into the rocks
As much as it's a tourist hive, I admit to an
increasing fondness for this area of Sydney, a city I frequently visit but in which I rarely feel at home. The Rocks has never exactly beckoned, but twice now it
has simply happened to me, presenting itself suddenly with a quietude, a
gravitas, piece by piece like the stone blocks that create its centuries old
buildings. Cast up against the cargo-pants-and-visor-filled Circular Quay and
the terribly ordinary CBD streets, the area is an anachronism, literally the
past carried through into the present. I feel ghostly walking the narrow steps
and beneath the hulking arch of stone that is cut from the hill. Am I haunting or being haunted? That part is unclear.
a play at the wharf
Beside the early 19th-century world of the Rocks, the
redeveloped, formerly industrial wharf area has become a contemporary docking
space for Sydney’s literary, arts and theatre scenes. In the modernised shell
of a disused 1950s warehouse, a surreal transformation takes place on stage. A
salary-man crawls through a tunnel from Tokyo to a small town in the Northern
Territory. The town is terrorised by a crocodile, who is a man, who is a
crocodile. School girls learn about love and creativity; older women reminisce
about a lost past. The earth is traumatised by a quarry, which is a
disfiguration. A portal to other worlds. A scar on the land that reminds of
Australia’s own scars, of a national kind. Some of this history was also played
out in the Rocks around us.
pop-ups
It is a night spent viewing a contemporary play by an expat
Australian come home, in a building that is an old soul sheltering a new (or
the new reviving the old), in an area both industrial and chic, in a city both
garish and sombre. The after-show drinks are held at a wharfside pop-up bar. The
very term ‘pop up’ makes me think of children’s books with paper cut-outs
rising from the pages. Fragile constructions too easily ripped. Many conversations
are given air and then left hanging in the night. Too much champagne
is consumed. Against this transient scene, the steel arch of the Harbour Bridge
illuminates green against the dark sky, propped solidly on its stocky bearings.
