Ruth Park's Sydney

by Ruth Park

Extract

There's a place in Sydney where but a few decades ago, people lived in symbiosis with ships, the only suburb where I've seen the bow of a large overseas vessel nuzzling someone's garden fence. Often there were no fences. Senile cottages, half lost in overgrown grapevines and mossy cherry trees, crouched a few feet above slipways, boatsheds, repair yards, and all the rusty disarray of engineering works.

Of course the years have brought progress, the tottering old homes have been restored handsomely and are now worth millions of dollars. The cherry trees bloom, the gardens are a dream, the trees thick as moss. But you still see masts and flitting sails through the foliage, and, though the residents do their best not to look that way, also the huge Caltex installation to the south east, on Ballast Point.

Generations ago the shores of Balmain were grabbed by maritime industry as it moved out of Sydney Cove. And in more recent times, from the 1830s, came steam sawmills, chemical works, soap factories, Mort's Dock, oil tankers, tug and lighterage companies, all of which needed more of the precipitous green peninsula so near to and yet so separate from Sydney. So Balmain is not beautiful. They press against kitchen windows and turn nice bandy little seagoing streets into blind alleys. But everywhere, unexpectedly, this horizon is broken by enchanting fragments of green and blue and glimpses of the silvery city set about like a circular wall.

It has many European residents, yet you never notice them. It is still the most Australian of villages, perhaps like Surry Hills and Redfern before World War II. Balmain absorbs all comers, the foreign seamen of a century ago, as well as the Greeks and Italians of today. Its close-knit community admits to only one alma mater, Balmain.

'Yeah', says a drinker in one of its numerous hotels, 'One of these days Balmain may join the Commonwealth. But I dunno. We're still chewing over whether we'll join New South'.