Sydney Vs Melbourne. The winner is…

The critical question in the Sydney versus Melbourne debate is –

Does Melbourne know it’s on?

Sydney sure as hell does.

From QANTAS captains welcoming passengers to ‘the greatest city in the world’ to the Sydney Festival slogan, ‘A Great Festival for a Great City’[1], Sydney is gauche, parochial and boorish.

Proof is Sydney’s obsessive dubbing of local sites ‘iconic’. By the way Sydney, consult a dictionary on what that word means.

Here’s an unbiased assessment of 3 of them.

The Opera House is pretty at sunset but as a venue its nasty. Its once cutting edge design was superseded by any number of buildings long ago.

Inside, the public areas are cramped and the bars as tiny as they are scarce.

The seats were designed by the acoustician and the acoustics by the upholsterer.

If you’re disabled, don’t bother. If you want to take a leak, use a bottle.

This might come as a shock, but other cities have opera houses! They may not have been elevated to the ultimate i-c-o-n status, but even a Sydney resident might be impressed by La Scala, Teatro Colon or the Paris Opera.

The National Trust says that Harry's Cafe de Wheels is not only a “quintessential Sydney icon”, it’s an institution. So is Villawood.

Located between a four lane road and a harbour backwater, Harry's has dished out pies since the 1930s. Some stock could be original.

To be fair, the service is considerate - food cooled to avoid mouth burn and drinks warmed to avert too great a contrast.

The rear of the Cafe affords a fine prospect of Her Majesty's Australian Navy ships disgorging bilge into a stagnant lagoon.

Customers can test their reflexes swatting flies and dodging seagull shit. And at night, motorists can dodge inebriates as they jauntily totter into the street. Police manning a recent speed trap joined in the merriment, laughing as drunks showered cars with half eaten pie 'n peas. Ha ha![2]

There are few Sydney landmarks of which its residents are prouder than Bondi Beach.

Though its only 5km from the CBD, visitors feel a world away from the big city bustle. Except for those days[3] when every man, woman, child, backpacker, carjacker, halfling and hobbit sit squeezed together, buttock to jowl, rubbing coconut oil into their hirsute abundances.

The beach is 150 metres from the shops - across a six lane road, a median strip, a footpath, a car park, another bigger footpath, another road and a promenade.

If you’re an out of town surfer, the locals will give you a memorable welcome.

The life guards use a public address system operated by the profoundly deaf with auxiliary mobile loud hailers, just in case you missed your orders.

Get there early to play chicken with the beach cleaning tractors.

If you’re from a country other than Australia and want to experience Bondi after dark - register with the local constabulary and move in groups of 20.

With both a south-easterly aspect and no protection from the northwest, the beach is blasted by southerly squalls and baked by westerlies - sometimes on the same day.

Don’t worry, if you’re too cold or hot, you can always seek relief in the piss warmed surf.

These 3 places maybe iconic to some, but they’re comic to many.

And that’s just fine.

I’ve recently returned from Pig City in Brisbane.

Those people might have skin cancer and bad clothes but they don’t give a toss if they’re cool or anybody likes their city. This suggests they just might have their shit together.

If Pig City had been in Sydney, the crowd would have been checking itself out, not the bands. Of course, that wasn’t a bad idea when Chris Bailey was on stage.

If Melbourne is the golden retriever of cities, Sydney is the foxy constantly trying to sniff the big dog’s arse.

And Brisbane?

It’s the old blue heeler asleep in the sun, occasionally waking to lick its balls.

I think we all know – particularly the men - which has the greatest appeal.


[1] When Schofield presided over that, Dublin was celebrating its millennium. There was not a relative epithet to be seen. Dublin was content with being Dublin. Sydney needed to reassure itself that it was, err… New York? [2] In keeping with the carnival atmosphere, Harry’s Café de Wheels actually has no wheels!
[3] Those falling in summer.

Manners - the mark of an older man

It’s taken a while to work out. I thought I was forced to repeat orders at my local because my voice was at a frequency undetectable by youth.

When drinking with the Glibertine recently, the real reason emerged.

Each of his, ‘Please may I have a triple Irish and a Cartlon’, left the youthful staff with gobs open, and not because of the frequency and scale of his personal order.

