30 Days in Sydney Read Online Free PDF

house, breakfast cereal, baby photos, fishing rods, mosquito nets, garden hose and a lifetime of Jack's plans, not only houses but big dreams for Sydney, a gateway topped by a dance floor above Circular Quay, an idea to turn Darling Harbour into 'lungs', a passageway for fresh salt air down into the forsaken edge of Broadway.
    I am sorry, My Lord, to add to this letter, wrote John Hunter almost 200 years before, that we have this last summer experienced the weather so excessively sultry and dry that from the very parch state of the earth every strong wind has occasioned conflagrations of astonishing extent, from some of which much public and much private property has been destroyed. Some of the settlers have been ruined by losing the whole produce of their harvest after it had been stacked and secured; others have lost not only their crops, but their houses, barns, and a part of their livestock, by the sudden manner in which the fire reached and spread over their grounds. Trains of gunpowder could scarcely have been more rapid in communicating destruction, such was the dried and very combustible state of the vegetation, whether grass or tree.
    In January 1994 all of Sydney seemed alight. The city was ringed with fire, ash fell in the Central Business District and it was not hard for my friends to imagine a ghastly apocalypse, petrol stations exploding the whole of white civilisation in flames. It was at about this time that people began to pay attention to Tim Flan-nery who was saying that the landscape which the white people found on arrival had been a carefully tended one, produced by a planned regime of burning, that practice known as 'fire-stick farming'. Commenting on John Hunter's letter, Flannery wrote: By now Wune 10 17971 the Eora had experienced a decade of European interference. The effects of disease, farms and settlement meant that they were no longer able to manage their land by burning it as they had done for millennia. Death-dealing bushfires with their terrifying roar and unimaginable heat were becoming a major problem.
    By the time I returned to Sydney in 2000 the whole issue of firestick farming had become particularly intense. Fire was defining not simply the landscape but the political climate and I would later have the slightly odd experience of sitting in an expensive Sydney restaurant, looking out across to the harbour and the opera house, and hearing two of my friends almost come to blows on the subject. Then I would see what a long way it was from New York.
    But, for now, I walked in the slightly mournful light towards Jack's house, avoiding looking in the place where my old house had been.
    There's fucking nothing there, mate, Sheridan had written to me. Nothing but the chimney in the middle of a lawn. I can't go there.
    I also kept the chimney behind my back, although as I stepped up on top of the platform on which Jack's new house was built, I could feel the absence pressing between my shoulder blades. It was, alas, my way. I have a lifetime of turning my back on painful memories.
    Jack's rebuilt house, being constructed in true de Selby fashion, still had no more walls than the previous model. Its one solid wall was blind and windowless, politely turning its back on its neighbour. Jack's place faced out towards the estuary, and thus, sitting in the steaming hot-tub, I was able to look down to the mangroves, up to the high darkening escarpment, but to have no visible reminder - if you can discount the silhouettes of dead trees on the clifftops - of all that had been lost in the fire.
    But later, having shared a bottle of Dead Arm Shiraz with Jack and Brigit, I dressed and wandered out on to the lawn. The wine and the bath had made me mellow and, as I walked across the thick damp grass in my warm bare feet, I was not prepared for the surge of grief that now rose in my throat.
    There we had lunched on the verandah beside the dense and fragile old wistaria the brevity of whose yearly splendour was