John Birmingham: Leviathan

(Vintage $26.95)

Review by Jack Leigh*

Perhaps it is Sydney's larrikin destiny to be bashed up and bleeding, with mask askew and tie awry, as it fronts up for the Olympics - mugged by its own "unofficial biographer."

Author John Birmingham set out to celebrate the leviathan, or urban monster, which he calls the greatest city in the world. What we get is not a celebration but a denigration, indeed, a ferocious assault.

He concludes that Sydney, a product of convicts and robber barons, never quite threw off its dysfunctional beginnings.

He decides the brute forces of power - lust, greed and self-interest - have shaped the city from within and outside the official structure and continue to do so.

Though he writes with attitude, this is no diatribe.

It is a well-sourced, sagacious and invigorating book which sweeps along like a tsunami. It is best to just buckle up for the ride. To quibble only spoils the flow.

So we traverse bitter conflicts in Sydney's past with officials, the grazier-gentry, soldiers, redeemed convicts, politicians and bent policemen rampant for gain at the expense of the poor and powerless. Racial minorities are victimised.

There are riots, strikes, plague, corruption and fine examples of 19th-century invective, as when Judge-Advocate Richard Atkins writes to the "cowardly" warrior-capitalist John Macarthur (1808 plotter against Governor Bligh of Bounty fame): "Your original meanness and despicable littleness pervade your every action. It shows the cloven foot.

"Return to your original nothing!"

Aucklanders, a gentler breed, know there is a hard, more extreme and even vicious edge to life in our great cousin across the Tasman.

Yet can Sydney be so rotten? From where we sit, it seems a brilliant place.

Birmingham could surely have told another story, praising the enterprise of the leviathan-builders.

He hints as much at the end, lamenting that he has lost "the good vibes" of living in the city he loves, and wondering if this "black armband" biography is unjustly selective, dwelling on "violence and alienation" at the expense of its triumphs and virtues.

"I had planned to write a celebration ... Four years later I sat hunched over my laptop, tapping out the ghoulish details of corpse-ratting at the Glebe morgue."

What started him on the darker path, he thinks, was an 1819 account of how an influential Sydney family entertained a French guest by having Aborigines beat and spear each other to death for "rum and mouldy bread ... I began to understand how little the mindset of white authority had changed."

Leviathan, originally a Biblical monster, became the state as an all-powerful organism through Thomas Hobbes' book of 1651. The Sydney leviathan evolved from the "few small cells" of its first tents in 1788, says the author.

* Jack Leigh is an Auckland journalist and reviewer.