Sydney, Day 3

I would like to take a moment to talk about birds. Now, I am by no means an ornithology expert, an avainophile if you will (I’m just making up words here), but I am truly impressed by the sheer range of birds that I’ve seen in Sydney, all of them fairly remarkable. Not that we don’t have some bizarre and beautiful birds in the US, but after 6 some years in New York, I just assume all birds are filthy sky-rats, aka pigeons, until proven otherwise. But not so here. My first day in Sydney, I saw a flock of cockatoos alight on a telephone wire. Cockatoos, just flapping around like pigeons, shitting on passing cars with their exotic cockatoo poop. My Aussie friends found this totally unremarkable. Just your average bird, hopping down the street, will be covered in massive black and white spots like some small feathery cow, or splashed with a myriad of colors like it’s wearing a technicolor dream coat, or like it was in the wrong place at the wrong time during a paintball fight. 

Yesterday, my bird-watching in Sydney rose to extreme levels when I wandered into the Royal Botanical Gardens. They are close to the magnificent new hostel I’m staying in (there’s a bathroom in the room, not in the hall! Amazing how quickly that has become a luxury to me), and I spent most of yesterday just wandering around the area that I’m staying in, The Rocks, and the nearby Gardens. These are beautiful gardens, full of helpful plaques explaining what the different trees and bushes are (Sydney seems to be enamored with informative plaques, slapping them on anything and everything that doesn’t have the presence of mind to run away). There are plenty of distinctly Australian trees everywhere, which more or less means 500 different types of eucalyptus, and then a smattering of trees that aren’t native to the continent, like swamp cyprus and bamboo. It’s right by the harbor, so it’s quite a pleasant walk all around. And it has the most magnificent birds, just wandering everywhere. I have no idea what the creature is, but I was stalking them everywhere trying to get a good photo. It probably doesn’t help that I’ve been reading Jurassic Park, so I was spending half my time in the park pretending that I was hunting down baby dinosaurs. 

In the course of tracking these brilliant little dirt-diggers around the park, I stumbled into the Asian Garden area, at the center of which was an overgrown lily pond, with an assortment of plants growing out of the muck to about 4 feet. It seemed impenetrable, and I didn’t pay it any more attention. I was distracted by a spider a little ways off the path in the bushes - my first Australian spider! Trying to prove to myself how brave I was, I kept sneaking closer and closer trying to get a photo of it. I was within perhaps 3 feet of it, had in fact just stepped off of the path into the untamed wilderness, when something behind me went ‘Aaah.’ There is no way to type that to do it justice. It sounded like a cross between someone being goosed and a bad singer attempting a vocal warm-up. It was completely human, and succeeded in startling the hell out of me. I jumped about 2 feet straight into the air and I think said something really intelligent like “Bloody hell, calm down!” although whether that was to myself or to the bird is anybody’s guess. Because that’s what had made that sound. A bird. A little black bird with a bright red patch above his bill that was staring at me defiantly from the lily pond. He yelped at me a couple more times and then paddled off, clearly content that he’d done his best sonic ninja attack. 

After the gardens I wandered into a wonderful (free!) museum, The Discovery Rocks Museum. The Rocks is one of the oldest parts of Sydney, right by the harbor, so it’s been a center of shipping for most of its history, and thus a gateway to the outside world. Like all harbor areas, where those dirty sailors congregate, it has long been considered a source of disease, depravity, drunkenness, and everything else that just sounds like an average Friday night in a college town. There were plans in the 1970s to tear the whole thing down and start again, and a valiant protest movement succeeded in halting the demolition and getting much of the area declared a historic trust. Now, it feels more like Williamsburg than Red Hook, and is in fact so expensive that I may starve to death in the next few days. 

The museum is wonderfully laid out, with lots of interactive screens that allow you to read more about the points that interest you. It covers the entire history of the area, from before recorded history up until the present. There were brilliant little historical gems scattered around, like the story of Cribb and his 3 wives. Cribb was a convict butcher that came over at the beginning of the 1800’s, and managed to create a thriving little empire for himself in Sydney. He’s important to the historical record because of a multitude of artifacts found in his well, which he apparently just used as a garbage shoot. He’s important to MY historical record, however, because of his wives. He left one behind in England when he was sentenced, but that didn’t stop him from marrying another woman after he’d been in Australia for a year. Then, uh-oh, his first wife decided to join him in Australia, so he paid off the second wife over 300 pounds, just an absurd amount of money at that time, to get the hell out of Dodge. She went back to England and lived happily ever after, while the first wife died within a year of being in Australia. Cribb married again shortly after that, which ended in his wife suing him, taking all his money, his business, and his home, and he disappears from history. Stories like that are why I go to museums.

Cribb aside, the most incredible part of this museum was the ground floor, which dealt entirely with the native peoples of Sydney, the Cadigal. The museum is Aboriginal owned, and one of the managers was giving very informative talks in this section about Cadigal tools and rituals. I am not a historian, so I will refrain from saying too much about Cadigal society, in fears of getting it horribly wrong, or being staggeringly culturally insensitive, but to be very serious for a moment, what the British landing here did was horrifying. They declared this land ‘terra nullius’, land belonging to no one, and then proceeded to completely destroy a society that had been thriving here for thousands of years. A year after the First Fleet landed with its cargo of convicts, 3 Cadigal people were still alive. 3. Everyone else had been wiped out, mostly by smallpox. It’s an intensely sad statistic. It does seem that Australia is now attempting to make some kind of amends, but it begs the question, how do you make up for destroying an entire culture?

Sculpture in the Royal Botanical Gardens created with the permission of the Cadigal Elders. 

Not to get too serious, I’ll end on a happy note. The sign below was by a lake in the botanical gardens, and I found it delightful, although it did make me very careful about where I put my feet, and I decided that going within 5 feet of the edge of the pool was just asking to be eaten by a giant slimy freshwater eel.