The City Behind the Harbor

Most people who visit Sydney are really visiting a handful of photographs they already know. The Opera House. The Harbor Bridge arcing against a cartoon-blue sky. Bondi Beach on a January morning. These are real places, magnificent places — and like Rome’s pizza or Panama’s Costa Rican restaurants, they deliver exactly what was promised. But Sydney, if you let it, delivers something else entirely: a city that has been quietly, stubbornly itself for decades, and doesn’t particularly care whether you notice.

The instinct, arriving here, is to orient around the water. And this is not wrong — Sydney Harbor is one of the genuinely great bodies of water in the world, the kind of geography that quietly arranges everything around it. But the harbour is also, in a way, the city’s most obvious trick. Follow it long enough and you eventually arrive somewhere no one told you to go.

GLADESVILLE TO BALMAIN

Take the western reaches of the harbor, the stretches beyond where the tour boats turn around. Out near Gladesville, where the water goes still and the fig trees lean over the esplanades, Sydney stops performing. On a weekday morning in Birchgrove, the corner bakeries fill with the same people they’ve filled with for thirty years. The conversation is local in the way that truly local conversation is: specific, unhurried, uninterested in being overheard. This is the Sydney that Sydneysiders actually inhabit — terraced streets tumbling down toward the water, a strange mixture of the domestic and the sublime.

Balmain has gentrified, yes, as everywhere has gentrified, but it has done so without entirely forgetting what it was. The pubs open at ten and close when they feel like it. There are four different opinions on where to get a meat pie and all four are correct.

“Sydney stops performing. The conversation is local in the way that truly local conversation is: specific, unhurried, uninterested in being overheard.”

THE BLUE MOUNTAINS PLATEAU

One of Sydney’s least-discussed qualities is how quickly it ends. Drive an hour west and you are standing on the edge of a sandstone escarpment two hundred million years old, watching mist roll through a valley so deep and wide that the far wall is merely a suggestion. The Blue Mountains have always been Sydney’s counterweight, the place the city goes when the city becomes too much of itself. And yet even here, in the touristy streets of Katoomba, the same resistance to globalization persists. The cafes serve strong coffee and not much else. The antique shops look genuinely raided from the estates of people who have actually died. There is something bracing about a tourist town that has not yet learned to pretend.

The mountains are also where you begin to understand what the right base does for a trip. Cocoon Luxury Properties keeps a number of private houses across the greater Sydney region — in the mountains and closer to the harbor — that solve this problem quietly and well. They feel less like hotels than like the homes of someone with excellent taste and the good sense to leave you alone.

NEWTOWN & THE INNER WEST

Back in the city, Newtown does what inner-city suburbs do in old port cities the world over: it absorbs everything and transforms it into something local. The Thai restaurants on King Street are some of the finest in the country. The second-hand bookshops have been curated, unintentionally, by the specific literary tastes of the neighborhood over forty years. Walk far enough down the main street and you find yourself somewhere quieter, residential, where the terrace houses lean toward each other across narrow lanes and someone has planted jasmine over every gate. This is not a neighborhood that has been designed. It has simply accumulated, which is the better thing.

What strikes you, after a few days of this, is that Sydney’s identity does not depend on your approval of it. Rome was a tourist city for two thousand years and learned to simply be Rome regardless. Sydney has arrived at something similar, though more recently and less self-consciously: a place that is emphatically, even stubbornly, itself. The harbor will be there when you look for it. The beaches will deliver their particular blue. But the city’s actual life — its texture, its flavor, its daily insistence on being somewhere specific — happens in the streets that don’t appear on the first page of search results.

MARDI GRAS & THE CROSS

There is one night a year when Sydney stops being quietly itself and becomes loudly, extravagantly, defiantly itself instead. The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade, which runs down Oxford Street every March, is one of the great street spectacles in the world — not because of its scale, though the scale is considerable, but because of what it means to the city that holds it. Sydney did not import this. It grew it, over decades, out of a march in 1978 that ended in arrests and became, slowly, a foundational piece of the city’s identity. The crowd that lines the street is not a tourist crowd. It is Sydney watching something that belongs to it.

Oxford Street itself — the spine of the parade route, running from Taylor Square up through Paddington — is worth walking on an ordinary night as well. It has the particular energy of a strip that has lived through several different versions of itself and is currently between identities, which makes it more interesting than it would be if it had settled. The bars are unpretentious. The conversations are loud. There is a sense, rare in any city, of people who actually want to be exactly where they are.

Kings Cross, a kilometer or so to the north-east, is something else again. It was Sydney’s red-light district for most of the twentieth century — gaudy, notorious, beloved in the way that only slightly disreputable places can be beloved — and it has been gentrifying unevenly for the better part of two decades. What remains is stranger and more interesting than either the old version or the new one would have been on its own. The neon is still there. So are the terrace houses with jasmine over the gates, and the late-night restaurants that don’t take bookings and don’t need to, and the small bars that open at ten and seem, somehow, to have been open since always. Walk the Cross at midnight on a weeknight and you are somewhere that has not yet decided what it is — which is precisely when a neighborhood is most worth visiting.

THE MARKETS

If you want to understand a city’s relationship with itself, go to its markets. Not the covered, curated kind with artisanal signage and a food truck strategy, but the kind that happen in churchyards and school grounds on Saturday mornings because they always have. Sydney has several of these, and they are among the most honest things in it.

Glebe Markets, held on the grounds of Glebe Public School, is the one that feels most like a genuine neighborhood turning itself inside out for a few hours each week. The stalls sell things that have clearly come from someone’s actual life — vintage clothing, dog-eared paperbacks, ceramics, vegetables grown in backyards — and the people running them seem entirely uninterested in whether you buy anything. This is not a performance of local color. It simply is local color, which is the rarer thing.

Paddington Markets, in the courtyard of Paddington Uniting Church, is the more polished version — it has been running since 1973 and has had time to acquire a certain self-awareness. The fashion is better, the jewelery more considered, the coffee queues longer. And yet even here the same spirit persists: a transaction between people who live in this city and people who want to, however briefly. Balmain, too, has its churchyard market on Saturdays, smaller and quieter and more likely to yield something genuinely surprising in a cardboard box under a trestle table.

The markets reward the traveller who is staying somewhere nearby rather than commuting in from the harbor. Which is, in the end, an argument for staying in the right kind of place altogether.

Sydney will show you the Opera House because you have come a long way and you deserve to see it. But give it a little longer — walk somewhere you were not told to walk, eat somewhere that looks as though it has not yet noticed you have arrived — and it will show you something else. Something same, and same, and endlessly itself.