What I Overdid on my Holidays

I have a habit of getting sick on holidays.  On our Lindeman Island honeymoon, I had sunstroke and heat rash. On holiday with a friend at Lake Cathie I had an allergic reaction to sun block that brought me out in hives. I have had food poisoning in Katoomba, Adelaide, Cessnock and Southend on Sea. I have broken my ankle in two places: Sydenham & Millthorpe. Admittedly the Sydenham ‘trip’ wasn’t a holiday, I was on my way to work, but falling over in Millthorpe was a decisive break in our Orange winter break!

Recently a planned Sydney visit was presaged with foreboding when I developed a nasty cold and needed Sudafed and nasal spray to get through the car journey and that evening’s performance of Candide at the Opera House. However, judiciously balancing activity and rest over the following days got me fit as a flea* for dinner with friends and An Evening with Jimmy Webb by week’s end. My smugness was to be challenged though – imminently…

 

The ABC reported on Sydney's heat and humidity on 15 March

According to an ABC news report, Saturday 15 March was the hottest autumn day Sydney had experienced for 149 years. Temperatures nudged 40 degrees and humidity was over 70%. Sydney’s mugginess was one reason for our decision to leave that city. Early in the day, I was coping well through brunch, a bit of telly and an afternoon nap. When I headed to town I noticed that the air conditioning on the train to Kings Cross was struggling a little, but waiting for my friend, Ian, by the Victoria Street station exit I felt a pleasant breeze while enjoying the passing parade of tourists and denizens.  

The calm before the sweat tsunami

Ian arrived dapper in pressed jeans and a T-shirt and joggers, both of luminous white. I teased him about his immaculate appearance and he admired my colourful jungle print dress. Our dinner/theatre booking at The Old Fitzroy was over an hour away so we had ample time to amble through Potts Point to Woolloomooloo. Both assuming we knew where we were headed, we went north down Victoria Street toward Garden Island Dockyard and turned left/west into Cowper Bay Wharf Roadway and ferocious sun.  We turned off briefly into Brougham Street mistaking a backpacker hostel for The Old Fitzroy but did a U-turn. Ian is ex-navy so I appealed to his supposed navigation skills only to be told he had left his sextant back in his apartment. I consulted my phone but the combination of the map’s scale, the ever reorienting little blue arrow and conflicting verbal directions sent us crisscrossing through Woolloomooloo. Soon my steamed up glasses and sweat filled eyes prevented me from seeing the screen clearly anyway. Ian’s glasses were back at the apartment with his sextant. Tourists from Byron Bay, New Zealand and Ireland we asked were as clueless as us and with better reason. 

At the corner of Bourke and Dowling Streets we intimated that we were well wide of our destination. By this time I was a sodden wreck and had rung the pub and left voicemails twice hoping to get directions. Cathedral Street was a denominator common to the phone app and to Ian’s recollections but we couldn’t agree whether to turn right or left at the corner of Forbes. Luckily a kindly local convinced us to go right and lo, the sign for The Old Fitzroy came into view. Appropriately enough, that signage contains the phrase ‘This must be the place’. We were 5 minutes early for our dinner booking having traversed Woolloomooloo for approximately 45 minutes. Two flights of stairs took us to the restaurant cooled only by ceiling fans. I asked where the loos were so that I could ‘repair’ my hair and visage and the charming maitre’d pointed back down those two flights of stairs. One jug of iced water, 2 glasses of Sauvignon Blanc a piece and some ill-advised pate and gnocchi later, it was time to see Iphigenia in Splott in the basement theatre. Back down the stairs we hurried and, as the last to enter, found the only remaining seats, on a narrow bench at the very top of the steeply raked rows.  

The Old Fitzroy pub, theatre and restaurant in Woolloomooloo (Google for directions)

The brick walls of the small theatre are uneven and painted a dull black. The air conditioning seemed to be the evaporative sort with humidity poorly managed. The atmosphere was claustrophobic. Meg Clarke, in skanky active wear, used the four intersecting grey rectangles that comprised the set dynamically to deliver her monologue. We were introduced to her character who is a tear away young Welsh woman in an unsatisfying relationship with a thick bloke who fails to pick up his dog’s droppings in the street.  Her main recreation is getting blotto in Splott and one night, fulfilling this mission, she meets a soldier, an amputee, with whom she begins a passionate affair. That’s about as far as I got…

I wonder how it turns out...

