sydney

For most of my life Sydney is a brash, cultureless place up north that I have no desire to visit. As a child Sydney means the funnel-web spider, atrax robustus, a thick, black, hairy, nasty brute of an arachnid that frightens you to death long before it gets a fang near you. Sydney is a place to drive through quickly on the way to somewhere better.

  

Last year and this I come to Sydney with Liz and Sandy to train teachers and psychs to present the SKIPS program in North Ryde.

I’ve no idea where I am in Sydney, whether in Ryde, Chatswood or Parramatta. Trains leave the airport or Central and rush into tunnels, emerging in unknown locations, before delving into other dark places. North Ryde Station is deep, deep underground. For food we trip back to Chatswood and traipse around what could be any metropolis in China.

On this trip I’m in Parramatta, a famous place name but otherwise unknown to me. I’m with my Victorian colleague Sasha, and Cathy, the national MM project officer from Adelaide. We travel in taxis and live in hotels, something I’ve done lots of in recent years, but it doesn’t come naturally. Every driver is from somewhere else; every hotel window looks into a car park.

After today’s training we walk back to the hotel, this morning’s long taxi ride now a short stroll on foot. We ditch our gear in our rooms and wander back to a mega-mall. I need new spectacle frames, shoes, maybe a watch, but everything is designer this, designer that: nothing here for daggy 60 year-olds. And food-court food is about obesity, not nutrition.

The dawn from my window on the sixth level is a riot of orange filtered between high-rise towers and a multi-level car park. Stained silver trains roll by, yellow doors their only distinguishing feature. And always the rattle and hum of traffic, the blare of claxons, whatever the hour, whatever the day.

Sydneysiders seem somehow different to us from down south. The trainees in Newcastle say they prefer Melbourne to Sydney: better shopping, more refinement. The Sydney people tell us they like Melbourne. Few Melbourne people like Sydney.

Last time here I kill time between gig and airport with a ride on a harbour ferry. The harbour is beautiful enough and the ferries a charming adjunct to the life of the city, but I’m not a water person.

Rock on.