Boomerang-ing Around Sydney

By Nancy Lyon

Seeing Sydney, Australia in sixty minutes before sundown, enroute to Kuala Lumpur, and without a kangaroo, is crazy

Would it whizz back around and hit me in the face? Or maybe even break my arm, like it did to that friend of a friend in New York State who was taught by the Aborigines? Or would it fly off at 100 mph and sink into the Sydney Harbour? That's was what I was wondering as I stared at the wall of boomerangs in the renovated warehouse echoing with the eerie tones of the didgeridoo.

"Rangs," as they're now called by boomsmiths who make them and the throwers who throw them, are of two kinds: returning boomerangs and those that hit their mark like the"Kylies" used for hunting kangaroos. These rangs are painted in bold Aboriginal designs and I decide that the best thing to do was to shoot them and run. 

I had to shoot fast. The Aboriginal artist attending the shop wanted to tell me all about boomerangs. How they'd been found 23,000 years ago in Poland and in the pyramids of Egypt. How they'd been made from mammoth tusk ivory, bone, hardened leather, wood, and now plastic and phenolic resin composites. And how they came in shapes of every letter of the alphabet, and with different gyroscopic and asymmetrical lift properties.

I thought about buying one with the plastic crinkle-proof Australian $50 bill in my pocket. (Aussie currency is waterproof and it floats!) But I have only 25 minutes left for my shamefully superficial, one-hour racing tour of the biggest city in Australia. It felt rude, but I thanked him and dashed out into the street again.

Sydney in sixty minutes

Seeing Sydney in sixty minutes before sundown, enroute to Kuala Lumpur, and without a kangaroo, was crazy. It’ was because I was on on a stomach-churning press trip of 50,000 miles in 17 days, and our small group of travel journalists had just checked into our hotel, and we were set to have cocktails and dinner in only an hour, then speed-sleep then get on another red-eye Ansett Airlines flight.

Fortunately the Observatory Hotel is on The Rocks. Not as in smashed up love or whisky on ice, but as in the Sydney Harbour area, the oldest and saltiest sector of this exotic South Pacific port of 3.5 million souls in New South Wales, where the whole post Aboriginal history of Australia is squeezed into a few blocks. If I jogged fast, I could see a lot of The Rocks before racing back to jump into a cocktail dress.

The Rocks is renowned for its rough lowlife history, when randy sailors, swaggering tattoed Maoris rattling sharktooth necklaces, smugglers and violent gangs brawled among the grog shops and brothels, wharves and warehouses lit by the ghoulish gaslamps. When doss houses and six-penny lodging houses and establishments like the Hit or Miss Hotel and the Live and Let Live Hotel overflowed with immigrants from Asia and Europe. When dark cobbled lanes stinking of beer and whale oil scurried with rats carrying bubonic plague, and clanged with the sound of convicts’ iron chains.

From penal to posh

Today Aussies are trendily proud of their convict ancestors. The good ole convict days are recreated in Old Sydney Town where actors portraying penal colony residents of 1780-1920 confess their heinous or petty crimes. And of course the gentrification that turns every city’s Tenderloin or Hell’s Kitchen into industrial chic has removed much of the grit from Sydney’s Rocks.

But there’s still enough salt left among the old sailing ships in the harbour, old pubs like the Fortunes of War Hotel and the Hero of Waterloo, the Old Police Station, the convict barracks built in 1816, and the preserved but unrestored slum museum (circa 1844) at Susanna Place to make The Rocks pretty tangy.

After the American Revolution of 1776, Merry Old England was forced to find a new dumping ground for the hoodlums and ruffians and bedraggled classes that it had been in the habit of exiling to the North American colonies. The southeastern corner of the unconquered continent of Australia proved the perfect place.

On January 26, 1788, the motley first fleet of 11 shiploads of exiled convicts landed under the rocks and bluffs of Sydney Cove. At what is now “First Fleet Park,” Captain Arthur Phillip first governor of New South Wales, established a penal colony of tents and bark shacks on the edge of the wild Australian bush, tidily away from King George III’s England.

Somehow this unruly settlement of petty thieves and prostitutes, cons and cutthroats and 257 military officers and their wives and offspring grew into one of the most beautiful and airy ports in the world. A San Francisco “Down Under.” A subtropical city of lacey wrought iron and Victorian pastels, 34 pounding Pacific surf beaches (protected with shark nets), nude beaches and parks and gardens rich with eucalypts, water gums, bangalays and Laughing Kookaburra birds.

The Great Sydney Dash

It had been only 35 minutes since I shot out of the Observatory Hotel and ran up the steep hill of Observatory Park for a panorama of the Blue Mountains and the harbour, piers, yachts and ferry boats and the Sydney Opera House billowing like a ship in full sail. Then down Kent Street where in front of the Lord Nelson Hotel I collided with a drunken English lad spending his first day down under upside down tasting ales.

I dashed in for a peak at the old pub, and with no time to sip a “Tooth’s Old” or some other brew among the weathered wood and leather, I bought a bottle of mineral water for the road. It came elaborately emblazoned with a spread Eagle and Lord Nelson’s image: “The Lord’s Water Pure Table water product of Australia and exclusively bottled Hotel Cnr Argyle & Kent”

I continued my sprint, past the Illustrated Man inking salon plastered with South Pacific tattoo flash. Past an historic plaque commemorating the 1788 hanging of convict Thomas Barrett, strung up from a gallows tree for stealing pork, butter and peas from penal colony provisions. In the days when public executions were a public entertainment, some Sydney pubs had picture windows from which patrons could view the hangings.

Was it only yesterday that I ate kangaroo enchiladas for lunch on Hayman Island in the Great Barrier Reef? As I jumped down the steps of Lower Fort Street toward the arched Sydney Harbour Bridge known as “The Coathanger” I noticed that my jumping ability seemed greatly enhanced. I zipped across the harbour to McMahon’s Point with my 200mm zoom lens. Then swang around George Street to gawk at a shop of dazzling milky white and black opals, Australia’s “rainbow stone” back-breakingly mined from the broiling earth 70 feet down.

The Royal Botanic Gardens is worth at least a day, not five minutes. The tropical gardens fronting Sydney’s Harbour spread over an area almost half the size of The Rocks. I get a quick whiff, a heady melange of tree fern and a eucalypt tinged with sea air, before racing back to the Observatory for cocktails in the book lined Globe Bar.

While the other travel writers had taken leisurely baths, I’d gobbled Sydney and was suffering from sensory indigestion. And at the very moment that I spied an old leather tome on the shelf I was dying to digest from cover to cover - Life and Laughter Midst the Cannibals - the dinner bell rings.