing. Who knew there was a Uruguay club in Hinchinbrook? We did. They welcomed us with open arms.

The Tivoli proved a disappointment. The food was good and in the restaurant an old man in a Tirolean cap played the harpsichord. But management had opened another bar. We did not make it to the restaurant before being accosted by two frauleins and we were brought into a large gloomy function hall with empty tables covered in plastic tablecloths in the Bavarian white and blue harlequin pattern. A bar was surrounded by a handful of people. “Now I will give myself an orgasm” said the bar frau, pouring a shot. This was not the Germany I was here for. It really wasn’t the same as back home.

In 2006 I was 24 and returned to Sydney after a two year stint in London. My friends had started a band and seen local success and for the next few years we lived in shitty cheap share houses, roamed the streets of the Inner West, drinking in parks and seeing live music. I can remember the warmth and space, the sheer aesthetic beauty of Sydney after the oppressive chill and grime of London, a city where the permanent low hanging cloud cover made you feel caged. In a rare moment I registered the privilege of being a part of Sydney. We put on a night at a pub in Leichhardt and every Friday national acts would play. Even though we never made any money, it felt right to invest our time in our city. I loved Sydney and even wrote poetry about her.

I travelled throughout my 20s. The formula was work my guts out at some job and save like crazy then travel for as long as the money would last. It was a formula that allowed me to witness Sydney change as a series frames rather than one continuous shot.

In 2010, I did exchange for a semester in San Francisco State University. The Aussie dollar was high and for once for a student I felt rich. It was also after the GFC, normal looking people were sleeping rough outside my rental at night. I’d never seen much of that in Sydney. I knew it happened but just not on this scale. Again I registered how lucky I was to have grown up in such a place.

When I returned back in 2011 things in Sydney were beginning to turn. After the staunch tolerance and goodwill of SF, I tuned into a note of aggression. I was not sure whether it had just begun to play or I was hearing it for the first time. It began as a very faint hum but over the years it would build to a raging cacophony. At first it was the little things - rather than wait, cars would edge closer as you crossed the pedestrian crossing, the security guards at venues were getting gruffer and more power hungry. For the first time I began to take note of lurid poker machines. Before they had been relegated to the back rooms but on the back of changing smoking laws, they slowly became the main event.

The city’s topography was also changing. I would return home broke and relying on the free room and board to save up enough money to move out again. This meant frequent train trips into the inner west through Strathfield. I always took note of the The Strathfield Plaza sign, the sight of the 1991 massacre. Emblazoned on the side of the squat brick building with each year it began to recede into the background as towering block after block of apartments were thrown up in the fore.

Something was happening to the city at night too. Before SF Lanfranchi’s - an iconic artist warehouse, a venue for the city’s emerging artists had closed down. I had passionately participated in Sydney’s electronic music scene since the moment I had walked out my school gates for the last time. I had spent all night at warehouse parties in artist squats up Regent street. Slowly these began to become rarer and rarer. The cops seemed to be onto them earlier. News coverage walked in-step with the usual cliches about wayward youth.

A housemate of mine worked for the Hopetoun hotel - a grungy inner-city venue famous for having live music every night of the week. I was in a band and we were bad but we had a venue to play at the Hoey. One day my housemate turned up to work to find the doors chained shut. Eventually news had filtered through that they had closed because the police fines due to complaints had mounted so large it was easier to shut up shop and flee. A single note has not been played from that grimy stage since.

Taken together I could feel the city begin to contract. It was as if culture was a wave that had suddenly hit a looming wall of prefab concrete and high density housing, a wall that remained silent, emitting no noise only noise complaints.

There was still hope. The irrepressible mayor, Clover Moore, was fighting a valiant rear-guard action. Against overwhelming odd, she brought in the small bar license. Venues under 120 capacity were allowed a much cheaper liquor licence. Corridor the first small bar to open was a thin and long venue with bartenders that prided themselves on a good cocktail. My tastes were too low-rent to appreciate it - but it did mark an improvement to the city and it suggested that perhaps the city was not closing but merely changing.

Well publicised in the then still formidable Sydney Morning Herald, Clover Moore had fought a pitched battle against the faceless monolith that was the Hotel’s Association. Funded through poker machine money they fought tooth and nail to keep live music and late-night entertainment synonymous with poker machines. While Moore somehow won it did provide a glimpse behind the veil at how freely state politics and the gambling lobby intermingled.

