Sydney lifestyle theme village
The sunniest mortgage farm in the Southern Hemisphere!
March 5, 2019 — August 20, 2023
Sydney. Australia’s oldest city. Fetid, fun, messy, corrupt, uptight, gorgeous, vapid. I love this place, but probably I do not love it enough to pay the fee to stay here forever. Update: I left, to Melbourne a.k.a. Naarm.
1 On a trajectory to boring
Sydney is great, but it’s too expensive and sclerotic to remain interesting long term. Leave Sydney.
Alex McKinnon ranted in 2016:
From police horses in pubs, to $400 fines for riding on the footpath to disgusting old houses with actual mouldy dead bodies in them that sell for $1.1 million at auction, Sydney is already streets ahead in 2016’s Shittest City in Australia award. The lockouts have torched the inner city’s once-vibrant nightlife, Westconnex is going to turn some of the city’s most liveable suburbs into one giant spaghetti junction, and the state government’s made it even easier for little old ladies to gamble away their retirement savings by approving Barangaroo, James Packer’s latest giant, dick-shaped monument to himself.
…The future of Sydney is gyms. In ten years, everything will be a gym. The Harbour Bridge will be a gym. The Domain will be a gym. Alan Jones will be a gym. Who needs a nightspot where one of history’s great bands might play a cheeky gig on a Saturday night when you can go do synchronised arm exercises with office managers while a would-be army instructor screams at you over a Pitbull EDM remix?
The terrible thing is, since COVID-19 closed my gym, this idea does not sound so bad anymore.
Note, however, that in terms of domestic migration, Sydney has been losing people for 20 years (Dwyer 2023).
And it turns out people are leaving. See Elyse Dwyer’s note on Sydney out-migration.
To put that rant another way, Sydney is choked by real estate pollution.
2 Larrikin Sydney
3 Mapping Sydney
Passive-aggressive psychogeography is a local specialty. Watch as the local topological contortions are ground into undifferentiated suburbia.
The ecological/trophic analysis:
Map My Sydney from the Map My Environment, tracks pollution levels of various toxins of note.
4 Past Sydney
Mirror Sydney by Vanessa Berry. SMSA.
How about Illustrated Sydney News?
5 Current Sydney
5.1 Sauna
Get some sauna! The Australian Sweat Bathing Association advocates for sauna culture in Australia.
5.2 Nature
There are lots of national parks and wilderness reserves. They are typically really good. The ones that are easiest to get to are listed in Sydney Hiking Trips (formerly Sydney Train Walks).
See also the list of local swimming holes at Sydney Wild Swimming Australia. C&C Karloo Pools and the hidden alternative swimming spots nearby.
5.3 Garbage dump
5.3.1 Skip bins
5.3.2 Compost services
Compost revolution is a composting (skill|resource) sharing community Not Sydney-specific, but Sharewaste.com is the social network I use to find places to compost my food scraps.
- Compost pickups: ORG REC
- Table to Earth Composting Solutions offer complete compostable plates etc and then compost the lot at the end. Sounds luxurious. Seems to be something of a one-man-show, I contacted them for a party and they couldn’t help because the founder was away that weekend.
5.4 Florists
Maybe try LVLY; they promise to source flowers locally.
6 Better future Sydney
6.1 Solar power
6.2 Less hostile
Sydney we sometimes call Retirementland because it’s highly polluted by real estate, in the sense that things that do not maximize the investment value of living space are unlikely to happen here, which more or less corresponds to being a nice place for retirees but not anyone else. Sydney is famously hostile to parties:
I’d overheard some Spaniards calling Sydney ‘El Cementerio’ — ‘The Cemetery’ — and there was something sepulchral about the silent spaces. That look of desolation distinctive to the top of Oxford Street (the civic pockmark of empty storefronts and For Lease signs) was spreading all over the city. Taylor Square could have been hosting a memorial service, and in a way it was. Already the iconic Flinders Hotel, the Exchange Hotel — home to a number of venues — and Taxi Club had closed down, and the closest nightclub was to be replaced with a government-funded “family-friendly” cycle hub.
