Sydney: Biography of a city (Lucy Hughes Turnbull)

Sydney is a great place. Turnbull’s history takes an almost street by street look at the history and development of the city, from the First Fleet’s arrival in 1788 to the end of the twentieth century. There’s good and bad to this approach.

First the good: It is really comprehensive, and as a new resident of the city, I can appreciate more how come things are they way they are. I also really liked how connections are made between the past and the present – like when some one’s ancestor started a restaurant, and the third generation is now running the shop, and it’s still a great restaurant. Fully 500 pages of minute detail help bring the past to life.

Next, the not so good. I suppose it is a challenge to put together 200 years of history of a city into a comprehensive story, but not to let it stretch to thousands of pages. Unfortunately, in accomplishing a 500 page comprehensive history, readability was sacrificed such that it reads like research notes with capitals at the start and periods at the end of the point form scrawls. Continuity between paragraphs is often missing – a paragraph will end with someone being hung, and the next paragraph starts with quarrying sandstone for a town hall. No, that’s not an exact quote, but it may as well be. The staccato beat of the sentences within paragraphs was hard to get through to, particularly as the continuity issues surface in this context as well.

There are thousands of interesting tidbits in the book, and it has value for those tidbits and bringing together all the stories of the people and places of Sydney’s past. Unfortunately, it reads like a laundry list of tidbits.

Finally, the story occasionally shifts from simple declarative chronology to editorial – particularly surrounding the architecture of the 1960s and 1970s building frenzy. It seems strangely out of place in the midst of a litany of events to see the authors undisguised opinions on architecture and civil planning pop up.