Clive James' favourite Sydney spots
Ten ways to fall in love with Sydney all over again, just as Clive James does...
Sydney's second-hand bookshops have been a big part of my life since I first haunted Tyrrell's Bookshop in George Street and bought my first slim volumes of modern poetry. Tyrrell's long ago moved to Crow's Nest, but in the current era the race is on between the Gleebooks second-hand branch in Glebe Point Road and Berkelouw Books in Oxford Street, Paddington, with Berkelouw's just taking the prize because of its excellent coffee shop.
My favourite coffee shop to sit and write, however, has always been Rossini's on Circular Quay. A decaff latte and two slices of cinnamon toast for breakfast, please, while I finish my first read-through of the latest poetry collection by Stephen Edgar. Then you can shoot me. Tyrrell's Bookshop, Level 1/ 328 Pacific Highway, Crows Nest NSW 2065 (02 9966 9925); Gleebooks, 49 Glebe Point Rd, Glebe NSW 2037 (02 9660 2333); Berkelouw's, 19 Oxford St, Paddington NSW 2021 (02 9360 3200); Rossini's, Alfred St, Circular Quay NSW 2000 (02 9247 8026).
Also at the Quay is the open air Sydney Cove Oyster Bar where you and a few friends can take the kind of Riesling-fuelled lunch that blends into dinner, followed by a complete collapse on the last ferry home. Doyle's at Watson's Bay still has the greater glamour, but I do miss Doyle himself. Even in his last illness he would join your table with a complimentary pile of crustaceans mercifully big enough to blot out your view of Bob Hawke. Sydney Cove Oyster Bar, 1 Circular Quay East, Sydney NSW 2000 (02 9247 2937); Doyle's at Watson's Bay, 11 Marine Pde, Watsons Bay NSW 2030 (02 9337 2007)
The NSW State Library, where I spent so much time as a student not writing my set essays, is now a positive encouragement to creativity. I like to sit there and scribble, knowing that all my literary papers, at the librarian's kind invitation, are accumulating in the basement. The library also has a secret room with a complete collection of all the editions of Don Quixote that there have ever been, in every language: ask to see it, using a Spanish accent. NSW State Library, Macquarie St, Sydney NSW 2000 (02 9273 1414).
The NSW Art Gallery, containing as it does a Jeffrey Smart portrait of myself, is of course a must, but I also like hanging out at the little S.H. Ervin gallery on Observatory Hill. When my Sydney hideout was in that neat Harbourside Apartments block on McMahon's Point I ate regularly at Sails, and it's time I went back, just to see if Mike Willesee is still there, calling yet again for that deadly extra bottle of Cloudy Bay. NSW Art Gallery, Art Gallery Rd, The Domain NSW 2000 (02 9225 1744); S.H. Ervin Gallery, Watson Rd; The Rocks NSW 2000 (02 9258 0173).
I can't go back to the great swimming enclosures at Manly, San Souci and Brighton because they are gone altogether or else reduced to a mere line of corks lying on the water. The original Manly enclosure used to have giant wheels that young men could run on top of until they slipped, fell, and killed themselves in those blessed days before every accident was someone else's fault. But the best pool of them all is still exactly what it was. It's the rock pool at the South end of Coogee beach.
While still at Sydney Technical High School, I won three bronze medallions in the Coogee rock pool, each medallion secured by successfully rescuing a brick and giving it artificial respiration. Go there at night when the tide is high and you'll see veils of white foam sluicing across the pool while the flood-lit gulls fly over the esplanade and that woman you're with has an audible crisis from the sheer romance.
A tougher but still beautiful vision is to be had from C. Bruce Dellitt and Rayner Hoff's Anzac War Memorial in Hyde Park. Monumental yet still human in its dimensions, it's one of the great Art Deco buildings of the world. I still get a charge out of Kingsford-Smith airport, always called Mascot when I was young. Born and raised among the landing lights of the old main runway, I would camp out in the sand-dunes to watch the Constellations and the Stratocruisers coming in from America. Anzac War Memorial, Hyde Park, Sydney NSW 2000, (02 9267 7668); Kingsford-Smith airport, 1 Link Rd, Sydney Airport NSW 2020 (02 9667 9111)
The height of Sydney's architectural achievement, beating even the Harbour Bridge, must be the Kogarah railway station shopping complex, a symphony in reinforced concrete outstripping even a Todt Organization WWII flak emplacement for brutalist elegance. In my youth it was an unusually pretty railway station on the Illawarra line, but later the combined geniuses of Kogarah Council had the inspired idea of reinforcing it against air attack by bunker-busting bombs and decking out the result with a dozen different outlets for fast food. The result was the masterpiece you can see today. Kogarah railway station shopping complex, Railway Pde, Kogarah (02 9563 7273).
Only the Opera House can equal Kogarah railway station's daring grandeur. When I left for England, nothing but the podium of the Opera House had been completed. In London I saw photographs of the finished building and didn't think much of it. (Yes, I was the one who called it an Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter full of oyster shells left after an office party.) But when I made my first trip home after sixteen years, I saw the Opera House for what it is: an epic poem. Going on stage to do a show there has been one of the great thrills of my later life.
It's such a stunning way of coming back to a city teeming with enchanted places. I always loved them and I love them still, even when they are no more. Opera House, Benelong Point (02 9250 7111)