And Photographer, With Love

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To Sydney, From A Writer And Photographer, With Love

Few mistresses have been as lovingly presented as the fair city of Sydney in a glossy production of the same name pro duced by the partnership of Gavin Souter (writer) and Quinton Davis (photographer).

those who usually abhor A picture books will be hard put ) it not to find merit in this one.

The black-and-white photographs *e good, even if the half dozen )lour plates give the city some un irthly hues. Nonetheless much of ie excellence of the book stems om the narrative which sings with ie siren-song of a nor-easter on a immer day; or backs swiftly like a ►bust westerly to sweep up the leaves, ie fish and chip papers, the discarded e-cream buckets and the odd-ball jaracters that are as much a part : the city as its rambling streets.

Gavin Souter is a feature writer

on the Sydney Morning Herald, some times an author of books (New Guinea—The Last Unknown). He has never written better than about the city of his birth; nor has Sydney ever been better written about.

With a penetrating eye but with tolerance for its sins or shortcomings, Souter and his photographic partner sift through the paradoxes of the 670 square miles of city sprawl and come up with something that is pretty near its essential character.

There are the Pink Pussy Cat, Hasty Tasty and Stripperama of King’s Cross (“In 1897 the City Council bestowed the name of Queen’s Cross on the junction of

William St., Darlinghurst Road, Vic toria Street and Bayswater Road and eight years later it removed any confusion with Queen’s Square by changing the Cross’s sex. Sex has always been somewhat equivocal at the Cross.”).

There are the terrace houses of Glebe and Waterloo and Paddington; the red brick and tile of Bondi Junction and Dover Heights; the slabs of concrete and glass of the city proper; and the affluent suburbia of Vaucluse and the right side of the Turramurra tracks.

There is the bush, never far away even from the heart of this city, and its summer corollary, the bushfire.

And always there are the harbour and ships, the surf, the sand and the white, lace-edged Pacific Ocean.

There are the people. Bikini-clad beach girls, metho. drinkers from around Railway Square; old age pensioners who play endless games of draughts in Hyde Park; the arty artists of re-discovered Paddington; the suburbanites in red-brick bungalows “with septic tank and un made roads” 40 minutes by train from their places of business; the fruit barrowmen (“Six for a bob the navels! Two for two bob the melons;”).

There are the Rosaleen Nortons who raise hell and witches at the Cross; octogenarian Arthur Stace, reformed metho-drinker, who rises at 4 a.m. to scrawl “Eternity” in copper plate script and white chalk across the footpaths of the city; and Mrs.

Winter who cuts up 30 pounds of meat a day in her Rushcutters Bay home and drags it in a shopping trolley into parks, timber-yards and junk lots in the inner city to feed stray and starving cats.

All these things are distilled to produce Sydney. Messrs. Souter and Davis have worked to such purpose to do it that all resident Sydneysiders will look upon their city with new affection while expatriates will cry tears of nostalgia into their foreign beer.—JT. (SYDNEY. Angus and Robertson. 75/-.)