Sydney: A Biography – Louis Nowra – REVIEW

Author and playwright Louis Nowra’s introduction to Sydney was as a nine-year-old driving across the Sydney Harbour Bridge with his father.

Immediately he contrasts the harbour city’s brightness and industrial and architectural power with the drabness of Melbourne, his home town.

Two decades later Nowra makes the journey again, this time for good.

Not only does his career as a playwright and author take off, he also begins a slow love affair with his new home that would be later celebrated in his books Kings Cross: a biography and Woolloomooloo: a biography.

With his new book Sydney: a biography, Nowra has broadened his purview of the city, taking in his early lodgings in Chippendale to Redfern, Ultimo and Surry Hills with day excursions to Mortdale and Clontarf.

Nowra looks at how the city developed, from early Aboriginal settlement to the establishment of the British penal colony and examines how the relationships between the two cultures resulted  in one being displaced from the harbour shores to the outskirts of the city.

As Nowra walks around his adopted city, fragments of the past are called up to trigger recollections of the early and later colonial years as the settlement went from barely surviving to eventually thriving.

Historical personalities and events are recalled, from the early days of theatre in the penal colony to Nowra’s contemporaneous hunt for Tracey Emin’s installation The Distance of Your Heart, comprising of 60 hand cast bronze birds scattered along an 850 metre line between Bridge and Grosvenor Streets.

Some of the characters that exemplify Sydney stories are well known, such as crooked premier Robert Askin, whose idea of running the state was similar to that of the Rum Corps of Governor Bligh’s time.

Others, like the Fairfax and Packers, we think we know, but Nowra does a great job of peeling away the onion layers of each family’s secrets and their dynastic rise and fall.

Throughout Sydney: a biography Nowra places equal importance on those who came to shape the city, for better or worse, along with the physical manifestations of the city’s architecture and habitats.

Like the city itself, Sydney: a biography is filled with the brash and the garish that sit side by side with the beautiful and exquisite, making it an engaging read seen through the lens of an adopted Sydneyite.

Sydney: a biography by Louis Nowra, published by UNSW Press

Available in hard copy or digital

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