Sydney Again

A quick flight and I'm back in Sydney. As usual in this city, there is too much to drink and I wake this morning with a bit of a hangover. It's nothing much, but my body is certainly not its accustomed temple - last night it was full of rowdy pranksters bent on its desecration. We ate in a Chinese fusion restaurant at Finger Wharf, located in the longest wooden building in the southern hemisphere. It might even be the longest wooden building in the world, but no one seems to be certain about that, so we settled for the southern hemisphere. One of the party was a slightly rakish individual, born a pom but now definitely Ozzie. Sadly for him, he now has advanced macular disease caused apparently by driving buses over endless bumpy roads. He was great company with some very odd travel stories to tell as he smoked and drank incessantly without getting drunk.

My friend said I had to go and see some more sights. She was particularly keen that I should visit Cockatoo Island, which, she said, was once a major industrial part of the city. The only problem is that I have been able find no mention of it in the Lonely Planet Guide, so does it really exist?

I may not have been able to find Cockatoo Island, but at least I now know what it was. The answer was at the Hyde Park Barracks Museum. Contrary to what I imagined, the Barracks had very little to do with soldiers. Rather it had various functions connected with immigrants - as a secure environment for transported criminals until 1848 when the barracks were relocated to Cockatoo Island; then as a receiving station for young Irish women who were sent to Australia during the Irish famines of the the 1850s; and finally as an asylum for destitute and infirm women. In 1887 it was converted into court rooms and legal offices which were in use right up to 1979.

The displays are a frightening testament to the brutal early days of Australia, with endless floggings, hard labour and death from disease. The stories of the young Irish women who were transported here are deeply sad, although many of them did manage to make lives for themselves, through marriage to protestant settlers. Running through this nineteenth century history is the continuing failure Britain to solve its own problems which it managed only by shipping them off to Australia.

To cheer myself up I dropped into the State Library of New South Wales to have a look at the exhibition devoted to The Magic Pudding, a children's book dating from 1918, which is very well known and loved in Australia but little known outside. Written and illustrated by Norman Lindsay, a prominent artist of the time, it tells the story of Bill Barnacle and his sidekick, the penguin Sam Sawnoff, who are owners of the Magic Pudding, a grumpy creature that never runs out however much you eat it. The Magic Pudding also has the ability to be whatever flavour you want at the time. Bill Barnacle's ownership of the Magic Pudding is threatened by Possum and Watkin Wombat, a pair of professional pudding thieves. It's a wonderful story of the pursuit of the pudding and its eventual rescue with the help of Bunyip Bluegum (a well dressed Koala), told in highly coloured, exuberant larrikin language that children love. Lindsay wrote the book because he thought the contempory vogue for stories about fairies was utterly wrong. In his view children were really much more interested in stories about food. He proved to be right and the book has been a continuing success for generations of children in Australia ever since.