The lucky country - Eleven cities

hsy12

刚刚开始读Donald Horne的The lucky country。其中描写了1960年代澳洲的11个城市，抄录一下，看各位有什么看法。

1. Sydney
Fire, air and water ... these are the elements of Sydney, the fire of the sun, the freedom of the air, the challenges and diversions of twenty-five beaches on the Pacific and the waters of Port Hacking. Those who see only miles of suburban streets leading away from ocean, bay or river see the form of Sydney but not the way it sees itself. Sydney dreams of surfing, fishing, sailing, swimming in calm bays, lying stretched out in the sun, absorbing heat into the marrow. And it is now at long last taking on some of the feeling of a great city, the first city in Australia to do so. After London, Paris and Berlin, Sydney is now as big as any city in Western Europe and bigger than Madrid, Rome, or Vienna. In American terms, it is about the same size as Pittsburg. Its peculiar flavour is of anarchic difference. Its two and a quarter million people have broken their guidelines. There are no accepted forms in Sydney; it is anonymous; just people following their pursuits, indifferent to others. Sydney does not acknowledge a 'Society'; there are merely claimants to position, who can, if they wish, achieve positions by self acclamation. There are no standards. For a quarter of a century politics in New South Wales have proceeded with a Tammany lack of policy, a mater of deals and pressure groups unadorned by rhetoric and of little interest except to the participants. Sydney's indifference to what others do has achieved tolerance without ideology. In Sydney you see more Asians than in any other Australian city but people seem to take no notice one way or the other. It is Melbourne that speaks up for conscience. But it is also in Melbourne that there can be scare campaigns against migrants. Sydney has dozens of migrant communities where English, at most, is only a second language; but there is no public criticism of migrants and there are no scare campaigns. No one cares. Sydney is indifferent to itself, and to the other capital cities. The other capitals are self-conscious and always aware of Sydney. To people in Sydney this is surprising.

2. Melbourne
Four hundred and fifty air miles south-west of Sydney, Melbourne, capital of Victoria and, with more than two million people, second in population to Sydney is seen as more 'English' than Sydney - not the England of London and the South, but of Manchester and provincial business. The top of its society coagulates into a recognizable pattern; there is still a significant club life, with the outward forms of gentlemanliness. You walk into a Melbourne club and, unlike Sydney, you see who's running the place. Melbourne's streets lead down not to a harbour, as in Sydney, but to the huge, ugly Flinders Street Railway Station. And a winter obsession with Australian Rules football seems to help Melbourne people make the adjustment that is so difficult to make in Sydney: what is there in life without sunlight? People are said to be milder, less aggressive in Melbourne than in Sydney; they are also said to be more clique-ish and group-conformist. Even social groups are inwardly quarrelsome in Sydney, but it is easy to move between them. In Melbourne groups  are more friendly within themselves, but interact less and suspect outsiders more. Melbourne is more outwardly puritan than Sydney and in acceptable social forms of gaiety the two cities - a few years ago about equally dull - seem to drift further apart. Melbourne has been described by Billy Graham as one of the most moral cities he has ever seen and by Ava Gardner, when she was there to star in On the Beach, as a fine place to make a film about the end of the world. Melbourne worries about its crime rate. Its intellectuals consider themselves more devoted to ideas than Sydney's pragmatic lot, and, in general, it accepts itself as a more cultured city than Sydney but this is not so. Its intellectual life is different - that's all. Melbourne knows more about the management of money than any other city in Australia. It is the home of much of Australia's big business. In Sydney many rugged individualists make a lot of money and English visitors, used to tolerating almost anything as long as it pretends to be something other than itself, see Sydney as a city of crude and newly gained wealth. (It is in fact the centre for Australis's oldest rich.) But while money talks a lot in Sydney it does not talk in one voice. In Melbourne it does - in a provincial gentleman's voice, blended with social conventions and respectabilities. At the top Melbourne provides what is left of an Australian 'Establishment' - a particularly pompous and obsolescent Establishment. It may be that Australia's obsolescence is most effectively perpetuated by the Melbourne Establishment. All four political parties are led from Victoria.