All around, people were barking, ‘VB’ or ‘2 Carltons’. They were rewarded with drinks and smiles. Our polite requests were met with uncomprehending blankness.

Could it have been the Glibertine’s burgundy smoking jacket and beaver pelt slippers?

‘What's wrong with those serfs?’, huffed the Glibertine. ‘Deaf, stupid or both?’

I suggested his attire might have struck them dumb. He scowled.

I wondered if his complex sentence construction and the insertion of the unfamiliar ‘may’ and ‘please’ might be the reason.

Spraying me with Irish mist, the Glibertine roared to life.

‘Good god man, you’re right! I might have been speaking Dzongkha to those babymaids.

May has gone for good. Please has passed away. Manners are dead.

We’ll be overwhelmed by the loathsome uncouth.’

Now he was on a roll and heads were turning.

‘I was in the East Sydney the other day. F*cking crowded.

Trying to get back to the table, I ran into two of those short browed humanoids. Couldn’t get around them.

Would you excuse me, please?, I say.

One monkey man instantly adopted an aggressive stance. The other didn’t bother to look at me, just uttered a venomous, No.

They were so unused to hearing good manners they thought they were being reproached.

Maybe I should have sprinkled a few ‘mates’ around. Aussie blokes are all mates, right, mate?’

The Glibertine sucked hard at his Irish.

‘And what about those f*ckers on Virgin Blue? Every time I board a flight, the babyface at the door says, G’dday, Douglas.

Familiar little oiks. I shake their tiny damp hands and say, I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t know we had been introduced. I’ve forgotten your name.’

We discussed whether we were afflicted with some bourgeois manners hang up.

Unsurprisingly, you might think, we decided it wasn’t our fault.

Manners oil the joints of society. Except in pubs, apparently, manners make the machinery of living run just a little more smoothly.

So, to all you public bar inhabitants, if the Glibertine and I offend you with our politeness, let us know - gently.

Please?

Inner-city cool

My thanks to Merely for having the good sense to invite me to share my wisdom.

I admit to not being cool. Indeed, I abhor cool, loathe its pursuit and despise those therein engaged.

Never would I possess porn star sunglasses. My trousers are of the denim variety and rest on the upper hip. I’ve no black clothes, do not own a car, let alone a sleek one, and my sort of pinkish complexion will never adorn a magazine cover. Other than Dermatologists’ Monthly.

But I do live in Potts Point and, like it or not, living here once afforded collateral cool.

Alas, things have changed. As the area has become infected with the self consciously cool, it has lost its ability to splash a little cool on the uncool.

Potts Point was cool when it was blithely unaware of itself. It had an accidental, disheveled style attractive to the similarly afflicted.

There was nowhere to buy provisions. Locals were nourished by alcohol, tobacco smoke and cocktail garnishes. Now there are delicatessens, gourmet butchers and a host of up market emporia of ephemera.

Never before has Potts Point been invaded by so many dogs of the fluffy, yapping kind. Never before have so many alighted from Porsche Cayennes to fill the bistros with their vacuous cacophony. Vacuophony?

Overnight the local bottleshop sprouted a Simon Johnson. Pate doesn’t even go with beer. Beer does. Speaking of beer, the place now features more foreign than domestic.

Each day sees fewer discarded needles, less vomit and precious few puddles of piss, other than from said fluffy yappers.

No longer gibbering to themselves on the street, Potts Point’s eccentrics have taken their delusions inside. The slim figured, plucked eyebrow crowd with furred collars and well turned heels have scared away the mad.

This purification is insidiously snaking its way up the hill from Potts Point and west from Elizabeth Bay which has always been little more than a poor man’s Point Piper.

While it’s too late for Potts Point, one hopes that sticky puddle of neon nasty, the glorious Cross, can resist this creeping ponciness.

One prays that the smart restaurants and flash bars, sprouting like spring daffodils at the tip, will never expunge the grunge.

But, let’s face it, the few Kings Cross foot soldiers left to stop the invasion don’t make the most reliable or sober army. And, when I last checked, they can be bought. Cheaply.

See you in Redfern. Just get there before Rusty Crowe and his homey a Court stuff that too.