Sydney’s apocalyptic history
This is not the first time Sydney has been threatened by outrageous forces of nature.
“To live in Sydney,” David Malouf wrote of his adopted home town in 1994, “is to live as much in light and air as on land.”
That sense Malouf discerned of Sydney being open to the elements — for better or worse — is being felt now as perhaps never before as Sydneysiders cope with the prolonged exposure to the hazardous bushfire smoke enveloping their city.
The persistence and severity of the smoke haze may be unprecedented — to say nothing of the immense suffering, hardship and damage caused by the bushfires that generated all the smoke.
If the haze in inner Sydney has produced countless images shown around the world that look like a scene from a blockbuster dystopian science fiction movie, it is no coincidence. In cultural imagination, Sydney looms as Australia’s most apocalyptic city.
The eerie glow of the smoke haze is reminiscent of the pivotal scene in Blade Runner 2049 set in a Las Vegas abandoned long after an environmental catastrophe has resulted in global warming and global dimming. In a clear case of art imitating life, that particular scene in the film was in fact inspired by an earlier atmospheric crisis in Sydney.
According to cinematographer Roger Deakins in a 2017 interview with Variety, the look of the Las Vegas sequence was influenced by images of the massive 2009 dust storm that produced a red dawn, reducing visibility to 100m and causing major disruptions to transport and other aspects of daily life.
“With Las Vegas,” explained Deakins, “(director Denis Villeneuve) wanted it to have the red dust. We discussed it at length and we came up with these images of Sydney during the dust storm that they had a few years ago. There are these wonderful photos of the Sydney Opera House and it’s covered with red dust.”
Life imitated art subsequently when about a year after Deakins spoke another dust storm arrived to turn Sydney’s skies red.
The 2009 dust storm in Sydney was presaged cinematically by another post-apocalyptic epic, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. In that 1985 film the tribe of children abandoned in the desert finally return to “civilisation” with the somewhat reluctant assistance of the enigmatic Max, only to find a shattered Harbour Bridge and a city apparently devastated by nuclear attack and covered in dust.
It was not the first time in an Australian feature film that Sydney had been destroyed by nuclear war. In John Duigan’s 1984 film One Night Stand, a group of young concertgoers find themselves stranded inside the Sydney Opera House following a concert by Midnight Oil when the nuclear Armageddon arrives.
Later that year, and perhaps influenced by the band’s involvement with Duigan’s film, Midnight Oil released Red Sails in the Sunset, an album in which the cover art incorporates an arresting image of Sydney devastated by nuclear weapons. The artwork was created by Japanese artist Tsunehisa Kimura, who specialised in photomontage images of urban destruction.
Sydney’s status as Australia’s truly global city has led to many such imaginary devastations. Since the end of the Cold War, Sydney regularly has been shown as destroyed in big-budget Hollywood sci-fi movies. Independence Day, X-Men: Apocalypse, The Day the Earth Stood Still, World War Z and Pacific Rim: Uprising all show Sydney being torn apart in a spectacular fashion.
The cinematic appetite for Sydney’s destruction is not confined to Hollywood; in the climactic giant monster showdown dramatised in Godzilla: Final Wars, Godzilla uses its giant tail to propel its deadly nemesis Zilla into the Sydney Opera House.
Not every alien visitation to Australia in movies is as harmful to Sydney’s architectural icons. In Arrival — also directed by Villeneuve — one of the dozen or so mysterious spacecraft that visit the Earth is reported to be hovering over Western Australia, seemingly without hostile intentions.
Perhaps it is only Sydney with its celebrated tourist attractions that attracts the wrath of destructive supervillains.
It is not just extraterrestrial forces that may give rise to a sense of crisis that relates to the light and air of Sydney. One of the oldest and most persistent nicknames for Sydney is The Big Smoke, a phrase used as a title by author D’Arcy Niland for a novel depicting the grimness of working-class life in inner Sydney in the 1940s.
The smoke was evoked as early as 1889 in Banjo Paterson’s colonial bush ballad Clancy of the Overflow. The speaker, who is presumably sitting in an office in the Sydney CBD of the type where Paterson worked as a solicitor, depicts a smoke-cloaked inner-city fugue in a way that carries a startling resonance of the city’s current plight: “I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy / Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall, / And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city / Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all.”
Written more than a century ago, Paterson’s evocation could easily apply to Sydney right now.
For the first few decades of its existence after the arrival of the First Fleet, Sydney was not assured of survival, much less prosperity.
Because of its geography and turbulent political history — which suggest a precariousness not associated with the other Australian capitals — Sydney looms as the most concentrated and intense place to live in this country.
The pleasures and stresses of Sydney life are unique to a city that is the oldest and most advanced European settlement in Australia. More than any other Australian city, Sydney demands you take the place personally.
In a minor way I know from my own experience of being there that the apocalyptic nature of that engagement can be personal rather than environmental.
A haunting description of a very Sydney existential crisis appears in Helen Garner’s essay The Darkness in Every One of Us, which captures unforgettably the sense of Sydney as a place of natural beauty and human struggle.
The Sydney conjured in Garner’s essay is vertical — the high-rise property developments that are forever straining for a marketable view of the water — and vertiginous.
“I was in a very poor state, emotionally and psychologically,” writes Garner, whose third marriage had just collapsed.
“I lived by myself on the fifth floor of an apartment block on top of a hill. Its windows had so much air and light outside them that I was constantly drawn to lean my elbows on the sill.”
The panorama Garner surveys is beguiling and perilous: “I would look across the golf course with its lines of massive dark green trees, and its hoses sprinkling bridal veils of spray, and further east, the ruled blue-grey line of the sea beyond Bondi. Some days, though, I couldn’t help looking straight down to the well-placed concrete retaining wall directly beneath me, five storeys below. There were days when it seemed wiser not to go near the windows.”
Sydney’s image and reality are both beautiful and sublime. Although the haze has given rise to concerns about the impact on tourism, Sydney has a singular vividness constantly revealed in ways that are positive and negative, fascinating and troubling.
Such is the condition of living in a city of light, air and land.
Simon Caterson is a Melbourne-based writer and critic.
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