Tales of the city
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday March 31, 2011
Every metropolis has its urban legends. John Birmingham reveals the stories - some funny, some dark - behind these well-known Sydney landmarks.1. The El Alamein Fountain in Kings CrossThe Harbour Bridge and the Opera House hog all the lovin' when it comes to symbols of Sydney recognised worldwide. And yet a humble fountain in a slightly seedy park has been copied many times all over the globe by designers looking to borrow a little of its modernist street cred. The El Alamein Fountain in Fitzroy Gardens - the demilitarised zone separating the Cross from its more genteel neighbours - was such a hit with design hipsters overseas that its creator, Robert Woodward, became known less for his architecture than this design, commissioned in 1959 and unveiled in 1961. In 1978, The Bulletin reported that "72 American companies were manufacturing it in seven different sizes and exporting it worldwide, making it probably the world's most copied fountain".For many years, Woodward's "dandelion" water feature was where Sydney met up before heading out for a night on the tiles. Locals lounged around it, enjoying the sun-dappled gardens by day; junkies, gay hustlers and bent cops moved through the shadowed surrounds after dark.Pranksters have often had their way with coloured dyes and bubble bath at the expense of the monument to the soldiers of the Australian 9th Division (who were prominent as the Allies smashed the Axis forces under Field Marshal Rommel in 1942). But vandals have left it almost entirely alone. Before his death in February 2010, Woodward speculated that it was the very delicacy of the fountain that deterred them: it would be so easy to trash the spindly copper piping that there was no challenge in it for even the meanest drunk.2. The Coke sign at Kings CrossIt burns through the night, casting its eerie-cheery red glow over shivering transvestites in winter and hordes of wandering party animals during the warmer months. The giant Coca-Cola sign at the top of William Street is as familiar an icon to locals as the sails of the Opera House are to visitors. It seems to have been there since the days when Coke had, er, coke as its secret ingredient and William Street was a shady bush track, meandering up the hill to some of the finest villas in town (and out to the undeveloped dunes of Bondi Beach, several hours' ride on horseback beyond). But of course it has been with us for much less time than that, in its current "dual screen" set-up since 1990, when the left side of the billboard was added to the original neon panel that first fired up in 1976. And while Coca-Cola now claims it's a myth the beverage once contained cocaine, it's definitely a myth - massively propagated by the internet - that the giant red billboard is heritage-listed. It probably should be. Even the gurus at the NSW Heritage Office we contacted for this story thought it was ... until they checked and found out that it wasn't.3. The Anzac War Memorial in Hyde ParkJoern Utzon was not the only architect to feel the scorn of an uncomprehending city. It's hard to imagine now the savage controversy that stormed around the Anzac War Memorial in Hyde Park when it was built and opened to the public in 1934. Designed by a relatively young architect, C. Bruce Dellit, the striking art deco monument was lashed as immoral and unworthy of honouring our glorious dead.Dellit's uncompromising modern aesthetic was a perfect vessel for the sculpture of Rayner Hoff, described in the Australian Dictionary of Biography as "the outstanding public sculptor in Sydney between the wars". Unfortunately, not everyone agreed.Hoff's sombre and affecting centrepiece, Sacrifice, drew the ire of conservatives because it featured three women bearing the naked body of an Australian soldier, lying atop a shield in the style of a fallen Spartan warrior. Representing life, the future and sacrifice, the women were a fundamental break with the accepted imagery of war memorials - fat blokes on horses or mournful diggers standing to attention with the air of men awaiting the imminent arrival of more fat blokes on horses. Two other sculptures, meant to stand atop stone pedestals on the eastern and western walls, were withdrawn after being attacked by the Catholic Church as "immoral and revolting" and "gravely offensive to ordinary Christian decency". The plaster casts were stored but eventually lost - and with them a beautiful legacy that would have been acknowledged the world over as some of the finest art to come out of the Great War.So viciously traduced was Hoff that he fell to the demon drink, lost his marriage and eventually his life, dying in November 1937 after being dumped by a wave in the surf and developing pancreatitis.4. The pig on Macquarie StreetThis little piggy gets around. Il Porcellino ("the piglet") - the bronze boar that has been grinning at passers-by outside Sydney Hospital since 1968, enticing all to rub its shiny nose for luck - has brothers around the world. Donated to the city by the Marchesa Clarissa Torrigiani to commemorate the work of her father and brother, the surgeons Thomas and Piero Fiaschi, Il Porky is an exact replica of the grand old boar sculpted by Pietro Tacco that has watched over the straw market in Florence since 1612. (Although nowadays, Florence's piglet is a copy, too, the original having decamped for the Museo Bardini.) Other Porcellini can be found in various galleries and parks as well as at the Viansa Winery in Sonoma, California and an adventure playground in Queensbury, New York.La famiglia Fiaschi hailed from Florence, where Thomas was born in 1853, leaving for Sydney when he turned 21 (his mother was English, hence the de-wogging of his first name). One of the earliest Italians to settle in Sydney, he practised out of Macquarie Street and served with Australian forces in the Boer War, where he won a Distinguished Service Order for conspicuous bravery before going back for a second bite of the cherry in the Great War. Greatly honoured for his medical work, he would approve of his piglet overlooking the bars and restaurants of Martin Place; the dashing surgeon was a great believer in the healing properties of wine and was one of the first Macquarie Street medicos to plant his own vineyard, Tizzana, on the Hawkesbury.Like his dad, whom he worshipped, Piero covered himself in martial glory, serving at Gallipoli and in France, but his principal calling was the saving of lives, not taking them. He practised in Phillip Street, refusing to move when the city's lawyers forced most of the doctors up to Macquarie. He died in Sydney Hospital in 1948 from burns