Sydney's Inner Circle

Photos: Christopher Morris

Neoclassical heritage buildings buttress contemporary organic designs in Martin Place, a pedestrian walkway through Sydney’s central business district. / The city’s sophistication overshadows Australia’s rough-and-tumble macho side.

I can’t remember what possessed me. But here I am, climbing a series of ladders up narrow vertical tunnels, penetrating the underbelly of the bridge that crosses Sydney’s expansive harbour. It’s hard to say whether the queasiness in my stomach comes more from claustrophobia or a fear of heights. I can hear the trains rattling underfoot, the whoosh of the cars speeding along the highway that crosses the bridge, the creaking of its 77-year-old steel frame. Finally, I reach my goal: the top of the arc that supports the whole structure. I’ve done it. And the jitters fall briefly away. The brisk wind off the Pacific is too exhilarating. The city’s ferry-filled harbour is brimming with too much life. The iconic Sydney Opera House gleams too emphatically in the sunlight. In the euphoric heat of the moment, I take both hands off the rails when the guide immortalizes me and my fellow climbers in a group photo. In the resulting picture, I look slightly mad with glee. 

Growing up, I was bespectacled and bookish, and my books painted pictures of a land Down Under settled by convicts whose rough-and-ready manners had become those of a nation. But later I started catching glimpses of another Australia, through Peter Carey’s 1988 Booker Prize-winning novel, Oscar and Lucinda, a moving love story that features the author’s sin-riddled city as a character in its own right, and Baz Luhrmann’s 1992 romcom Strictly Ballroom (one of my all-time favourite films), set in Australia’s world-renowned competitive social dance scene. An alt-Oz, with Sydney at its centre, emerged. The country revealed itself to me as quite the king of camp. For all its stoicism and rugby-playing toughness, there’s an equal measure of sensuousness. For every straight line, there is a curve.

Photo: Christopher Morris

Harry Seidler made waves when he designed the Ian Thorpe Aquatic Centre.

Unlike tidy Melbourne, with its gridded layout, Sydney has higgledy-piggledy streets. Some track the bulging bays of the harbour; others mark the meanderings of former creeks and rivulets; others still follow Aboriginal paths along the ridges of the area’s many hills. Fittingly, Sydney, a gold-rush city, has always had a soft spot for sinners who depart from the straight and narrow, for schemers who take get-rich-quick shortcuts to the top, for creative sorts who won’t conform. This is where the imperial sidewalk ended.

Throughout the city, terraces are decked out in Sydney lace, cast-iron fences wrought into extravagant swirling forms.

“All newcomers to Sydney have that experience of disorientation,” says gregarious local architect and walking tour leader Eoghan Lewis. His Sydney Architecture Walks (“urban tours for aesthetes, literati, flâneurs”) highlight many of the city’s landmark buildings, almost all of which happen to be curvy – from Jørn Utzon’s 1973 Sydney Opera House to the round 1981 Sydney Tower to starchitect Renzo Piano’s willowy 2000 Aurora Place skyscraper. Arabesques and flourishes predate the modern era, though. Throughout the city, the Victorian terraces are decked out in so-called Sydney lace, cast-iron fences on the balconies and wraparound porches that are wrought into extravagant swirling forms. Wandering and taking in these shapes is like watching a dance unfold, which I end up doing later in a community centre. There a disco ball slowly turns above ballroom dancers all kitted out: the women dressed in everything from red velvet to pink chiffon to silver lamé and sequins; the men more conservatively attired, save for a couple of crazy toupées.