I felt waves of cold sweat wash over my brow and I flopped forward in three distinct micro second movements coming to rest on the shoulder of the audience member in front of me. The next I knew I was lying on the bench seat unable to right myself and semi delirious. A disembodied woman introduced herself as a doctor. She took my pulse, described my colour, clamminess and respiration to others and at one point stroked my cheek reassuringly. I heard someone say ‘call an ambulance’ and report back that there would be a two hour wait. The anonymous doctor took matters into her own hands and spoke to the ambulance dispatch people. In ten minutes paramedics were on the scene.

The Old Fitzroy is somewhere between a hundred and a hundred and fifty years old. It is amongst the most intact pubs of its era still operating and perhaps the only one to have maintained its performance space for decades. Before Iphigenia in Splott it staged a smorgasbord of praised productions including plays by Harold Pinter and Lillian Hellman and solo shows by Paul Capsis and iOTA. Given its age the fact that it is not an accessible building is unsurprising. This presented special challenges for the ambos. The gurney made it through the doors and a special folding carry chair got about half way up the incline. Somehow my support squad, which included Ian, the doctor, the man whose shoulder I had come to rest on (I think), and the paramedics eventually got me vertical, down a couple of stairs and into the seat and from there onto the stretcher/gurney. All the while the kind ambulance officer talked me through what was happening  as they got me settled in the ambulance and applied monitors for my heart rate, took my temperature and pulse and measured my  blood pressure which was a disturbing 80/30. She gave me a tubular vomit bag to clutch but fortunately, while I felt woozy, I didn’t need to use it. Ian stayed beside me on the trip to St Vincent’s and tolerated the hospital environment until 11pm despite its less than happy associations for him.  I was a little uninhibited in my conversation apparently as twice he responded to my statements with ‘TMI’. I do remember warning him not to steal my frock when they made me divest myself of it for a hospital gown. Its riot of candy colours would have shown off his complexion to excellent effect. 

St Vincent’s staff were amazing in their thoroughness and good humour and the care they took of me.  I had two more ECGs, blood and urine tests (I hadn’t peed from 3 pm to 11.20 pm which supported a dehydration diagnosis), three lots of fluid and oxygen because my level was initially 87. When I explained that there was no one with a car to come and collect me they moved me to a quieter area of the Emergency Unit where I managed to get some reasonable sleep amidst the symphony of machines that go ping, PA announcements and patient call buzzers. While Sydney sweltered through that uncharacteristically sultry autumn night I was cool enough in my cubicle to need two blankets.  In the morning I was given a breakfast of juice, cereal and yoghurt and provided with four soft towels to have a shower. By the time I was discharged and caught a taxi back to where I was staying my electrolytes and spirits were high. I scored a taxi driver whose daughter coincidentally works in Pathology at St Vincent’s and who knew about the history of the Grand Pacific Blue Room currently being refurbished as the Olympia Boutique Hotel on the corner of Oxford and Streets. That was of course right up my alley! And I made my 3.30 pm flight home with ease.

St Vincent's brekkie pack

Everyone has been commiserating with me about this incident but I think I had a very easy time of it and am full of appreciation and gratitude for everyone who intervened especially lovely solicitous Ian who kept me light hearted throughout. I am sorry I interrupted the play and the enjoyment of the other audience members. When Lucy Clements, Artistic Director of New Ghosts Theatre Company emailed me the following day to enquire how I was going, I apologised for my show stopping performance and she was kind enough to reply:

please don’t think twice about the show stop – the plot points you missed in the play were all about how wonderful healthcare staff are, but how hard it is for them to work with such large funding cuts – so the events that unfolded in reality (being told the ambulance would take 2 hours to attend to you!!) were much more dramatic, poignant and impactful to us than the play ever could be.