received when a heater he was lighting exploded.5 Ferry Lane, The RocksLike Melbourne, Sydney was once a city of laneways and alleys. Hundreds of them. In the 19th century, most of the city's working poor lived in crowded slums just a few steps off the main boulevards of the colonial capital. Few of these lanes remain but one, Ferry Lane in The Rocks, survived the city's never-ending redevelopment and the destruction of dozens of nearby streets when the Harbour Bridge was built. It is also notable for one other reason: on January 19, 1900, the plague erupted there.The sun beat down hard that Friday, casting a shimmering silver net over the waters of the harbour and baking Sydney's unsealed streets until cart wheels and horses' hooves raised clouds of choking dust. Through those crowded avenues rode Arthur Payne, a 30-year-old wagon driver, fair of skin and said to be of anxious disposition. With good reason, as it turned out.Arthur was seized by dizziness, nausea and a headache of unmatched ferocity that January morning. He struggled through his duties before dragging himself home to 10 Ferry Lane just before sunset. There, he dosed himself with some castor oil, vomited enormously and collapsed into bed, the first victim of bubonic plague in Sydney. Arthur survived his brush with history. More than 300 of his fellow Sydneysiders, many of them his neighbours, did not. The outbreak led to mass panic initially and decades of slum reclamation later. But in one of those ironies history is so adept at throwing up, the epicentre of the epidemic largely escaped the destructive reshaping of the vast slum that surrounded it.6. Matthew Flinders' cat at the State LibraryIt's raining cats and dogs. Several of our four-legged friends are preserved in bronze throughout Sydney. And the war between dogs and cats is kept in balance by the homage paid to Trim, Matthew Flinders' cat, at the State Library on Macquarie Street. To Flinders we owe a tip of the slouch hat for popularising the name Australia. Joseph Banks had lobbied instead for "Terra Australis" but Flinders used the much easier ‚“Australia" throughout his book A Voyage to Terra Australis. Although the finished manuscript was delivered to him on his deathbed, Flinders never regained consciousness and so never knew that he'd succeeded in naming a new nation.Voyage described Flinders' circumnavigation of the continent, an epic undertaking of almost three years (from December 1801 to June 1803), followed by his capture and imprisonment on the island of Mauritius by the dastardly French. Flinders remains with us in the form of a statue at the State Library and he would be delighted that Trim, his companion on the voyage, watches over him from a ledge just a short distance away.Black of fur but white of paw, Trim was named after the butler in Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy because Flinders thought him the most faithful and affectionate of friends. He was a survivor, having fallen overboard as a kitten and scrambled back onto deck by clambering up an anchor rope. He lived through a shipwreck in 1803 and was imprisoned with Flinders when they strayed too close to French territory a year later. The great navigator blamed his furry friend's disappearance while the pair were incarcerated by the French, suspecting that his best mate had been eaten by the Gauls' hungry slaves. 7. The suspension bridge at NorthbridgeSometimes, disgraced Sydney property developers get it right, even if they end up in the poorhouse. Or dead. During the 1880s, the city was growing with obscene speed. Andrew Armstrong and James Brown, landowners and directors of the North Sydney Investment and Tramway Company, did as developers always have, pushing a little bit further and a little bit harder than was entirely wise. Looking beyond the frenetic building activity then transforming the inner city from sand dunes, bogs and industrial wastelands into immensely profitable and overcrowded slums, they imagined a more refined Arcadia on the far northern shores. If the peninsulas of Middle Harbour could be developed, the city's growing middle class might be tempted by the prospect of a life untroubled by the unwashed and foul-mouthed lower orders.Armstrong and Brown commissioned a bridge across one of the steepest, most impassable ravines, Long Gully. Designed in part by William Warren, the father of professional civil engineering in Sydney, the original suspension bridge - with its ornate Gothic towers - was a popular tourist attraction and engineering marvel decades before the Coathanger stole its thunder.Unfortunately for Armstrong and Brown, the economic depression of the 1890s impoverished many of the people who would have bought into their toffee-nosed new 'burbs. The developers went belly up and the government eventually took over the bridge in 1912, finding a structure so neglected it had to be largely rebuilt in the 1930s.The long, graceful span, which incorporates both Gothic flashes and the design features of classic Norman castles, has recently been marred by the addition of a safety fence after becoming, in the words of the state coroner, "a magnet for suicides". Perhaps their melancholy spirits commune with Brown, who was dead within a year of the bridge opening in 1892.8. Islay, the talking dog, at the QVBThe sun may have set on the British Empire but the Golden Tonsils will always be with us. Long after Queen Victoria and stiff upper lips vanished from the world, the old girl's favourite ankle biter - Islay, a Skye terrier - lives on, cast in bronze and voiced by John Laws, sitting up and begging for a bickie. Well, actually, he's begging for a few coins, having been put to work for the Royal Institute for Deaf and Blind Children.Victoria didn't enjoy Islay's company for long. He carked it at the age of five, either done in by a diet of buttery biscuits and a life of lolling around in the rotund monarch's ample lap or in a fight with a cat, depending on which account you believe. She was not amused, announcing herself "much shaken and distressed by his passing". The statue was crafted by a local sculptor, Justin Robson, from a sketch done by the Queen in 1842, and unveiled in 1987 to mark the Queen Victoria Building's restoration. Queen Vic is herself immortalised in the far grander statue that has reigned over the southern end of the former market building, also since 1987. That had sat outside the Irish Parliament in Dublin until 1947, when the Irish decided they no longer wanted her around, reminding them as she did of darker days - like the Potato Famine that killed a million Irish peasants in just seven years after Islay was laid to rest in 1844.
© 2011 Sydney Morning Herald