Moore’s victory was a pitched battle against a far better armed foe, a foe that could change the rules whenever it wanted. Much ink has been spilled about the lockout laws imposed by then Barry O'Farrell in 2014. Officially put in force to curb the city’s alcohol fuelled violence, it represented the decisive blow to they city’s nightlife. In the language of control - a zone was demarcated - venues within could not admit new punters after 1:30 am and last drinks were served by 3 am. Bottleshops throughout the state had to close by 10:30.

Almost instantly the city began to wither. I remember seeing the impact on the once heaving Oxford now quieter on a Friday at 11 pm as it had been on Tuesday at 4 am. The exclusion of Star City Casino left most to conclude the true purpose of the lockout laws were to funnel drinkers into the casino.

Newtown also fell outside the Zone. Newtown was a bohemian escape from the chain-store uniformity of the CBD. It was grimy, graffiti-streaked with goths swilling goon in the parks. It felt safe and tolerant. Now with the lockout laws in force, people that had drunk in the city were shunted off to Newtown. Places where lines had not existed now swelled with drinkers who didn’t care about the area’s heritage as long as they could get wrecked. No judgement on this last point but definitely on the first. Rates of violence in the suburb spiked while the area’s iconic character began to buckle.

I can remember the moment when I discovered exactly what this meant. Thanks to the early bottleshop closing now in force, I bought enough alcohol to cater for the latest, craziest scenario. You could always buy more mixer but not more alcohol, or so the thinking went. I had popped down with a mate to the 7 Eleven on King Street. The automatic doors failed to open when I approached. I knocked on them but peering through into the operating theatre like light I could see the cashier not at the desk. Beside me came a pair of two females who stood at the door.
“Yeah there’s no-one there…” I said.
“Probably off to get a curry” one said and began to pound on the glass door with a closed fist, making it shiver in its frame. My friend began to tell her off for her racist remark when another couple approached the door and began to pound on it too. The doors opened and a sheepish attendant came through. “Sorry sir I was using the toilet.”

It’s worth considering this from the point of view from the poor guy, especially given 7 Eleven’s habit of underpaying their staff and working them horrifically long hours. He clearly not born in Australia and was working alone. He returns from the toilet to see 6 people four of which are banging on the glass door. The woman that had made the racist remark began to slurring abuse at him for leaving his post. I was shocked but it was only after putting two and two together I realised that this was idiosyncratic and tolerant Newtown’s character being crushed.

Anecdotes about Newtown getting more violent filtered through. It was no surprise when in 2016 Isaac Keatinge was gay bashed. It was not the Newtown I had grown up in.

Back in Epping, I began to witness another change. The transformation of Strathfield into a high density, high intensity, congested and most of all soulless CBD was complete. Towering blocks of apartments blocked out the sun and created wind corridors, through will a chilling gale blew all months of the year. Shopfronts at the bottom were simply the same convenience store replicated ad nausea. The entire facade was prefabricated, generic and utterly without character. The only redemption was the Korean community that had moved in. Terrific Korean food was available yet once the transaction was complete there was nothing to keep people there.

Yet this phenomenon was replicated throughout the rail corridor that joined Strathfield to Epping. All down the line developers were taking advantage of surging apartment prices as towering blocks of apartments, some 25 - 30 stories sprouted up. Homebush, Chonchord, Rhodes, Eastwood. As the train drifted over the Parramatta river between Rhodes and Meadowbank you a rapid beat was kept by the faceless blocks vaulting up the sky. When there was a gap you could see out West to the furious industry as mechanical claws of cranes moved steel beams, glass panes and unimaginable mountains of concrete to bellowing hot air and hype into the Sydney housing bubble. Slowly the wave crept towards the suburb that I had grown up in. It was only a matter of time.

For Epping it happened in 2016. I had spent nearly a year working overseas and I had learned to be wary of the Sydney I returned to. Epping was ripe for redevelopment. In 2012 it was flagged as a priority precinct - it sits on the intersection between the Northern Line into the city, and the line connected to Chatswood. This second branch goes through Macquarie University taking the massive amounts of international students attending. From all directions hyper-development was creeping towards Epping. Tower blocks of apartments appeared to move in real time to take advantage of the property bubble, marching not just along the train line, but also from Chatswood along Epping Highway. This is not just the imagination of a crusty old writer who’s afraid of change. In the first quarter of 2017 24% of Australia’s GDP was in the area between Macquarie Park and the CBD. Development was market driven it’s main purpose to generate profits, meaning the livability for those in the suburbs came a very distant second, if at all.

