Leviathan: The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney The strange confluence of forces which combined to destroy Governor William Bligh's administration have long since dissipated and their protagonists turned to dust in the ground. But the protean nature of power in Sydney and the fierce, uncertain currents of creation and destruction which were exposed by the coup, remain as potent in the digital city as in the mud brick village Sydney once was. To understand the origin of these forces is to see the modern city anew, with a sort of z-ray vision, which reveals the underlying structure not to be concrete and steel, but rather lust, greed, hubris and a ceaselessly shifting but morally inert and insatiable will to power. To peer deeply into this ghost city, the one lying beneath the surface of things, is to understand that Sydney has a soul and that it is a very dark place indeed. LEVIATHAN is history for the Tarantino generation. A epic study of the violent, the beautiful and the weird in one of the world's great cities it races through the chicanes of Sydney's history with the pedal to the metal and no respect for the road rules. From the eerily quiet swampy plains of two hundred million years ago, to the roaring gun fire of modern day gangland, LEVIATHAN rips through topics as diverse as crime and corruption, money and power, architecture, sex, food, art and tsunamis. LEVIATHAN is a long study of Sydney divided into five book-length chapters. It is both a history and a portrait of the modern-day city. The chapters are organised as follows around five themes which are characteristic of the city. (1) The Long Goodbye: The story of migration. Opens in Saigon in the last days of the Vietnam War. We follow a school teacher, Dinh Tran, around the disintegrating city as he tries to find an escape route for his family. He fails. Over the next few years the Tran family repeatedly attempt to escape to the West, finally making it out on a small fishing boat and settling in Bankstown. Their story is told to establish a pattern for post-1788 migration to Sydney where generations of desparate families and individuals - Irish convicts, poor British, anarchist Italians, German Jews, Asian refugees - have fled from the worst places in the world to create one of the world's finest city. The disastrous impact of this movement on the local aborigines is also examined. The endurance of violent authoritarian attitudes towards the blacks is examined through comparison of Watkin Tench's revenge raid on Botany bay with the killing of David Gundy by the NSW Police SWAT force. John has uncovered the truly shocking scoop that slavery is alive and well in Sydney's Eastern suburbs, and recounts the story of an Indian man who was brought out by a 'benefactor' and literally imprisoned in his home and made to work for him for years to pay off his 'debts'. (2) The Virgin's Shining Lie: built and natural environment. Opens in present day Sydney with the author considering a surf. From there we trace the developing European consciousness of the difference of Sydney's environment and the early refusal of the English and Australians to accept that difference on its own terms. Environmental destruction ensues. The physical growth of the city from a clutch of tents around the tank stream to a megalopolis is traced through the bulk of this chapter with an extensive comparison of 19C slums to 20C fringe suburbs. (3) Only The Strong: money and power. This chapter is divided into three sections each examining a violent era in the city's history and drawing out links between them. The thesis of Only the Strong is that because Sydney simply winked into existence on 26 January, 1788 there was no settled power structure such as existed in London, or in any of the medieval or Roman-era European cities. Sydney was a creation of the global expansion of capitalism, a tabula rasa on which only the strongest would be allowed to shape a story. The three episodes are the Rum Rebellion, the election day riots of 1843, and th |
