Being a Living Part of Sydney
You are just as much a part of the universe as a black hole, or a supernova
- Bill Bryson, A Really Short History of Nearly Everything
What is Sydney?
Any question phrased so succinctly and trivially cannot conceivably have a definitive, concise answer. The question demands to be explored in depth, it demands the answerer reference Australia’s aboriginal heritage, its colonial history, demographics and migration patterns, socio-cultural evolution, economic state, political partition, geographical boundaries and countless other subjective ways of defining a city. In this post I want to talk about how Sydney is its population- and more precisely, how insignificant individuals have a very felt presence in a city of millions.
People make a place
It is one thing to be a powerful politician, like our current prime minister Albanese or an influential public figure, like Danny Lim, or even people who did nothing to stand out but ended up going down in history nonetheless like Kathleen Folbigg (who deserves her own article). These people definitely have made almost a measurable contribution to Sydney’s recent history. But the very fact that they are named somehow makes their contribution impure- as though the life they have lived and the things they have done are tied to their identities first and foremost and only through incidence are associated with Sydney itself. I think the most powerful contributions people make to the culture of a city is an implicit one.
What is an Implicit Contribution?
Culture is by its very definition an abstract and hard to quantify thing and on top of that we speak about it in an implicit sense? To analogize in a way that almost none of my audience will understand1, think about it in terms of applying the kernel trick to the data in a support vector machine. I happen to be studying neural networks at the moment. 2D data can be operated on as though it were in 3D, allowing it to be separated by a linear hyperplane- but the transformation does not need to actually project the data into 3D, an expensive operation. Are the people who build Sydney ever identified? No. But while they are anonymous, their presence is still there just like how while the mapping is never “named”, the data is now linearly separable, while retaining the original dimensionality. What matters is the inner product which is the result of the mapping, not the mapping itself.
Enough of These Stupid Analogies
The Macca’s at Town Hall is (in my opinion) the most famous Macca’s in all of Sydney, probably Australia. The first time I dined at this dignified establishment was when I had graduated yr 12 and for the first time found myself spending some late nights in the city. I grew up far away from fast food and I’m reasonably strictly vegan too (sometimes I spoil myself with a slice of cheese) so there’s really not a lot on offer for me at any big fast food chain, least of all McDonald’s. But something about being there felt different, different to basically any other restaurant I’ve been to. And I can explain: the Town Hall Macca’s is the perfect blend of these two things that are really important to me. Firstly security, fast food is the epitome of security. It might have something to do with being raised on a diet, or maybe just my subconscious attitutes towards eating with friends but I am always conscious of what I am going to eat and if a place has options. If I see a chain I recognize, I know it a) will have standards (cleanliness, service, etc.), b) will have dietary options and c) will be reasonably cheap. There are other points too that I’ll get to soon. Although Macca’s is not renowned for the healthiest foods, the fact that it is “safe” and familiar is enough for me to prefer eating fries there to risking it at a nice place next door if I were with a close friend. But the Town Hall Macca’s in particular also boasts another characteristic that just makes it perfect: it is busy. I don’t care if your restaurant staff are totally indifferent or have seen it all. If I’m at a nice place, I feel judged and I don’t like it. I can always put up with it but it’ll never be my preference. But THM is just so busy and there are so many people there that no one cares about you. There’s just too many orders and too much to do, too many drunk people throwing up and crackheads doing some ungodly combination of drugs and sex in the bathrooms. The first time I went to the THM I didn’t even order, and noone knew. My friends and I sat at a seat for multipleHOURS, at least 2, and noone knew or cared. On top of all of this, the fact that the THM is essentially 24/7 is all I need, I could not wish for a better more convenient place to eat. The THM is what it means to “enjoy Sydney like a local”.
Everyone has their own unique experience and relationship with the THM, and you’re not a real Sydneysider until you’ve been there. My mentor from work, Elliott, for example, was telling me what he got up to over the weekend and the THM was a recurring motif, a central location in his recount. It’s the fact that the THM is so small and approachable that allows people to come together to create and maintain what is really an icon of Sydney, moreso than the Opera House or Harbour Bridge. It is by being employed at the THM, likely between the ages of 14 and 22 that someone small and insignificant, a nameless teen, can interract with so many people from all over and contribute to and truly be a part of Sydney’s living heritage.