The political party organising around more interesting times was Keep Sydney Open.
Another great phrasing of this problem:
“Noël, noël is a great nostalgic Christmas carol that reminds me of a more simple time before coward punches, but it really needs to be enjoyed in moderation. It’s interrupting my small town BBC murder mysteries. I’m a caucasian post-war Australian. I’ve never had to make a compromise in my life, and I don’t plan on starting now.”
Frontyard projects (frontyard wiki, Frontyard slack) is a singular thing; an arts space in the Inner West of Sydney which collects assorted missing pieces of medium-density living; A usable writing space a collective library, a shared garden, rooms for thinking in etc.
Sydney Alliance is a miscellaneous actor.
The Sydney Alliance is a diverse coalition of community organisations, religious organisations, unions and schools that uses the tools of community organising to make the city a better place to live. The idea of building a Sydney Alliance was first raised in May 2007, and by November that same year was financially supported by 13 organisations. The Alliance launched with 45 partner organisations on 15 September 2011.The Alliance has three goals. We work with our partner organisations to:
- Increase and strengthen the leadership capacity of their members, their leaders, and staff.
- Deepen the relationships across civil society by strengthening the relationships between our partner organisations.
- Act for the ‘Common Good’.
6.3 Real estate
The Tenant’s Union is the OG lobby group:
Over 2 million people rent their homes in NSW. That’s one in every three households. Many of these are families, as well as an increasing number of older people, and people sharing homes. […] But the reality is that rental laws in NSW aren’t fair. Renters don’t experience the same security and comfort in their homes as homeowners. Many are constantly worried about losing their home and feel they are powerless to assert their rights.
Yes, renting a thing is not as certain as owning a thing. The question is: does the system as it stands make renting worse than it needs to be? Does it make, for example, renting especially unpleasant as a kind of dark subsidy to an overgrown property-speculation sector? I think it likely.
The gradualist Tenant’s Union does not exactly grab me with their campaigning strategy to change this. They lack the muscular, cashed-up prestige presence of the real-estate lobby, but do not substitute it with a scrappy underdog guerilla campaigning ethos, or a dynamic, internet-savvy media presence. Perhaps Better Renting, schooled in a more modern, disruptive style, might be the goods.
Fixing the nasty rental market is one of the Sydney Alliance campaigns too.
Westconnex Action Group and Wendy Bacon’s reportage cover some of the construction pile-on that is Sydney at the moment.
Honestly though, most of these campaigns do not have much money or power backing them; realistically, if fixing real estate is not the hill to die upon, then it might make sense to go elsewhere and maybe come back later if the market collapses.
7 Within Australia
Classic Melbourne newsletters The Paris End
★★★★★ Sydney There’s a city about one hour north of Melbourne by air travel that is one of our nation’s best-kept secrets. We recently spent a weekend in this up-and-coming metropolitan region after a friend told us about its beautiful beaches and year-round clement weather. We were pleasantly surprised to find that it actually had a lot more to offer than midwinter swims and sunbathing! For example, there is a new Metro system linking the vibrant Western suburbs to the city’s oddly desolate CBD (hopefully this will enliven it). There were a few decent bars open past 9 pm, and live music in one of them! Best of all, we purchased a packet of fine imported cigarettes from a kindly tobacco vendor for only $12.50! And not a fire bomb in sight… yet. Beyond the stunning veneer, we could sense some resurgent energy amongst the tanned and toned local population, as if they were emerging from some tyrannical dark age. Anyway, if you haven’t heard of it, we recommend you check out Sydney for yourself. There are a surprising number of affordable flights out there. We think it has the potential to become one of Australia’s great cities.
8 The high life
Currently, that means: benefiting from our excellent produce and gourmet food options. See Sydney food suppliers.
Also, why not the Inner West Tool Library?