There’s something quite special and something very Kiwi about staying with an old friend in an overseas city.
Seeing the city on foot adds to the fun too.
On first awakening in Sydney there was a sound I hadn’t heard for 38 years — my ex-Dunedin ex-flatmate’s assertive morning footsteps thumping down the hallway. I’d forgotten the phenomenon but instantly recognised it. Heartwarmingly nostalgic, evocative and endearing.
Their home, like much of central Sydney, is a terraced house from the gold rush population boom that started in the 1850s. As tight together as terraces are, and as tiny as their front yards are, each feels private with its walled backyard.
A delightful welcome to Sydney was eating breakfast out the back while watching Australian parrots, normally seen restricted in cages, here flying free and feasting on a huge flowering tree. Screeching, warbling birds are a beloved background constant in Aussie, no aside intended to the human locals.
Walking into town meant swimming against the silent stream of closed-faced workers padding their way to the railway station. Dunedin habits die hard as I scanned the crowd to greet acquaintances in a reverse Crocodile Dundee.
Seriously short-sided, seriously long-backed mullets. Short short skirts.
Where are all the middle-aged people?
Old people?
Aboriginals?
Why do women still wear high shoes?
Modern buildings in different shades of brick.
Outdoor banana trees.
A friendly street worker talked about his job filling in the cracks between bricks. Frequent passing trains shake the ground so much that the bricks move. About once a year he adds more sand.
Keep walking and there’s a beautiful Art Deco building in the central business district, the Anzac Memorial. Even though it’s 90 years old its kaupapa makes it feel as if war is more recent. There’s a genuineness about the place. Guides are sober in dress and demeanour. One of the few signs asks visitors to "Let silent contemplation be your offering’’.
A central statue has an exhausted male soldier carried by women, the only wartime statue in Australia to commemorate the role of women both at war and at home.
At 11am each day small gold paper stars are dropped from the balustrade during a service of remembrance.
Text is minimal, with life-sized photos doing the talking.
You can see the sparkling eyes of a young guy, beaming at the camera from his hospital bed with a gap left by his amputated arm. A Dunedinite recently said with a straight face that she was traumatised by the junk food served at a social event. Yeah, nah. Within memory our whole society was truly traumatised.
Closer to town are the restored barracks that were used to house prisoners of the penal colony. Seventy hammocks hang in the sleeping quarters. In the past a further 70 people slept on the floor below. Rats visited at night in their hundreds, biting noses and ears until daybreak. An audio recording of creaking hammocks and hacking coughs appears creepily behind you at head height.
Scraps of a blue and white prisoner’s shirt are on display. The Hyde Park Barracks were built in 1819. At that stage in New Zealand the missionaries had only recently arrived; that same year New Zealand was declared a dependency of New South Wales. Australia’s colonial history is quite different from ours.
Walking and gawking is a fun way to travel. Being used to one’s own small city, the sheer change is novel. Window shop the interesting architecture.
Street behaviour is different from Dunedin. People don’t make eye contact, let alone make small talk, let alone say excuse me when cutting in front of someone. From a pedestrian crossing I waved thanks at a taxi driver giving way and Gabby said he probably assumed I was trying to flag him down for a ride.
I was probably "making an opera house about it’’. This saying developed among tradies when it took 14 years to build the Sydney Opera House, finished in 1973.
No worries mate, as the opera house is now a stunner of a shoreline wonder. It retains its original state-of-the-art funkiness, still in pristine condition. The foyer has a limousine-sized purple couch, topped with a sign in period Helvetica font commemorating the opening by the late Queen.
Even the toilets are a treat, the toilet rolls being flatteringly backlit. With exposed shiny concrete, low lighting and an audible background hum, a trip to the toilet feels like visiting a particularly fabulous mid-century submarine.
Big white birds sedately strut nearby. The Australian white ibis used to stay inland but has self-introduced to the city. You apparently never used to see them but they moved in during a drought. Now they’re everywhere to the point they’re called bin chickens. One flew into a plate glass window at the botanic garden, making a heck of a bang. It bounced off and just jived on.
For a day lasting this long, nine hours on foot, caffeine becomes a performance-enhancing drug. Personally, it was my first coffee in two years, yet I had an unscheduled sleep on the floor in front of an audiovisual at The Rocks Discovery Museum. Initially, I had the place to myself but woke up to a wholesome family group seated beside me and relaxed holidaymakers nearby. Brazened it out.
Navigating home by train is an adventure and walking alone at night feels safe as there are so many people around. Home to hearty Kiwi hospitality in Aussie, safe and sound and cosy.
Staying with friends adds a human element to the tourist experience. Gabby and husband Brian have recently been bereaved by suicide too. We visited The Gap cliffs above the harbour, a beautiful tourist destination but also the location for about 50 suicides a year. In 2009 local Don Ritchie was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia, recognising his contribution over almost 50 years, through timely conversation, in preventing 180 people from jumping. The visit might sound morbid but it felt mutually supportive to openly share the load.
Having known each other as young adults but reunited in late middle age, Gabby and I were actually strangers. But we felt like whanau. It’s weird how ourselves we can feel with people we’ve known when young.
Crashing at someone’s house is a great Kiwi tradition, creating homely conviviality to escape to in the evenings, and renewal of friendship. There’s a pleasure in seeing an old friend’s successful life, and even pride in seeing Gabby’s artwork feature in a restaurant and her name on the window.
A long weekend in a big city is short enough to forget oneself but long enough to be an adventure. Mind you, I wonder how long before flying becomes the new smoking.
