Sydney is more Brooklyn than Brooklyn

In Sydney people were drinking cider, claiming it was a perfect cider climate. Some were drinking whiskey. In certain bars every guy was wearing the scuffed boots black jeans blue denim greaser outfit. No one was that interested in artisanal pickles, but still, there was a whole lot of what I’d taken to be Brooklyn style on the streets of Sydney.

And then there was Shady Pines, a basement saloon behind an unmarked door on an empty alley wedged between Crown St. and Oxford – two of the city’s most happening strips. A speakeasy to make any true Brooklyn trendster weak at the knees. Sydney’s only American Apparel shop was less than a block away.

Past that unmarked door, was a low-ceilinged room, its floor spread with worn carpets. A long bar stretched along one wall, its bottles catching the dusty light of the ornate lamps. The stuffed and mounted heads of North American animals – everything from bison to catfish – adorned the walls.

Having spent a semester trudging about Brooklyn, investigating the whole urbanised, hipsterfied Americana thing going on there, I’d now found in Sydney something far edgier, and infinitely more confused. A parody of the Brooklyn parodies of old school Midwestern dive bars.

Our table was lit by a candle in a grimey mason jar – the mason jar! Adored festish of the Brooklyn hipster enclaves from September to October 2011! – and we ordered whiskey and local cider. A bowl of peanuts in their shells was placed on the table by a disinterested waiter.

I did what any aspiring young Brooklyn trendy would do; I got out my phone, and when no one was watching I took photos. And then I pretended I wasn’t embarrassed to be doing so. And the room was so dark, so like authentically divey, that the pictures turned out terribly. And then I planned my next blog post.

 

Dead Australians can be interesting too!

One of Buenos Aires’s biggest tourist attractions – and one of the first I visited back in 2005 – is the Recolata cemetery. One of Mexico’s biggest festivals is Día de los Muertos. Up and down the length of Latin America, cemeteries and the rites that go on within them are hot stuff. Especially for backpackers at a loose end.

Wandering Valparaiso a couple of years ago, I heeded the advice of Lonely Planet and visited a couple of cemeteries on the hills overlooking the city. Last year in Cienfuegos, when unsure of how to spend the day I visited a bayside cemetery, again at Lonely Planet’s suggestion. With all the melodramatic statuary – angels fainting over one another, lions weeping, virgins imploring the heavens – and photogenic decay that goes on within them, such cemeteries make the perfect guidebook filler.

Cemeteries in Anglophone countries just don’t garner the same inches of guidebook approval. Maybe they seem too muted, too dour and Protestant. Maybe they don’t seem old enough or grand enough, and thus don’t seem mysterious enough.

Wedged behind a supermarket on a narrow street in an area thrumming with bars and restaurants and street art and winos, Newtown’s Camperdown Cemetery has plenty of mystique, it just doesn’t advertise it. Hidden behind graffitied walls, it is easily overlooked by everyone except the local goth kids and their Saturday night candles.

Harking from Sydney’s sandstone days – circa 1850 – Camperdown Cemetery is only a couple decades younger than La Recoleta, but has a completely different vibe. After a girl was murdered here, the bounds of the cemetery were decreased to make more room for a park and less room for the dead. Tombstones from the reclaimed land were deposited higgledy-piggledy within the cemetery ground. Most are now overgrown, many are cracked or crumbling. There’s little sense of order to the place, which might be why ghost (and goth) sightings are so common.

A lugubrious Moreton Bay fig tree holds court over the gates of the cemetery; eventually its roots will infiltrate every grave and overturn every tombstone. Already many of the tombs sit crooked and subsiding. Still, for all the desolation and decay, the details of many of the tombs are in tact, and these paint a picture of life – and how it tended to end – in the Sydney colony. Death by water is a recurring theme, the victims of some shipwrecks buried in common graves.

As the stones crack and shift, those buried beneath them lose their names and fade into obscurity. Camperdown Cemetery evokes none of the permanence of its Baroqueish counterparts in other places, but is all the same a repository of crumbling history in a country that often forgets that it has any.