3. Brisbane
Brisbane, capital of Queensland, about a third the size of Melbourne, and as far from it as Istanbul is from Rome, is a city with its jacket off and its sleeves rolled up, hot, langorous, at times sensuously indolent - generous in tropical flowers, beer, hospitality, dominated in politics by Catholics for a quarter of a century, now by the Methodists. (The brothels have been closed.) It is the least capital of Australian cities, least in self-importance. To the tropical north, in the sugar ports and the cattle country and the developing mining and industrial areas they do not look to Brisbane. They want a separate North Queensland State they can run themselves. The big firms in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia see Brisbane as just a branch manager town, a city of also-rans. Brisbane is a man's city - matey, slow to change and a bit rough around the edges.

hsy12

4. Adelaide
Adelaide, capital of South Australia, about as big as Brisbane and as far from it as London is from Lisbon, is in conflict with itself. The accepted picture is of a gracious city of wide boulevards, grass squares and stone colonial buildings, set out on the grand scale; of men of property and family running the State in a gentlemanly way from behind the green shutters and cedar doors of the Adelaide Club; of a community established without the 'Irish element' or the 'convict strain'; assured, in control of powerful interests, but puritanical and dull; dedicated to civic pride, high business ethics, good works, good taste. This picture is attacked by  some as a façade for political gerrymandering and a cynical and conspiratorial social conservatism. However this may be, the undeniable criticism of the accepted version of Adelaide is that it is now out of date. Adelaide has moved into the technological age. Despite the tradition of conservatism it is a go-ahead place where industries migrate. Much of it is now noisy, dirty and confused; people now work there who may not have heard of the old families, and the new class of managers and experts provides a new social force. At the same time it sponsors the highly successfully biennial Festival of the Arts. Compared with their own past relations to each other, Brisbane falls backwards, Sydney falls apart, Melbourne moves forward to stay where it is, Adelaide goes ahead.

5. Perth
Perth, capital city of Western Australia, is about as far from Adelaide as London from Leningrad, about as far from Sydney as Saigon form Tokyo. It is separated from the rest of Australia by thousands of square miles of desert and scrubland. Perth is the most isolated city of its size in the world. Set near the Indian Ocean it is as close to Cocos Island as to Sydney. Its people did not want to join Australia as the time of Federation; the migrant gold miners forced them to. It is the centre of a world in which much of the southern part is fertile with light seasonal rain and the northern part is in the wet-dry rainfall belt but most of it is one of the driest lands on earth. The State Perth governs is ten times as big as the United Kingdom and contains fewer than 800,000 people, about a third the population of Sydney. Perth is relaxed, hospitable, a world of fishing, backyard beer parties and nice gardens. It works as hard as it can but takes it a bit easy when the sun flares in the summer sky. It distrusts the 'East'. (In Adelaide they distrust the 'East' but Perth distrusts Adelaide, too.)

6. Newcastle 7. Wollongong
The next largest city in Australia is not Hobart, Tasmania's capital, (with only a little over 100,000 people, Hobart is eighth on the list) but Newcastle, whose expanding southern edge now lies only about 50 miles from the expanding northern edge of Sydney. Sprawling around the shallow, silting port where coal from the Hunter Valley fields is loaded, its skyline formed by a significant part of Australis' heavy industry, dominated by the government business complex of Melbourne, Newcastle is now struggling to achieve the character of a more mature city. Its tone is set by old families, steelworks managers and local professional leaders. To the south of Sydney, Wollongong, seventh largest city, site of the biggest steelworks in the British commonwealth, is not yet so ambitious. Wollongong is a mystery thrown up from the puzzles of industrial change. Building and rebuilding are conducted with twentieth century technique but in a goldrush muddle. Wollongong is a series of settlements spread along the coast rather than a city. The central part of this agglomeration is still a one street town. People from 40 or 50 nations make up Wollongong - in the steel works migrant labour runs as high as 50 per cent. It is by far the most frontier-like of Australia's bigger cities, spreading and sprawling to God knows where. In the less than 150 miles of coastline, that encompass Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong live about a quarter of the people of Australia. Sydney has broken the bounds of definition; Newcastle is attempting a new definition; Wollongong is creative disorder. It may be in this turbulent area where, on present trends, there will be five million people by the end of the century that much of the shape of the new Australia will be comprehended.