The Central Tunnel
One other really fascinating example of “being a living part of Sydney” is busking in the tunnels. Yeah it is a bit shady and there are often people experiencing homelessness there- in fact, most buskers probably aren’t busking, but just begging for money which is really sad :(- but that tunnel (which I just learnt is called the Devonshire Street Tunnel) is universally known by all Sydneysiders. We’ve all walked there, probably run through there at some point and even seen someone we knew there going the other way. Especially UTS students. I know it has negative connotations and I really don’t mean to idealize or romanticize what homeless people experience. Singing to the public in that tunnel to me means the same as an overworked underpayed teen doing the night shift at the THM, they’re contributing to the shared experience of a place we’ve all been to and had not just exciting, but mundane experiences in.
Footnote: My Defense to Anyone That Says “We Are All Equal Parts of Sydney”
The introductory quote might give some readers the wrong idea, that we are all here building Sydney together. I don’t deny that, but that’s not really something I’ve intended to express in this post. It is hard for individuals to impress their own value and individuality when part of a collective, especially as that collective scales. In school when split into 3s or 4s for English, everyone mattered and people (ideally) listened when you had something to contribute. 5s or 6s were mostly the same, but it was reasonable that someone would fall through the cracks. If a group of 5 were to present, say, a report, the teacher would nominate someone to “represent” the group, a natural resolution to the problem of not having a single entry point to access/address the group (we do it all the time in businesses with managers, any significant group has a leader). But this is the same as Albanese being a “special” person- it is unnatural and consequently the individual leader and the group they represent are now distinct (and potentially conflicting) entities. Now scale up to a class- say the class comes together to take a photo. A few people will be in the middle, the place your eyes go to first. And commonly people are left behind, stuck behind someone taller than them or otherwise made invisible. If a class of 30 were to take a picture- and remember in this scenario people are ideally meant to all share the spotlight, no single person is the “leader”, 3-4 kids might be obscured.
Losing Community with Scale
Let’s scale up even further- last year I attended the NCSS Summer Camp (and it was the last one ever to be held, but that’s another thing). How does a cohort of 100 kids develop a culture? Naturally some kids are more outgoing. Others by circumstance get picked on by the tutors (in a good way) or make a fool of themselves in front of others and an inside joke starts to develop. And I saw it at NCSS, some (5-10) kids started to become representative of that particular cohort of 100 students, because they were loud or fun or cool or smart or active on the Discord or just because. And most of them were invited back as returners. I saw this previously at WSC when I was 14 and again (albeit less so) last month when I was in Adelaide for the ARC. Maybe your class in highschool had it too, the students who would organize the birthday card for the teacher. I might be projecting or overanalysing, but these were often students who felt like they were part of the class and felt obligated to do something “for the class”. A self fulfulling prophecy. Time and time again, nature can’t help but pick leaders.
By the time you get to the size of a local community- maybe 1000s of people, like the Ingleburn community, it is quite hard to have special individuals that represent a community, whose voices are “louder” than the rest. People who identify with and are more involved with the spirit of the group than others, who are reclusive and (in a not bad way) self-centered. This is my defense to anyone who claims “We Are All Equal Parts of Sydney”. Yeah maybe we all live here and maybe the empty can on the floor that I picked up and tossed in the bin, or the bubble tea I bought are doing their own little bit to influence the economy and culture of Sydney, but some people are just more important than others. In a way I go to uni and build the UTS environment for non uni students, but the lack of exclusivity of the uni experience (thousands attend UTS every day) makes it just that much less special than the small number with such considerable influence in other places.
I have to clarify, while employees of the Opera House and Sydney Bridge Climb and security guards at the ICC probably get a lot of traffic too, the exclusivity of these venues takes away from how many people can understand them. I mean, how many people do you know that you can guarantee have been to Sydney Acquarium? But anyone can go to, and work at, the THM.
In Conclusion
In conclusion I find it interesting and thought-provoking how these ordinary people without much thought build the universal experiences of the inhabitants of the city we live in.
Or maybe as my only reader, 100% of my audience will understand? ↩︎