What a trouper! I will certainly visit the Old Fitz again but will be avoiding Sydney humidity. As for my and Ian’s inability to make the walk from Kings Cross Station to the pub in the nine minutes Google maps now tells me is standard, let not our excitement in meeting up after almost a decade ever again eclipse the need for sensibly checking our route in advance, or at least let’s not leave the sextant at his place again!

*why are fleas particularly ‘fit’? I suppose they must do their squats to be able to jump like that.

Strike Up The Band Once More!

 Edwardian & Victorian Bandstands should be re-animated.

As a little girl growing up in Ilford, Essex  my favourite outing was to Valentine's Park (originally known as 'Central' or 'Cranbrook' Park). It had a duck pond, huge 'monkey puzzle' trees, squirrels you could feed with peanuts in the shell, a boating lake and a big bandstand with cast iron railings covered in flaky green paint surrounded by a gravel path. I loved the crunch of the gravel underfoot and running up and down the bandstand steps. Inside the bandstand were stacked rows of folded iron chairs. On  trips to the park with my mother or grandmother, my sister in her pram, we never saw another soul in the bandstand area and we never saw those chairs unfolded and in use. It was the 1960s and no performance had taken place in the Valentine's Park bandstand for decades. 

The Bandstand in Valentine's Park, Ilford soon after its construction

The Valentine's Park lands were part of a 17thC estate gradually bequeathed to the public between 1899 and 1912. The bandstand, built in 1906, was one of a slew of attractions including sunken gardens, a clock tower, tea rooms and cricket grounds, added to entice the public through the park gates.

Me in the bandstand with the folded chairs 1958 (?)

The heyday of the British bandstand was in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Colonialists would have seen domed and pillared pavilions dotting Indian and Islamic landscapes and judged the style just right for open public spaces back home. Parks and pleasure grounds proliferated as sites for clean, healthy outdoor enjoyment and the addition of a bandstand provided scope for economical and rousing entertainment.  The military in Victorian/Edwardian society was a strong breeding ground for brass band musicians and by the early 20thC most British towns had their own band and bandstand. 

In the same period, New South Wales was eager to match the sort of elegant open air vistas and promenades that featured in the parks of the 'Mother Country'. Sydney's Hyde Park had not one, but two, bandstands in quite quick succession. The first and more modest of the two was erected in 1888, then removed to suburban Camperdown in 1910, to be replaced by a grander bandstand and amphitheatre which lasted in situ until 1951.

 A concert in Hyde Park, Sydney  c.1890s

 

The original Hyde Park Bandstand that now stands in Camperdown Park (above)

The more elaborate 1919 Hyde Park Bandstand destined for demolition in the 50s

Recycling was quite the thing with bandstands apparently  as the elaborate 'rotunda' built at Farm Cove for the arrival of Lord Hopetoun in 1895 appeared in Ashfield park in 1903 where it lasted until the 1940s.

Same rotunda at different locations: Farm Cove (above), Ashfield Park (below), sadly no trace of it exists today.

 

Some other Sydney monuments shifted about a bit include the Shakespeare memorial statue opposite the State Library, the  statues of Victoria and Albert in the Macquarie Street/Queen's Square precinct and 'The Abbey' in Bridge Street Glebe which was once on Broadway. But I digress...

While researching the fate of the bandstand I remembered from my childhood and discovering bandstands still standing in Sydney's inner west I happened upon the site for an inspired project.  Bandstand Marathon aims to breathe new life into UK  bandstands with an annual performance blitz at multiple venues featuring multiple musical genres.  My own  Valentine's Park bandstand will be participating this year on September 9th. 

An event like this would be a wonderful addition to the Sydney Festival or to Open Sydney - I am keen to sow the seeds with heritage and music organisations. While bandstands in the Botanic Gardens, Glebe's Jubilee Park and in Wynyard Square have now vanished, here are several neglected bandstands still standing that could find a new lease on life through such a venture.  Do you know of others?

 Belmore Park Bandstand

Moore Park Bandstand

Observatory Hill Bandstand

Campsie Bandstand

Sydney: What Lies Beneath

The Paris sewers are rightly celebrated. One of my favourite posts in a friend's blog is about the Paris sewers and I very much enjoyed watching Griff Rhys Jones's illicit tour of their labyrinthine networks in his Greatest Cities of the World series. But I refuse to be cowed by cultural cringe and have delved into Sydney's own subterranean waterways to see what I could come up with (so to speak).

