Crawling in and out of every crevice, the unceasing swarm of a public with their digital cameras dutifully proliferate the scene, sending digital parcels off to distant lands, marking off a tourist’s checklist. “Look at the ship!” Across the water the parodically enormous cruise ship, “Sapphire Princess,” is docked at the Rocks, bringing Sydney Cove to brimful. “You went on a boat, but not that boat?” Passing by, a girl of about eight is clarifying family folklore, and her clean, enunciated Australian accent – the fresh diction of childhood – contrasts her grandmother’s soupy Mediterranean cadence. “Yes. It was different. You couldn’t fly so easily then. We went on boats with two thousand people.”
At the end of our circumnavigation, the obligatory gesture of coda seems to be to mount the stairs and touch the gleaming tiles. Two types, one smoother than the other, yellowed with age or off-white by design, march upwards in endless lines of binary. At a middle-distance the combined effect is mosaic. I raise uncovered eyes, my gaze skidding up the steep, curved surface, and squint into the glare of sun refracted. A bucket of glass shards has been spilt; the sun’s intensity scatters unevenly across the tiles. And beyond, the cumuli have frayed into wisps spread out across the sky.
My friend and I have lost the third in our group. We phone to track him down: ‘I’m at the front.’ Which front? ‘The harbour side.’ It’s all harbour side! We stalk one another clockwise around the building like cyclists in a velodrome, though our pace is languorous and the hour stretches on.
A young man with a video camera walks up behind me and touches the same tiles as I move away, speaking calmly as he records: his family and friends’ own foreign correspondent. He wears lurid board-shorts, according to local custom, and the multi-khaki ‘hiking’ boots favoured by freshmen back-packers the world over. Local and universal, mis-matched and alert, here he is anonymous and far from home.
We circle to starboard, thankful for the shade and hush of the granite foundations. Peering over the railings – at thigh-height they are retro-low – into the precious-stone blues and greens of the Pacific, long strands of kelp can be seen floating serenely from the building’s base: an aesthetic flourish, the sub-aquatic adornments of a famous moored ship.
Making our break for the station, the first spoonfuls of rain begin to fall. From the platform, I watch an ancient drama unfold across the harbour. The water and sky have reset to a steely grey-blue, and the sweet, peaty tang, so strong with Australian rains, wafts up the escalator. When the train embarks, it is to the crack of an axe splitting ancient, felled timber in the sky.