Flaneurs: wanders of the metropolitan world

To the flaneur, the sights, sounds and smells of city streets are the stuff of life.

‘Each individual sees their surroundings in an original way,’ says Louis Nowra, roaming Woolloomooloo. Picture: James Croucher

When I was in my last year of high school I was a postman. I would do my round before heading off to school. The postal authorities didn’t know I was under 18, but the hardware shop owner who had the mail contract did. He was a miser who underpaid his 17-year-old postie. The job meant that I had to be up at 5am to collect the postal bags from the first train, then carry them to the hardware shop to arrange the letters according to streets and numbers before setting out on my round.

At first I concentrated so hard on putting the right letters in the correct boxes and doing it all in my allotted time that I seldom noticed anything else, but as I grew used to my job I became fascinated by the streets and people. I learned that a postie can tell a lot about his customers. There was the forlorn house with its garden of weeds that received constant unpaid energy bills; the woman, smelling of cheap brandy and wearing a dirty dressing gown always waiting for me in the hope of receiving a letter from her daughter; another housewife who’d rush out to grab the final demand bills directly from my hands so her husband wouldn’t know; the couple who always argued in the driveway before the husband went to work; and those lucky people who received postcards from their relatives in exotic places like Hawaii or New York. In retrospect I was becoming a budding flaneur.

The definition of flaneur is slippery. It can mean someone who saunters or even an idler, but now refers to someone who explores a city, sometimes with no deliberate aim in mind but one who finds meaning in the diversity of people and sights, sounds and smells of streets, parks and cafes.

In 19th-century Paris the word began to be associated with how someone interpreted and experienced the richness and variety of the urban landscape. Poet Charles Baudelaire developed the idea that the city was a more natural subject for lyrical appreciation and personal epiphany as any poem about the countryside.

You’d think that Australia, one of the most urbanised countries, would have a tradition of flanerie, but our writers have been and still are obsessed by nature and the bush. Even in the 1920s and 30s bohemians in a densely populated area like Kings Cross never wrote about their surroundings. It took their contemporary Kenneth Slessor to say the great subjects for poems were all around them: high-rise apartments, neon lights, greasy-spoon cafes and crime.

Ninety per cent of a recent and exhaustive anthology of Australian poetry of the past 20 years featured poems about nature and not the city, even though just on 90 per cent of us live in urban communities. What made it even stranger was the huge majority of the poets live in cities. It seems many of us still define our identity in terms of the bush. Even today some of the bestselling books are about the bush (like Don Watson’s eponymous volume).

I shifted into Kings Cross in 1990 and without being conscious of what I was doing I began to explore it. There was no need for a car and although it was the most densely populated district in Australia, it was not spread out as suburbs are but packed into a small, very walkable area. On my daily excursions, whether to my office, shopping or catching up with friends at cafes and bars, I began to see the subtle differences in architecture, streets and lanes. Its diversity and tolerance of people like the homeless, the affluent, artists, even criminals was obvious. Then there were the smells of the streets and cafes, the wonderful overheard snatches of dialogues and crazy monologues, the familiar faces of the prostitutes and shopkeepers. It was a magnificent cacophony of human beings.

My awareness of what was happening around me was the result of my daily existence and the influence of Jane Jacobs’s seminal The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a book that pointed out the significance of street life and how its diversity and variety is crucial to the social and cultural health of the urban landscape and can in no way be compared to the homogeneity of the suburbs.

Ironically it was author Tim Robinson who helped me see my urban surroundings even more clearly. In researching a film set in Ireland I read his extraordinary two volumes on Airann, largest of the Aran Islands. These are intense, lyrical studies, in which he relates the microscopic physical and details of the natural environment to the island’s myths, animals and people. Like Jacobs, he was teaching me how to see the details around me.

The more I looked, heard, smelled and walked, the greater my appreciation of Kings Cross became. I sought out its history and witnessed the essential component of urban areas: constant change. Shops underwent transformations from selling groceries to porno, brothels became restaurants, hotels were transformed into apartments and, of course, there was a continual turnover of residents in the myriad flats.

Englishman Jonathan Meades’s idiosyncratic documentaries on architecture and interior design made me realise the importance of how buildings and hum­ans are in a constant flux of interaction. But it was Iain Sinclair, also an Englishman, who helped me to understand that there were different ways of exploring and writing about a city. In his Lights Out for the Territory he, sometimes alone, or with friends, strolled the streets of the city seeking out hidden patterns, taking heed of crazies and eccentrics who have always been overlooked, acknowledging the significance of ruined factories and houses and feeling the presence of the past and its ghosts. Where others saw an urban wasteland, he gave the space a mythological dimension. His Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, was just as impressive. Here was an area of London he had known for 40 years, once a symbol of dereliction and ugliness, which he saw in a unique fashion, revealing its eccentric diversity and its fascinating past as no professional historian can.

Sinclair’s books have been considered psychogeography, a pretentious term that in reality is how a flaneur — that is, a walker — can explore a city as one would a natural environment, interpreting it through one’s close relationship to it and one’s psychological reaction to the urban environment, its buildings and people. My preferred term for it is deep walking, a way of strolling the streets, sometimes aimlessly and other times with purpose, but always allowing the surroundings and the people to influence one’s way of seeing.

These flaneurs inspired me to write my books on Kings Cross and Woolloomooloo. I’ve spent years walking their streets. If anything confirmed just how people view these environs differently from me it was a woman who showed me her daily journey through the streets of Woolloomooloo in a series of photographs. She focused on hairdressers, gardens and cafes that were important to her but not to me. A homeless man I know took no notice of anything except where charities gave out free meals and where he could kip safely for the night. Where I saw the council destruction of a small park as an unfortunate act, he was thrilled the site was going to have affordable housing. It brought home to me just how each individual sees their surroundings in an original way.

Part of the pleasure of being a flaneur is getting lost. One time when I was in Moscow I became lost in a part of the city filled with narrow streets and dingy lanes. The feeling of disorientation was profound but liberating. Everything was unfamiliar and because of it the area had a particular intensity that so seared itself into my brain that I can still recall every building and street.

Nowadays it’s impossible to get lost with GPS software on your phone. In fact smartphones have radically changed the way we relate to the urban landscape. Every morning when I walk to the post office to collect my mail I see thousands of workers walking into the city. Their eyes are glued to their phone screens. They don’t notice what’s happening around them, except if they’re in danger of running into you. They are not interested in the street life, its denizens, its smells and sounds. They may walk through the city but they are not flaneurs. They are obsessed by their two-dimensional digital world and blind to the three-dimensional environment they inhabit. The conclusion is obvious: flaneurs are a dying breed.

Louis Nowra’s most recent book is Woolloomooloo: A Biography.