Sydney - Softcover

Clean-limbed description of the great port by Morris (O Canada, p. 307, etc.). Morris now sees Sydney as one of the most important cities of the world, ``not the most beautiful...but the most hyperbolic, the youngest in heart, the shiniest.'' Sydney's classy new Opera House is a world-famed structure, and the city's suburbs have spread so vastly that the metropolitan area now twice exceeds that of Beijing and is six times as large as Rome. The people of Sydney are generally seen, Morris says, as ``an esoteric subspecies of Briton- -sunburnt, healthy, loud, generous, misogynist, beery, lazy, capable, racist and entertaining, strutting along beaches wearing bathing caps and carrying banners, exchanging badinage or war memoirs in raw colonial slang, jeering at unfortunate Englishmen at cricket matches they nearly always won.'' The natives of Australia have lived near Sydney Harbor for 20,000 years, she tells us, though Western-style civilization did not begin until Cook of the Royal Navy arrived in 1770. Not long after, British convicts were exiled there in great numbers and found a tough, lonely life, thinking themselves, Morris says, almost on the moon. The author finds an epiphany in the aborigines, a sense of transience or yearning that ``in some way charges the place'' and that moved D.H. Lawrence to detect in their eyes and their visionary tie with the land the ``incomprehensible ancient shine.'' Nonetheless, Morris still feels Sydney to be ``on the edge of some more metaphysical blank...It does not seem an introspective place....[and] has never been overburdened with spirituality.'' Sydney's one unassailable satisfaction: ``the beauty of its harbor....[In] the velvet sensual darkness...I sometimes feel myself haunted by a sense of loss, as though time is passing too fast, and frail black people are watching me out of the night somewhere, leaning on their spears.'' The old dazzle still at work. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Elegantly written and charmingly impressionistic, this newest addition to the author's distinguished series of travel books ( Hong Kong ; Venice ) paints a vivid picture of Australia's largest city. Founded in 1788, when England sent its first shipload of convicts to Australia to atone for their crimes by settling the remote wilderness, Sydney in the 1990s is, Morris states, "one of the great cities of the world," booming from its participation in Pacific Rim trade, blessed with a splendid climate and a spectacularly beautiful harbor. She captures the sardonic, earthy humor for which Sydneysiders are famous: the pupils who translate their school's motto ("I Hear, I See, I Learn") into the mock-Latin "Audio, Video, Disco," spoofing the city's famously hedonistic lifestyle; the infirm woman who, helped up from a bench, confides, "It was a good lay, anyway." The author capably describes Sydney's social structure and memorably captures its architectural ambience. Yet she admits she found the city elusive, and she fails to provide the single crucial insight into Sydney's essence that would bring her slightly fuzzy portrait into focus. Not quite as wonderful as some of Morris's other titles, but great fun to read all the same.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.