My first glimpse of anything related to Sydney's historic drains was through a perspex case housing the beautifully preserved remnants of a water cistern unearthed during the expansion of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in the 1990s. It dates from the 1790s and was used as water storage for a bakery on the site. 

 Excavations for the extensions to the Sydney Conservatorium of Music reveal the cistern (right).

My second encounter was wandering through the newly reclaimed and restored Paddington Reservoir. Built in 1878, its limited elevation meant that only the top 5 feet of water from the reservoir could be provided to buildings in excess of one storey, thus it was quickly supplemented by a further pumping station in Crown Street and then decommissioned altogether when the Centennial Park Reservoir came into service in 1899. The structure spent several decades housing a service station and a council works depot until it was transformed to the beautiful airy garden it is today.

But I precede myself. Sydney's first 'sewer' was never intended as such because it was also the cherished drinking water supply which attracted British settlement to Sydney Cove over Botany Bay. I refer of course to the Tank Stream. This  fresh waterway flowed from a swamp near modern day Park Street on the edge of Hyde Park through today's CBD into what is now Circular Quay. To capture water from the stream's variable supply, tanks were built in the position shown on the map below, giving the stream its name. However, after a brief period of purity under Arthur Phillip's vigilant governance, not fencing, nor guards nor fines saved the Tank Stream from pollution. It went from life source to disease fermenter in less than two decades. It was inevitable really as no independent water supply for washing, industry and sewage existed. Pollution and alternating droughts and floods finally ended the Tank Stream's useful life in the 1810s. I quote from the informative Sydney Architecture site:

The Tank Stream served as a dubious source of water for the settlement for a few more years (after Macquarie's time) and was abandoned in 1826. For the next four years residents depended on wells or on water carted from the Lachlan Swamps (Centennial Park) at heavy expense. When the Tank Stream had begun to fail, wells were dug with good results in various places in and near the town...

... In 1860 the Tank Stream was covered from Hunter Street to Bridge Street, forming a four metre by three metre sewer. At Bridge Street this work connected on to an open stone drain which ran along the original course of the Tank Stream through private property to connect up near the present site of Crane Place with the elliptical stone sewer constructed by the City Commissioners and the City Council in 1857.

Map showing the course of the Tank Stream superimposed over modern Sydney.

By the mid 19thC the Tank Stream had been progressively covered over until all traces disappeared. It is now a storm water channel controlled by Sydney Water who, in conjunction with the Historic Houses Trust, permit occasional tours (none scheduled currently, I've checked). There are calls for portions of the Tank Strem to be made visible again and its existence has been drawn attention to by a number of commemorative art projects. Most splendid is Stephen Walker's sculpture, Tank Stream Fountain at Herald Square, Circular Quay.

 

 

The plaque reads:

1788 A stream flows into Sydney Cove. The European Settlement of Australia begins along its sandstone banks. Soon drought strikes and storage tanks are carved from the stone. Hence the name, Tank Stream. The Seasons Pass. 1981. The Tank Stream Fountain recalls mankind' s past dependence on this flowing stream and our links with life around the region.

The most prosaic tribute was undoubtedly the now defunct Tank Stream Arcade on the corner of King and Pitt Streets (pictured below in the 1980s). The hoarding covers a stairway which led down to a quaint little section of the MLC Centre where you could sit and eat your healthy Sanitarium* sandwich beside a gaudily tiled cascade purportedly evoking the Tank Stream - searches have not yielded a photo unfortunately.  

I am not sure if the bar in the old MLC Centre was called the Tank Stream Bar  but there is one now, it's in Tank Stream Way  (only recently so named) between Abercrombie and Bridge Lanes near Wynyard.

To me, more resonant than any of these is the series of installations in five separate sites in city pavements made in 1999 by artist Lynne Roberts-Goodwin. Featuring two interconnecting lines and hauntingly lit from beneath (when the Council remembers to change the bulb), this is what the artist says about her work:

The Tankstream Artwork, in five separate locations from Pitt Street Mall to Alfred Street, marks the existence of the historic Tank Stream bubbling below the city streets. The subterranean movement of a fine stream of fresh spring water is conveyed through the rippling blue light and accompanying text.

