JOHN BIRMINGHAM Leviathan: The unauthorised biography of Sydney; DAVID HUNT Girt: The unauthorised history of Australia. Reviewed by Kurt Johnson
Leviathan and Girt are engaging because they do what official histories shy away from – they spin a ripping yarn.
We Australians have a strained relationship with our past. As the ongoing culture wars rage ever louder, it might seem that we respond to our history with either V8-revving hyper-pride or Chardonnay-swirling revulsion. In truth, most of us react with a loud, protracted yawn. We learned to do this in school as our teachers tried desperately to season the bland stew concocted in beige corridors at the Board of Studies. It’s not the teachers’ fault; historically politicians on both sides have wrenched the narrative this way and that to exonerate or condemn, then fed it through the mincer of official bureaucracy. It is no wonder students feel the final product is as flat and lifeless as the paper it is printed on.
Most Sydneysiders try to stifle the same yawn at the city’s history. Yet where national history is burdened with the abstract concepts of guilt, society and identity, the history of a city can be nimble, sharp and alive; it can crackle with vitality and furnish new meaning to the street you walk down every day. Here unofficial histories are well placed because they can be grassroots and intimate; they can use local lingo, be irreverent in a way stuffy, grandiose official history never can. For a city as divided and in flux as Sydney is today, it helps to think local.
Two prime examples are John Birmingham’s Leviathan and David Hunt’s Girt (Part I is mostly about Sydney). At first, these books are engaging because they do what official histories shy away from – they spin a ripping yarn. It takes a while for the shock to wear off that such a feat is possible. But soon the real value of these books shines through, and Sydney emerges as a living colourised character of history, rarely as beautiful as the official version but for once alive and kicking.
A quote on the cover from a review of Leviathan states the reader can expect ‘Sydney as psychopath’. Great PR copy for a book published in 1999, except it would be more accurate to characterise Birmingham’s Sydney as a schizophrenic with a personality divided between the official and beautiful ideal, and icy, single-minded and callous reality. Today such a diagnosis might be blamed on the real-estate boom and gentrification and, without historical memory, this makes a convincing argument. Leviathan posits that division was sunk into the city’s marrow at the moment Sydney was founded, from when Governor Phillip ‘swept his arm around the curve of the bay’ to designate the rocky western slopes for convicts and the gentler more picturesque east for the officers.
Division, in Leviathan, is constant but not static. The powerful exploit the poor for personal gain. Yet occasionally the poor push back. These moments represent the book’s high drama, which Birmingham unapologetically portrays as class warfare. Most memorable is a forced eviction in 1931 in Newtown. Then a grim working-class suburb suffering from the Great Depression with streets home to roving packs of feral dogs. After repeated legal evictions of unemployed workers (on thin pretexts) throughout the inner west, many locals had had enough. Thousands surrounded 143 Union Street when police arrived to evict the occupants. Members from the Unemployed Workers Movement had barricaded themselves inside with bricks, rocks and various bludgeoning devices. Police elbowed their way through the hostile crowd and broke down the door, moving from room to room, firing off volleys of poorly aimed bullets and generally busting heads. In the ensuing riot the raw violence supporting the state was laid bare. Birmingham relates the story in slow detail so you can hear the wood and bone splinter, the bullets crack and the sirens wail into the distance carrying the bloodied ‘reds’:
As the riot-beast kicked and gouged, pushed and shoved, screamed, shouted cursed and punched and batoned its way towards them, it must have robbed many of their courage. All those straining bodies so closely confined, all smashing into each other and running at white heat. All those hearts racing, eyes darting. It stank. It reeked with human funk and fear. The police did not hesitate when they reached that last sanctuary. ‘They charged in and started to baton us unmercifully,’ said Dare.
Moments of resistance in Australia’s history are galvanising. Attempts by the Turnbull government to ban companies from working on federal construction sites if employees brandish the Eureka flag show that these symbols still have the power to threaten authority. One wonders what the impact would be if Birmingham’s tales of resistance lived on in Sydney’s memory. Would protesters wanting to prevent the destruction of the Sirius building in the Rocks, or the building of Westconnex be more willing to resort to more militant means?
