Friday essay: what can we learn about a city from its writers?

There is a pleasure for readers in walking streets known from the pages of books. Taking literary walking tours in London, Paris, New York or Dublin, readers conjure the worlds of Woolf, Hemingway, Whitman or Joyce. We move through the streets in the here and now, but also amid characters from other times and versions of the city. Our cities are given back to us, expanded and enriched.

Australian writing, once dominated by European settler bush mythologies, has in recent decades seen a major focus on urban and suburban lives. We know ourselves now through the Melbourne of Tony Birch, Helen Garner and Christos Tsiolkas; the Brisbane of David Malouf, Andrew McGahan and Ellen van Neerven; the Perth of Sally Morgan, Tim Winton and Robert Drewe.

The explosion of urban writing set in the cities and towns of Australia allows us to walk amid history, subcultures and alternative visions of urban places – these other lives of the city mingling with our own.

As a reader and a writer, I am fascinated by how writers know and imagine cities. In Sydney, the city in which I’ve lived for nearly 30 years, writing has sprung up over that time from every corner, and from communities previously underrepresented in Australian literature.

In addition to the Sydney of 20th-century writers like Kenneth Slessor, Patrick White, Ruth Park and Jessica Anderson, we now have the endless riches of the city’s First Nations and diasporic writers.

We learn of Aboriginal sovereignty and activism in Larissa Behrendt’s novels of the inner city. Vivian Pham’s Coconut Children tells of a Vietnamese-Australian childhood in Cabramatta. In Amnesty, Booker Prize-winner Aravind Adiga introduces us to a Sri Lankan asylum seeker slipping by unseen on the streets of Glebe and Newtown. To read these books is to know the city in ways we did not before.

Wanting to know more about how writers know cities, I embarked on a project – Walking Sydney – an extended literary walking tour that unearths the histories and lives, real and imagined, of the many very different areas of Sydney amid the rapidly changing forms of a contemporary city.

There is a strong tradition of walking to understand cities. Proponents of psychogeography urge us to “get lost” in the city, to resist its commercial imperatives in “drifts”, as the French theorist Guy Debord termed these counterflows.

In this way, we can go beyond surfaces, understanding the city as palimpsest, seeing through to deeper meanings.

Walking with writers allowed me to see the city differently. Just as reading books empowers us to know what it means to be human beyond our own limited perspective, reading the city through the eyes of others helped me see the city anew.

Walking slowly and respectfully on Country

The first walk was on Gadigal land with poet, filmmaker and artist Jazz Money, of Wiradjuri and Irish heritage. We strolled around the old railway yards of Carriageworks in Eveleigh. The broad flat lot of massive brickwork sheds is now the site of markets, theatre and festivals – including the Sydney Writers’ Festival.

Jazz’s poetry, though, is ever conscious of Australian places, including cities, as Country.

On our walk, Jazz explains that before colonisation, this was a gathering place for local community, a vantage point from which you could see the water to the east, with valuable ochre pits all around.

It is an important place in more recent history too; thousands of workers came from far afield to work in the railyards, a large proportion of them Aboriginal, and so the inner-south of Sydney has been heartland for much of the city’s history.

As we walk among the repurposed buildings and through the streets of terraces and workers’ cottages, a poem of Jazz’s provides context for the site’s colonial history. £100,000, previously presented as a site-specific work in the Carriageworks gallery, tells the story of the sale of this land for a vast sum.

The site was once the estate of James Chisholm, a soldier involved in quelling Aboriginal resistance on the Hawkesbury. His family sold the land to the New South Wales government in the 19th century for the construction of the railyards. In the poem, Jazz commemorates the loss and desecration of stolen Country for the purposes of industry:

a place all riches all sand dune water way banksia safe of ceremony of song of care of always

wiped razed and poured.

Reflecting on the stories and art that remind us of the true histories of the lands on which we walk, Jazz explains the Wiradjuri concept of Yindyamarra: “at its simplest it means to go slowly and respectfully”.

Thinking and being with this in mind allows Jazz to understand the knowledge contained and expressed by place:

If you’re interested in story, and the way that stories operate, there isn’t a square centimetre of this continent that isn’t rich with it, and with story that goes back to the first sunrise.

Razor gangs and warehouse parties

In another post-industrial inner suburb, Surry Hills, different histories unfold among the steep streets of terraces and former warehouses and factories.

Fiona Kelly McGregor, writer, artist and critic, is the author of Iris, based on the life of petty criminal Iris Weber, once dubbed “the most violent woman in Sydney”. As well as a gripping novel, Iris is an important work of queer history, providing a fresh angle on the familiar story of razor gangs and sly groggeries of Depression-era Sydney.