"SYDNEY-SIDERS" Australia's Little Europe

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 35, 23 February 1940, Page 43

"SYDNEY-SIDERS" Australia's Little Europe

You've »only to. meet them to know at once ‘where they belong. King’s Cross, on the height above Williams Street, which is neither suburb nor city. And if there’s any magic ifi-‘all Australia that might be called "stagey," it’s certainly’ there — tiny shops, ‘trees in the street, tiny cafes, rare foods, queer dress, informal behaviour, people and languages from most other counS AND. MAGGIE" are "Sydney-siders."

tries of the world. it is bright, it is gay; it is. Sydney's " Little Europe." Out from the Cross runs a headland covered close with a curious mixture of old and new. Mansions, dilapidated into slum, cowering in what is left of rank, once-lovely gardens. And, hemming them in, crowding them out, trampling them under, the towering arrogance of the new flats. These are Sydney’s "sky-scrapers." They stand against the sky like broken battlements.

It used to be Macquarie Street where such things happened — where the stranger, leaning on the rail beside you while the boat is berthing gets the answer, "Oh, those — those are the flats of the Cross." If he is also a foreigner, he is to know them well, for, with the instinct of a homing pigeon he -will. find: himself there. It is so nearly "home" for the one who is from far-away and homeless,

It has no laws, of behaviour, It is gay. It is brave. It is harsh. But also it is kindly. And — above all — it could never make one feel self-conscious. That tall, lean man with the small black beard is an artist. Everybody knows he is pseudo. Everybody knows he can’t paint. Everybody, that is, except his "sitters,’ who are fat and disgustingly wealthy and without knowledge of anything at all. The Cross laughs and shrugs its shoulders. A man

must live, That woman with the tawny head who strides as though she owned the earth. Why not? — it’s a diverting illusion. That young bronze god with his splendid arrogance. That girl with her secret laughter. There’s room for all, Round the corner in Williams Street the traffic thunders. Knives are used in the dusk’ of Woolloomooloo. But at the Cross tiny Continental tables stand in the dappled

shadow of young plane trees. Strange tobaccos hang in the air. Strange tongues go chattering past. Life is there. Life — many-sided, multi-coloured, Art, culture, and all the half-ways that go between to make radio and fashionable journals, Life — but on a more detailed canvas than anywhere else in Australia.