NUMBER: 103

Genre: Non-fiction; Origin: Australia; Pages: 500

Satisfaction rating: 8.5

OVERVIEW:

Beneath the shining harbour, amid the towers of global greed and deep inside the bad-drugs madness of the suburban wastelands, lies Sydney’s shadow history. Terrifying tsunamis, corpse-robbing morgue staff, killer cops, neo-Nazis, power junkies and bumbling SWOS teams electrifying this epic tale of a city with a cold vacuum for a moral core.

MATTHEW’S COMMENTS:

I’m not sure that the blurb on the back of this book does it justice, if anything, referring this gonzo-styled 200-odd year history of Sydney as an ‘epic tale of a city with a cold vacuum for a moral core’ seems needlessly melodramatic. Forget the histrionics, what we have are several extremely well crafted essays on immigration, environment and power.

Each non-linear chapter is thematically constructed as Birmingham navigates the arrival of white colonialists, their struggles against the environment and each other, the strangled birth of the city’s infrastructure and those who seek to control it through politics or crime, or both. All the while, these tangled tales are glimpses of an historic record filtered through Birmingham’s laconic leftest perspective. The best thing about this book is the way the themes retread the same path, building a detailed picture of Sydney, yet never straying from their intended tangent.

Birmingham’s final words suggest that the book was inspired by the technique of Michael Pye in his work Maximum City about New York. I intend to seek this out. I am interested to pinpoint what I like best about this book, the fact that I live in Sydney and have a personal reference, or the fact that the book’s structure is what made it such a page turner.

For those who wish to query Birmingham’s account there is well over 50 pages of sources and biographical notes. Birmingham claims to have spent four years researching the book, recounting that each chapter felt like a PhD. I can see why. The research is impressive, never more so than in the first two chapters which turn in the best results. My only criticism is that the book ran out of steam in the final chapter, Birmingham started to rely on his own experiences a little too much for my liking. This didn’t make the chapter any less interesting but did isolated it in style from the others.

Good to see that it is still in print a decade on, I hope it will continue that way for many years to come.

FURTHER REFERENCES:

Read more on wikipedia.

Last Modified :January 20th, 2009 Filed under : The Log: novels Navigate : Previous post / Next post