When it did arrive, it was brutal. The fifties suburban houses on their generous blocks of land, places that I had walked past on my way to school were suddenly surrounded by cyclone fencing. Over a few days there was the grinding sound of metal and concrete then they were gone. Whenever I had told people I had grown up in Epping they often remarked how leafy it was. Now along Epping road entire blocks were left a barren. Still left partially standing was an art deco apartment block that had always fascinated me growing up. One night I jumped the fence to pay my respects to the dying. While the inside was gutted there remained the wood and brass finishings of a modest but functional apartments. Back outside, the small but elegant red brick building stood in stark contrast to the giant apartment blocks already rising up behind me. Where the art deco apartments beside the houses, the apartment blocks dominated the landscape, peering down.

On one corner was a clear holdout of man refusing to sell. His brick fence had been damaged during the demolitions, with a section resting shattered on the footpath. Now he had the dubious privilege of living next to a manmade desert, levelled by bulldozers. Soon he would have another privilege of living in a house surrounded on all sides by giant (25 stories) blocks of flats peering into his backyard.

Community reaction to the sudden hyper-development was loud but in the end impotent. The suburb had become part of a council consolidation was now part of Parramatta and giant developers could hire the most powerful lawyers and afford to sit on land until planning permission was approved.

Today the objections are all practical. Talk is about too much congestion, not about a loss of character. I had grown up in once quiet Epping and now it was utterly unrecognisable. The roads were congested, the sleepy cul-de-sac was now impossible to get a park. The media were happy to regurgitate promises of financial benefits of development but I never saw any. Instead the suburb is less liveable by almost any standard. To tally it all up in the end, I had lost far far more than I had gained. The context of my childhood, a easy suburb that happily provided for its residents was now a seething metropolis, bursting at the seams. And for what gain?

Riding round on my motorcycle I could see that Epping was an extreme example of plight that had befallen the entire city. Immense blocks of units were going up everywhere. For a time the inner-West remained relatively unscathed but soon the house I had been living in Newtown had a giant apartment complex raised up next to it. Roads became choked, people became meaner and as the high-rise apartment blocks clamoured towards the harbour and train lines, the people below clamoured to get to work every day. Before my eyes the city had transformed into a prefabricated high-density nightmare, devoid of character, all personality sacrificed before the false gods of big developers. Yes, the beaches were great but what good were they if you had to sit in traffic for an hour and a half each way? Only the Northern Beaches and Eastern Suburbs - those affluent, Liberal voting bastions seemed the only places immune to the hyper development.

Nowhere was the symbol of what Sydney had become more succinctly captured than Barangaroo. The planned redevelopment of the CSR site would contain vast amounts of public green space. A compromise from Jamie Packer for building the city’s towering second casino for high rollers. Second plans saw the amount of green space cut back and the building’s height increased to an immense 275 metres tall (Centrepoint is 305). Once Premier Mike Baird took over, all plans were conducted in secret including the tender process. Morally flawed but literarily brilliant as a symbol Barangaroo is sublime - a monument to exclusive gambling, built at the cost of public green space, a monument that will dominate the skyline of a city built for the few to profit off the many. And all the major decisions about it conducted in privacy.

It has been two and a bit years since I’ve moved to Melbourne. I see changes here that I recognise from Sydney. Apartments are going up but the nightlife remains vibrant. There is a tolerance, a slower pace. It is hard to have left my friends and family but I have made new friends. In the end Melbourne is a much better city than Sydney is because it reminds me how Sydney was. The people are nicer and more invested in the livability rather than of the city.

When Glady Berejiklian won in the NSW election I had mixed feelings. I was glad that I had not wasted the past two years in the hope that the city would shake off the yoke of developer money. I was also deeply sad that it did not seem to matter to the voting majority of Sydneysiders that their city had become a mean, money hungry version of itself; that livability was so unimportant. It seemed to represent the final victory of neoliberalism in the final and most important battle - that for the hearts and minds of the public.

I have begun to avoid returning. When I go back to Epping, it is like seeing the face of a old friend overwritten with a circuit board over and over again. Newtown is tough too. Its transformation from a thriving bohemian quarter to a cultural ghetto into which every citizen unhinged enough to want a drink after midnight is herded. Out of Newtown or Epping - the city at large is unrecognisable, in that it is totally recognisable in its utter uniformity. With the Opera House or Harbour bridge out of sight, vast swathes represent the absolute triumph of money over every other consideration. There is nothing to distinguish one street from another. Each is flanked by chains and sport backlit corporate logos. Inside each copycat pub the same poker machines flash for our attention, as the same desperado flushes his savings, interrupted only momentarily by a melody and a burst of serotonin. I’m left with a single thought - it is possible to turn it all round? You can’t go back but can you go forward to reinstate a sense of place. This will never be achieved by a property developer but by a civic and community driven movement. Until the city realises this Sydney will continue its decline.