Captain Watkin Tench, Captain of the Marines of the First Settlers at Port Jackson, wrote in his diary about the selection of Sydney Cove as the site for the first settlement. He recorded the presence of water at this site, his vision of grandeur of the settlement, the geographical description of the Sydney valley and the rise and flow of the stream.

Tankstream celebrates the memory of the original stream which started in the marshes where the Pitt Street Mall is now situated, its importance in the founding of the city, finally flowing into the harbour at Circular Quay.

Martin Place site of Roberts-Goodwin's Tankstream Artwork. Other locations are Alfred Street, Curtin Place, Angel Place, Bridge Street and the spot where Pitt Street Mall and Sydney Arcade meet (I add this up as 6 locations but the artist herself says 5).

In 1828 the enterprising mineral surveyor and civil engineer to the colony, John Busby recommended that water from the Lachlan Swamps (later to become the site of Centennial Park) be delivered to a reservoir at Hyde Park via a tunnel or 'bore'. The project was still unapproved when tunnelling began in  1827 but was soon recognised as indispensable and afforded Busby a nice pay rise.  Built by convict labour, mostly through solid sandstone, and varying from 0.9m by 0.9m to 3.5m in height, Busby's Bore was  supplying Sydney with about 1.5 million litres of drinkable water per day by 1830. It's route was from the Lachlan Swamps (Centennial Park) to Hyde Park and its existence is marked today by a commemorative fountain in the latter park. It is however, in the wrong place, the actual outlet of Busby's Bore was near the corner of Park and Elizabeth Streets whereas the fountain (pictured) is on the corner of Elizabeth Street and St James Road!

At this point in my research I felt I had waded through enough sewers for a nice chunky post so I will hold on to other delights for future musings. Before I conclude though I must share perhaps my most appealing finding. I have quoted the Sydney Architecture site saying that Sydney's first comprehensive sewerage system was built in 1857 and indeed this is true, but as Anna Wong's compelling Colonial Sanitation, Urban Planning and Social Reform in Sydney, New South Wales 1788-1857 is at pains to point out, there were earlier proposals but their design and material costs made construction prohibitive.

By 1857 Sydney appears to have had both sufficient affluence and effluence to proceed with drainage and sewerage schemes apace. While the city got safe fresh drinking water, outflow and pollution problems for the Harbour, the Cooks River and Bondi were just beginning. Presiding over the engineering work was Sydney's Lord Mayor George Thornton. He it was who commissioned Thornton's Obelisk (pictured) the Sydney equivalent of the London Embankment's Cleopatra's Needle. While recalling lofty antiquity,  the brass capped sandstone obelisk was in fact the first major sewer vent constructed in Sydney or greater NSW. Designed to ventilate the Bennelong sewerage system, historians give conflicting reports on whether it achieved its purpose. Though one contemporary account certainly suggests it ushered air in even if it did not disperse noxious gases as intended: "The Obelisk causes a splendid draft in Pitt-street sewer - the foreman reports it is difficult to keep a candle alight when working in same" (unsourced quote on Sydney Council's media site). 

Characteristically Sydneysider's greeted this pretentious monument to their Mayor  with derision and nicknamed it 'Thornton's Perfume Bottle'.  Remaining thematically consistent to the last, Thornton died of dysentery!

Cleopatra's Needle/Hyde Park Obelisk/Thornton's Perfume Bottle whatever you call it, this structure on Elizabeth Street is an 1857 sewer vent.

NOTES

* The Quaker health food company, Sanitarium, sold sandwiches, soy milk shakes and other wholesome foodstuffs from a kind of geodesic structure on King Street  a mere pebble toss from the Tank Stream Arcade.

Researching for this blog I chanced upon the delightful  This Isn't Sydney - Spike's walkies blog with swearing & pictures  he covers a lot of the same content and I pinched the wording of Lynne Roberts-Goodwin's  statement about her installation from him (thanks, mate) all other coincidences are coincidental or because of what's out there.