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. |
