Surviving Sydney

Last Christmas I visited Sydney for a few days on personal business. I had been reticent to set foot in the city and as I had not actually ventured further than the airport for some 20 or more years it was a strange experience. I live in Canberra which is many times smaller than Sydney and as I suspected, I was utterly overwhelmed when I arrived in the seaside leviathan that is the largest city in Australia.

The absolute magnitude of the number and density of human beings was really very unsettling. The travel by car through the city was an experience perforated with aggressive drivers and garish billboards. I had a pleasant Christmas Day train and ferry trip to Darling Harbour which calmed my nerves a bit.

Large cities are so vast and positively swarming with humanity that I can understand how it is that people living in them learn to shut out all but the vital information they require to survive. After a few days I even found myself beginning to shut out people and events around me as though this were a necessary human cognitive filtering function designed to allow one to cope with the stress of a flood of information and images, people and places.

My final observation is that the part of Western Sydney I was staying in resembled a Middle Eastern country (by virtue of the large number of Islamic people there) and the central CBD of Sydney resembled an Asian capital (by virtue of the huge numbers of Asian people there). I saw the most exquisitely attractive Japanese woman standing on a street in the CBD. This is perhaps the after-image that I choose to remember of my few days surviving Sydney.