In the morning I walked along Oxford Street, the “gay area.” I didn’t see a lot that was specifically LGBT, though there were a few places advertising LGBT shows (“The Outback is Never a Drag”). On one plaza there was this wonderful marker of Forty Years of Love, which must be how long the Sydney Pride Festival has been running. With this kind of acceptance gay specific shops may not be necessary.
However, I did find an LGBT bookstore. After browsing I asked the clerk for recommendations. I bought several.
I spent the afternoon at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (the state Sydney is in). This is a very fine museum. There are some European masters and galleries of Australian art. It was fascinating to see the subjects they decided to paint, which are quite different from American and European artists think is important. I joined a tour of some of the contemporary installations. It was helpful to have a guide explain some things. My favorite was a room filled with 50,000 balls about an inch in diameter painted in rainbow colors and strung on lines stretching across the space. On seeing it the reaction is usually oh, this is fun! A camera can’t capture all of it, but can show a bit.
I spent the evening at the Opera House, using that expensive ticket I bought a couple days before. The opera was Aida (Italians pronounce it eye-EE-dah) by Giuseppi Verdi. Here are the main characters:
Aida, daughter of the King of Ethiopia and a slave to Amneris.
Amneris, daughter of Pharaoh of Egypt.
Radames, commander of the Egyptian army, fighting the Ethiopians.
And this is why it is opera:
Aida is in love with Radames.
Amneris is in love with Radames.
Radames is in love with Aida and definitely not with Amneris.
Which means:
Aida's loyalties are split between her lover and her country. Radames' loyalties are split between his lover and his country.
Amneris is caught between her love for Radames and her fury at him for his love for Aida and not her.
Can you say impossible situation?
It's a dramatic opera. Of course it doesn't have a happy ending.
The Sydney Opera House has two large spaces for music performance. These account for the two sets of sails in the exterior of the building. There is also a theater for plays underneath. In talking to the clerk at the gay bookstore that morning he said the stage for the opera is much smaller than the stage for the concert hall. It was supposed to be the other way around. So opera productions have to design for a cramped space.
This one did it with ten panels the full height of the proscenium. I'm pretty sure they were display screens and not receivers of projections. They moved around and provided a shifting background. They were pretty well controlled because an image will be stationary in space while the screen displaying it moved. Some of the images were pretty cool. But the stormy roiling red clouds got tiring after a while. As did the watching panther when Amneris schemed against Aida.
The music was, of course, wonderful. The big scenes, such as the Triumphal March, filled the stage as they should. It was a good evening. And worth the money.
Tuesday, August 21
I spent the morning in a big book store, Kinokuniya Books. I don’t know the source of the name. It had all the departments one might expect in an American bookstore (or the Aussie equivalent). But it also had a large section I didn’t expect – books in Japanese. There was a separate section for books, such as manga, translated from Japanese. I saw a lot of Asians around Sydney, but I couldn’t tell if they were immigrants or had grown up in Australia. From the size of this section a large number are immigrants.
One purpose in seeking out such a big store was to see if there is much Australian science fiction. Other than authors I can find in a US bookstore there isn’t. Most of the authors on these shelves were English and American. There is more Australian fantasy, which I don’t care much for, though I did buy a book of fantasy by an Aboriginal author. The clerk I talked to was sweet (or at least doing his job) who would appear by me every so often saying I might want to consider whatever new book he had in his hands. I also bought two other books considered to be classics of Australian literature, one of those was the boring book I read on the flight to Los Angeles.
I dropped the books at the hotel and headed for what would be one of the highlights of the trip. I took the subway and then a bus to Bondi Beach. This is one of the famous ocean beaches of Sydney, good for both bathing and surfing. I did neither. Instead I did the Coastal Walk. There is a very good footpath from Bondi Beach south along the coast, looping outward for each point of land and inward for each protected beach. It was beautiful, dramatic, and restful. Several times I stopped to watch the waves roll in (no waves like that near Detroit). I went as far as Clovelly Beach and decided I was tired and didn’t need to go on. I caught a bus back into the city.
After a buildup like that I’d better have pictures.
This is part of Bondi Beach, with the Pavilion in the center. I took the picture just before rounding the first headland.
And after rounding that first headland I saw a few more headlands to the south. I went only a bit beyond the first one in the picture.
This is what I mean by both dramatic and restful. There is a bit of the walk in the upper left corner of the picture. I had just come down that part.
I think I’d just passed Bronte Beach when I took this picture looking north. The headland farthest to the right is on the far side of Bondi Beach. In the foreground, yes, there are bodies in the water. They’re wearing wetsuits and trying to surf. Occasionally they succeed for a short distance.
Once back in town I went to the State Library and used a computer to read email. I didn’t write any notes about what I did that evening, so I guess I found supper and went back to the hotel.
Wednesday, August 22
By this time in the trip I felt I was running out of things to do and would have preferred to be heading to the airport. I had put together a long list of things to do in Sydney and surrounding area and though I had done many items on the list there were still several more things I could do.
Such as a few more museums.
I took a bus to the bottom of the hill where the Sydney Observatory is and took the stairs up. It’s a small observatory, used now mostly for verifying time. It has a ball on a pole on the roof that drops every day at 1:00 pm to give a time check to the ships in the harbour. Not that there are many ocean going ships in the harbour these days.
Since the Observatory is on a hill one gets a good view of the west side of the Harbour Bridge. Across the water is North Sydney and the entrance to an amusement park.
From here I went to The Rocks Discovery Museum. I happened to arrive just after a couple school groups, so I did the museum in reverse. It’s a small one and didn’t take much time. The Rocks is the area just to the west of Circular Quay and its rocky terrain was one of the areas first settled. So this museum told the story of that settlement. It also told of the time, maybe 50 years ago, when the city council wanted to tear everything down for urban renewal. The residents protested and after convincing a few construction companies to boycott the renewal project the council turned from renewal to renovation.
After lunch I went to the Museum of Sydney. This is on the site of the first governor’s house and the museum’s existence is a way of preventing a skyscraper from obliterating the house’s foundation and its historical resource. The museum’s plaza shows the floor plan of the foundation of the house now below it.
One of the displays in this museum is models of the ships in the First Fleet that arrived in 1788 to colonize the land for England. That trip took a long time and the new colony was short of supplies. The convicts and settlers were not chosen for a breadth of skills so weren’t really prepared to build a colony and get food from the land. Fresh supplies from England were delayed due to ships getting wrecked.
There were also displays of the growth of Sydney, especially the coming of the car and creation of suburbs. The city had a pretty good streetcar system. In the 1950s it was taken out. And now George Street (a block from my hotel) is closed while a streetcar line is put in.
When the museum closed I had about half an hour to enjoy the adjacent Royal Botanical Gardens. This would have been a place to explore some more. Even so, I was able to get a farewell shot of the city.
Back at Circular Quay I found an Indian restaurant with reasonable prices. Alas, it was a small place and all the tables were already reserved. So I did take-out and carried it on the subway back to my room.
I’ve already posted about the trip home. So this concludes my Australia travelogue.
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