8. Hobart
Hobart started life on the frontier and then went to sleep. It was one of the earliest convict colonies and a roystering whaling port. Then it stood easy. A ten-mile stretch of blue water lies in front of it and a dark blue mountain crouches behind it, covered with snow to its foothills in winter. Streets of old colonial houses in yellow stone still remain and the town slips so quickly into the port that ships seem to be anchored in the streets. Those who play this kind of game say that tis people are more reserved and cautious than the mainlanders. It is now being jerked into the 1960s (critics say the 1940s) with new buildings, espressos and so forth but has not yet known the kind of new development that now shakes Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Wollongong. Existence is said to be somewhere between small town serenity and small town vindictiveness. Mainlanders think little about Tasmania and foreigners want to know who owns it.

9. Canberra
Canberra, although the national capital, is in size only a town, smaller than Hobart, and it has some characteristics of a town although it is the centre of the administrative power game. It is not primarily a political town. Except for political party meetings (which are now of little importance) the quilt of Australian politics is patched together all over Australia, not in Canberra. Canberra is an administrative garrison, beautified by parks and gardens, laid out across a plain that is ringed with hills, a power complex of officials isolated from the Australian people. Their pressures on the politicians - perhaps the strongest single force in government - are not usually informed by that feeling for the texture of national life that might come from living among the people one governs. In their judgement of the possible they can be out of date. They must live on memories of what th e Australians seemed to be like some years ago. There is the world of government buildings and the world of small quiet houses set in garden suburbs; for some there is contact with a diplomatic community (of very uneven quality) or with members of the Australian National University; there is the kind of entertainment and cultural life one might expect in an intellectual's garden suburb.

10. Darwin
Before the Second World War Darwin was a left-over from Joseph Conrad; it was a sleepy, half-Asian port, debilitated by a century of almost entire failure to do anything with the Northern Territory. It was a gambling, drinking town of pearl buyers, trepang fishermen and crocodile hunters, sprawling in the heat beside the Arafura Sea. In 1942 Japanese bombers blew most of it away and some of its people looted what was left and drove off towards the desert. Now it is a town of neat houses on stilts. Government officials make up half its population. They administer 600,000 square miles of territory where 30,000 'whites' (most of them government employees) still experiment with development and cannot yet report their success. Darwin is a very different sort of administrative garrison from Canberra; It is still a town where 'grog parties' set the tone. A lonely man might still sneak off to some rusty iron shanty and get an aboriginal woman for a bottle. It is hot, only 12 degrees south of the equator and in latitude a little further from Hobart than Khartoum is from Rome; its long wet season sometimes drives men mad; in the dry season buffaloes have broken into the golf course. The integration of part-aborigines proceeds, the integration of full aborigines moves more slowly. In its long history of fiasco. of the ruin of a hundred schemes, three definite hopes now stand out for Darwin and the Territory: the breeding of cattle, the encouragement of mining and the development of Australia's first genuine and broadly based multiracial society.

11. Broken Hill
Broken Hill is not the administrative centre of anything except itself. It is a city of only 33,000, out in the hot, dusty west of New South Wales. Silver, lead and zinc are mined there. Broken Hill is run by its trade unions and so far as Broken Hill is concerned the Barrier Industrial Council is Stronger than the State of New South Wales. 'Badge Show' day are held to check on financial membership of unions and prices in shops are controlled by industrial action. If a price is considered too high the shop is declared 'black'. The miners have even boycotted beer to keep price down.Thee barrier Industrial Council owns the morning paper and is prepared to declare 'black' firms that don't advertise in it. Purchase of this pater is compulsory for all unionists, even if there are several of them in one household or if they are migrants who cannot read English. When women marry they are given three months to resign from their jobs. Broken Hill follows its own laws and ignores the rest of Australia.

虞宅与美丽

大概读一下，虽然是60年代的描述，感觉现在也差不多啊

hsy12

第一眼看到Broken Hill，你会觉得哪里冒出来的听都没听过的城市啊？
不过大名鼎鼎的BHP应该是尽人皆知吧？BHP就是Broken Hill Proprietary Company的缩写。
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BHP

Broken Hill是NSW的西部郊区，公司总部怎么在Melbourne？也许应验了作者的一句话：
Melbourne knows more about the management of money than any other city in Australia. It is the home of much of Australia's big business.

chenhu1984

对欧洲人来说，澳“大”利亚,面积真是大啊。