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Amazon.co.uk Review
Subtitled "a wildly distorted account" it is pretty much that: an oblique, poignant, entertaining and rather candid look at the city. Using his prize-winning novelist's eye for telling detail, and the objectivity of the relative outsider (Carey has spent the last decade in New York, and he hails from Melbourne), the author shows that Sydney is not just about sun, sports, gay sex and Sydney Harbour Bridge. It's also about endangered wildlife, painful history, militant agnosticism and, above all, a wilful, dogged, brave, funny, cantankerous citizenry. As Carey trots around town we get to meet a few of these hard-bitten "diggers"; their individuality and orneriness are deftly sketched.
If there is a criticism of the book it's that it's all too brief. 240 smallish pages is a diminutive canvas on which to paint a portrait of such a diversely sprawling place. One might, for instance, have wished to know more about multicultural Sydney, and perhaps a bit more about the cockatoos and koalas which yet inhabit the city's remoter reaches. But this is still an agreeable pocket companion for anyone intending a trip to the Big City Down Under. --Sean Thomas --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Woman's Journal, 1st September 2001
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Customer Reviews
Many cities rejoice in their history, but in this, too, Sydney is special. Founded as a convict colony, it grew into a major Pacific port. Survival was a struggle with poor soil, vagaries of rain and wind and the presence of the Aborigine population - issues that urbanisation hides but cannot eliminate. Sensing its importance early, Sydney girted the Harbour with forts, something Carey lightly applauds when old forts become new parks. Carey conveys the sense of struggle, but time has transformed equal starving of convicts and guards to ideals of social equality - so long as that society is white, he reminds us. His "distorted view" imparts his dissenting view on relations with displaced Aborigines, among other topics.
However booksellers classify this work, it's not a travel advisory. Tourists will be unlikely to join the Sydney to Hobart race. Even more unlikely when they read Carey's account of the disaster of 1998. Nor will the casual visitor find themselves in a capsized racing skiff in the teeth of ten metre waves and forty knot winds. If you do visit, be careful hiking in mountains. If your visit occurs in the Southern Hemispheric summer, be extra cautious with matches or campfires. What can happen if you aren't Carey imparts with stunning clarity. Having lost his own house to fire, a telephone dialogue with a friend fighting to save one is a gripping read.
Carey's many awards are well deserved. His descriptive writing skills and characterisation are well demonstrated in this book. It's no matter if these are real people, mixtures of many into one or wholly invented. Their own stories are from real life and deserve attention. Carey snags your attention from the first page and you give it willingly to the rest of the book. An essay string that may be enjoyed by anyone, this book provides entertainment, education and excitement. Try it and see. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]
The idea, it seems, is to communicate a feel for a place. The result is a collected experience where the personal rubs shoulders with the historical, where memory meets geography, where the past is partly lived again through recollection and the lives of others who themselves have moved on. And all of this takes place in less than sixty thousand words.
Peter Carey's aim of using the ancient elements, fire, air, earth and water, as a thread to bind his impressions, however, simply does not work. The idea appears and then seems to be forgotten for some time. The earth is surely special in Australia, quite unlike anywhere else. And water is everywhere in Sydney, whose harbour is surely one of the world's most beautiful places. Fire certainly formed - and continues to form - this landscape: no Australian needs to be reminded of this. Air, however, did not seem to have its own angle, apart form the author having arrived by plane. Looking back now, perhaps the thread was there, despite the fact that at the time it seemed something of a complication.
Themes apart, 30 Days In Sydney is a delightful read because of the characters that Peter Carey meets, depicts and describes, both the living and the dead, the contemporary and the historical. The mix is unique. The rawness is abrasive, but the sophistication alongside is always breathtaking.
Sydney is the kind of city where multiple cultures coexist. In that it is not unique. But it is also the largest city of a nation that has recently rediscovered an aboriginal identity that is being apologetically sanctified. It's a city where the bar at the opera probably has a poker machine. In Manly, the multi-class seaside suburb, a beautiful person with headphones and roller blades can flash past the open door of an amusement arcade while the police swing band, live in the open air, all in uniform and wearing shades, plays a Glen Miller selection. It's a place where you can be pushed off the sidewalk by a redneck right outside the most utterly twee of art galleries. Such contrasts are all there in Peter Carey's book.
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