Rather than timidly proposing an alternative, Leviathan attacks official history head-on. Where the history approved in Canberra is produced it builds consensus and de-emphasises difference, Leviathan fixes its eye on the divisions that simmer underneath in a way that feels authentic because most of the resulting conflicts are about real estate – lavish heritage buildings pulverised by the developer’s wrecking ball, sketchy real-estate speculators throwing up dodgy housing, politicians parcelling off public green space in dubious grants. With Leviathan we have an historical Sydney that we can relate to, and while it may be unloveable, at least we can recognise it enough to get mad.
In David Hunt’s Girt we have a city that is less human but just as alive. He prefers a lighter touch to Birmingham, relying on satire and absurdity to an almost Douglas Adams-esque degree. The result is just as subversive: ‘Bligh has a fouler mouth than a Tourette’s sufferer at the business end of a buck’s night.’
Throughout Girt the stony statues of official Australian historical figures are forced at penpoint to step off their pedestals, disrobe and stand before us so we can point and laugh.
Hunt’s treatment of Macarthur, for example, is particularly satisfying. With the departure of Governor Phillip, Macarthur was left more-or-less in control of the young colony. His time was marked by the most outrageous cronyism, giving free settlers the rocky unfarmable plots while his officers were given immense grants of the most fertile land in the Cumberland Plains, and free convict labour to work them. This shored up his support base and guaranteed the loyalty of the soldiers. Hunt goes to great lengths to articulate Macarthur’s other outrageous abuses like rigged courts, tax dodges, self-serving legislation, allocating himself vast swathes of land while deliberately running down public institutions. It’s when Macarthur’s pompous justifications are quoted that his hypocrisy really begins to steam. In the audiobook, read by the author, Hunt even does the voices. Hunt wastes no time confirming what every Sydneysider knowns in their bones: that politicians have been acting this way ever since.
As Girt is a history of Australia it has a wider, national-scale arc than Birmingham’s civic focus, but Hunt’s humour is crucial in slaughtering some sacred cows, while raising up lesser-known figures. The most compelling of his stories is about the Indigenous warrior Pemulwuy, who waged a guerrilla war against the first white settlers and had an Rasputinesque capacity for dodging death, having his head cracked by a giant African convict named Black Caesar, escaping from Governor Hunter and being more filled with ‘more lead than an architect’s pencil case’. I remember being taught about Pemulwuy in school. Multiple times, in fact, but never as the swashbuckling tale included in Girt. Here storytelling is everything – and instead of the recent history of Sydney’s Eora, Dharug and Tharawal people being treated as a grim two-century litany of oppression, marginalisation and exclusion, no matter how well intentioned, it is easier to connect with a history that thrills and inspires. To connect to the past is to create a sense of belonging, especially in the case of a city.
In the end the question remains: Who benefits from a city’s population being estranged from its own history? This is best answered by another question: How easy is it for politicians to repeat the same tired cynical plays when the population isn’t up enough on their own past to see them coming?
It is certainly far easier to delist a heritage building for sale to a private developer, or to sell off green space for a new commercial district, if the locals don’t feel that they are being deprived of part of who they are
Beyond resistance, having a sense of history in Sydney also provides the population with the perspective to diagnose structural issues and recognise the need for structural solutions: if inequality is built into a city’s foundations, it cannot be undone by tweaking tax laws.
Unofficial histories that deal with Sydney, like Girt or Leviathan, are vital pieces of cultural capital as they can inspire belonging and connectedness to a city, something desperately needed to return Sydney to something greater than a real-estate farm with killer beaches.
John Birmingham Leviathan: The unauthorised biography of Sydney Random House Australia 2000 (first published 1999) PB 592pp $19.99
David Hunt Girt: The unauthorised history of Australia Black Inc 2013 PB 288pp $29.99 (Volume 2, True Girt, was reviewed by Ashley Kalagian Blunt here.)
Kurt Johnson is a journalist and author of The Red Wake: A hybrid of travel, history and journalism, Random House, 2016.
You can buy Leviathan from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
You can buy Girt from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
To see if these books are available available from Newtown Library, click here.
I remember even my history teacher (in the 60’s) telling us how boring the pap that was served up as history was. It wasn’t until I heard Girt as an audio book that I realised how savage the frontier wars against the indigenous people was. That part of history was expunged from the curriculum. Now I have another book on my queue – Leviathan