Literary Sydney cultural features

While painters such as Brett Whiteley have rendered their city in joyous Technicolour tones, Sydney’s authors have a fetish for the city’s darker side. From Ruth Park’s tales of slum life onwards, many of the best books about the city dwell on its underside. Even Kenneth Slessor’s Five Bells, considered by many to be the ultimate poem about Sydney Harbour, was inspired by a friend’s drowning. Some of the best portrayals of the city have been by writers from abroad but, increasingly, native Sydneysiders have been using their home town as a character in their work. See our reading list below for examples.

Early accounts

The very earliest account of the colony’s early days by Marine captain Watkin Tench was first published in 1793, and is currently available under the title 1788. Nineteenth-century works include Backhouse’s A Narrative of A Visit to the Australian Colonies (1843) and Trollope’s Australia and New Zealand (1876).

20th-century writers

Local novelists did not begin focusing on the city until the early 20th century. Louis Stone’s Jonah (1909), telling the story of a larrikin from the slums, was the first novel of any literary merit set in urban Sydney. Christina Stead’s early novels (Seven Poor Men of Sydney, 1934; For Love Alone, 1944) evoke Sydney during the 1920s and 1930s, while the novels of Kylie Tennant (Foveaux, 1939) and Ruth Park (Harp in the South, 1948; Poor Man’s Orange, 1949) evoke life in Surry Hills, then Sydney’s most notorious slum.

Contemporary life

The city’s seedy side is also the focus of contemporary authors such as Peter Corris and his fictional detective Cliff Hardy, and poet Dorothy Porter in her powerful verse novels, The Monkey’s Mask and What a Piece of Work. Younger writers such as Christos Tsiolkas in The Jesus Man offer views of contemporary inner-city life.

Two of the most powerful portraits of the city have come from John Birmingham’s ‘shadow history’ Leviathan; and Booker Prize-winner Peter Carey’s 30 Days in Sydney, which contains a far more vivid picture of the city than is captured in any of his novels.