central

My MM colleague Sasha and I stand outside toilets at Sydney airport fruitlessly cajoling our smartphones to direct us to our hotel. Later we pick an exit, any exit from Central Station and I promise to find the hotel by wandering in the right direction with my wits about me.

We obey traffic lights, cross several roads, and manage a fairly direct path to our destination, only to find a subway direct to Central Station at the hotel door. We eat lunch in the sun on a balcony outside our conference room which looks up George Street right into the heart of the CDB.

As a Melburnian, my default setting for Sydney is to bag the place. But my 24 hours in central Sydney produce nothing to criticise and plenty to like. Neither the straight-line grid of Melbourne nor the flat sprawl of Adelaide can match Hobart’s feel of history. Sydney has it too in its higgledy-piggledy centre.

Just after six this morning Tracy and Cathy and I walk through the Haymarket to Pyrmont Bridge and back to the hotel. Central Sydney is a bewildering spaghetti of stairways, paved terraces and criss-crossing pathways. We walk along Darling Harbour with buses on a flyover miles overhead that disappears into the sixth storey of the surrounding buildings.

A marvellous historic pigeon-spotted plinth sits at the end of the Pyrmont bridge, a set of utilitarian concrete stairs leading off one way and a glossy glass walkway in the other direction. Such an incongruous, jangling mix of architecture, yet in Sydney it just doesn’t seem to matter.

The traffic has a different character here. Horns are honked, as in Asia, for no apparent reason: it’s just noise-making; no one is going anywhere. If honked in Melbourne, you’ve caused offence: it’s the aural equivalent of a fist through the windscreen.

The Melbourne-Sydney similarity is the Asianisation of the inner city: Chatswood, Box Hill, central Sydney at night, the Melbourne CBD. The majority in George Street is Asian.

Chinese girls in mini-skirts stride by with money on their minds. Young Asians suck slurpees on the Lilydale train.

A time long ago I worked a summer job carting an importer’s bills of lading to shipping and stevedoring companies before lodging them at the Harbour Trust. I walked and knew Melbourne. Much of it has grown foreign to me, but it quickly becomes familiar as I travel to the inner suburbs to do my job.

I am an observer of Sydney. It is no part of me.

Rock on.