The Sydney Scene

This is exactly what I’d missed about Sydney: real, sticky-floored Sydney rock. A dark room, a chic young crowd, a throng at the bar, nonchalant bartenders and crappy local beers in crappier plastic schooner glasses, disgusting bathrooms, drunken eighteen year olds curled up around their phones, a snug stage, a smirking soundcheck, and a couple of your mates in the band letting loose on stage.

I used to say that not many great international acts came to Australia. I was very wrong, but it never mattered anyway because there were so many local acts working the circuit. I was bummed to realise I’d be missing the main late-Summer festival season, but there’s always a show somewhere.

These guys are The Former Love. I’ve known the front man since he was a mere bairn. Still kind of a shock to realise that he and his mates aren’t twelve years old (and thus a surprise to realise that I’m no longer 18). Less surprising to discover that in the last few years they’ve become pretty awesome.

It’s not their own song, but they stole a bit of local infamy with this…

Here is the original…

And for a bit of their original stuff (even Sydney loves antlers)…

Postcard from Sydney to Myself Six Months Ago

Dear self six months ago,

Thank you for your postcard from Mazunte, full of nostalgia after almost two years in Mexico. It was very good to hear from you even though, silly tit, you obviously didn’t consider the fact that six months after that postcard was sent I wouldn’t be starving in New York but rather sunning myself back in Sydney.

You were of course right about many things. New York is cold and expensive, and I spend a lot of time fretting about all the travel I am not doing, books I’m not writing, clothes I’m not wearing and money I’m not making. Life is very different from what it was in Mexico.

I’m not starving though, and I haven’t dropped out yet. I am enjoying uni, thanks for asking, although I still don’t really know what I’m doing there. You were wrong about the ramen though; pizza by the slice will kill me long before noodles do. Also donuts.

Anyway, I’m in Sydney. My first trip home in two and a half years. My first hot southern Christmas in five years. Mum is very happy. The cat is feigning indifference.

It is wonderful to be back. I’d forgotten how deeply this country resonates with me: every raucous bird call (you couldn’t really call it song), every aromatic rainstorm. It is beautiful here. A shame I’m allergic to everything. Far too much nature about.

I haven’t forgotten the girl. How could I? She was in Sydney too. You can see her wrist in one of the photos. She’s not around as often as she was. When she is, it feels like Mazunte all over again.

I’ve been eating all the delightfully crappy foods from our childhood. I’ve hung around with a lot of marsupials; I still remember so many of the weird animal facts we learned as a kid. The neighbourhood we grew up in doesn’t feel quite as suffocating as it used to. I think my accent might be growing back.

So basically, I’m keeping it together. Things aren’t as bad as you feared.

Good luck out there,

Phil

P.S. yes that is a baby koala…

Outtake: Rooftops of Brooklyn

I’m currently editing my two articles for the Glimpse Correspondents Program. Working with the editor/coordinator has been tremendously helpful; she’s brought a couple of rough-as-guts drafts and has shown me how to shape them into something worthy of sharing with the outside world. There have been a lot of casualties. Most of the excised paragraphs will never see the light of day, but I’m going to throw a few up here, just to give some idea of where the articles or going. or maybe where they’re not going anymore.

Anyway, this is about a visit to Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Greenpoint, Brooklyn…

On the rooftops of Brooklyn, people are trying to bring the transcendence of the country into the empty spaces of the city. Overlooking the East River, a 6000 square foot rooftop farm is growing tomatoes, radishes, chilies, and orderly rows of herbs. Chickens scratch in their coup and honey is congealing in the beehives. A bunch of local chefs get their produce here; no other veggies in New York have as direct a commute as this from soil to plate.

The labour at the rooftop farm is provided in part by volunteers. A no-bullshit ethic prevails; there’s work to be done and if you’re only here to spectate, you best stay the cuss out of the way. The volunteers work like Puritans, while down below them the Sunday sloppy brunch crowd enjoy the fruits of their labour.