On a balmy day in the Sydney autumn, a decent interval after elevenses, Hyde Park offers welcome relief for weary city dwellers. A century ago, wise city planners conceived the park around an avenue of overarching trees, a canopy of green under which the traffic hum of the city would be hushed to a murmur. Under the boughs of the soaring Moreton Bay figs there is peace and solace for jaded city nerves. True, it is not a very large park. One might call it compact. And later city planners’ decision to split the park in two by running William Street, the major route to the eastern suburbs, slap through the middle has made it that little bit more compact. That’s all right. There’s nothing wrong with compact, or small, or dwarfish. Admittedly, the traffic noise on four sides is a little more intrusive than the original city planners envisaged, so it is important, as you wander down the shaded walk that leads to the Archibald Fountain along with several hundred others, to fix clearly in your mind how tranquil and relaxing you are finding the sylvan setting. And it will be so.
If you amble north, say from Kerry Packer’s headquarters in Park Street, the gentle whisper of wind in the trees—and it is important to ignore completely some of the other noises—will usher you gently towards the Archibald Fountain. From there, it is a simple stretch across College Street, past St Mary’s Cathedral and on to the lush, grassy slopes of the Domain. Past the Art Gallery of New South Wales on your left as you descend to Sir John Young Crescent, then you merely work your way through a screen of laneways and houses. And there you are, on the waterfront: primed, dangerous, and ready for a whole lot of lunching.
Not that any of the power-lunching crowd actually walks to Woolloomooloo. They prefer to arrive by various combinations of yacht, motorised launch, ship’s tender, water taxi, seaplane or helicopter; by Roller, Ferrari, Aston, company car, limousine, hire car, cab, Harley-Davidson, or private vehicles of lesser pedigree. There is no ugly talk of public transport.
The outlook on the waterfront, once you get there, is nondescript. Overwhelming tiny Woolloomooloo Bay, with the Naval Dockyards on the right, and the Botanic Gardens on the left, stands the monstrous Finger Wharf. At three hundred metres it is the city’s longest edifice of unfinished wood, a class of construction known to architects as rude timber. (It is listed in Sydney’s Rude Building Index.) It is the Rude Finger Wharf. This is the spot where Anzacs piled on to the transport ships in 1915; where Australian troops, heading off to World War II, Korea and later Vietnam, waved goodbye to their loved ones. It’s a national treasure. Inevitably this meant that in Sydney, in the early 1990s, it became ground zero for the vigorous discussions between the city’s great and good over who should be entrusted with the sacred task of developing the exciting commercial potential of this priceless piece of the past. When the smoke cleared in 1994, after almost a decade of wrangling—involving community groups, politicians from the prime minister down, endless planning authorities and some nifty elbow work among the lobbyists—property developer Lang Walker emerged from the scrum with a piece of paper that made him king of the boardwalk.
Sydney loves its own. The city lives and breathes around a harbour that is a property developer’s dream—from the bleak cliffs of the Heads to the nooks and crannies of Pittwater; from Watsons Bay through Vaucluse to the ‘low swampy land’ (as referred to in early Admiralty charts) that is now trendy Double Bay; from Sydney Cove and the city up into the reaches of the Parramatta River. When the weather is fine, the harbour is a glistening jewel, and now and then the city’s favourite sons are entrusted with historic parts of it, highlights on that larger gem. Like John Roberts at Multiplex taking up the mantle to save Luna Park—we know the future of the historic fun park is completely safe. Or Franco Belgiorno-Nettis and Paul Salteri, slugging out the bitterest of corporate divorces after four decades running the Transfield group—they divvied up almost everything but hung on to their joint half-share in the Harbour Tunnel. It’s a sentimental touch—two former friends who now can’t stand each other, bound together by a hole in the ground—that and the $77 million in dividends they and their partner Kumugai Gumi took out of the Tunnel company in 2003 and 2004.
Above the jewel runs that other fabulous money stream, from which Paul Cave’s company, Ottto Holdings, extracts $32 million a year by allowing Sydneysiders (and, of course, tourists) to walk over their own Harbour Bridge. An eighth of that money goes to the state government to help with the paintwork, according to the company’s 2004 accounts. Half the revenue ends up as pre-tax profit. It’s a wonderful tribute to private enterprise, the way in which Cave, then an unknown entrepreneur and after years of trying, finally persuaded the state government in 1998 to give his company an operating lease on the bridge. One of the more colourful public service tales that does the rounds is that the government was so concerned about liability claims from falling climbers it set up a hybrid lease arrangement that in effect transferred ownership of the bridge to Ottto for twenty-five years, then immediately leased it back again so the trains could still run across it. But that can’t be right. Selling the Harbour Bridge would be like subdividing Luna Park.
Business in Sydney is personal. So when Lang Walker won the redevelopment rights for the Woolloomooloo Finger Wharf, you knew he would leave his own style all over it. Walker is a one-off. The four decades since he began work with his father’s earthmoving business have shown that you can take the boy out of the bulldozer, but you can’t take the bulldozer out of the boy. Walker understands that when it comes to being a billionaire there are no short cuts. He maintains five yachts—any less would smack of meanness. He has the obligatory mutiple residences around the world. And he does a bit of flying. It’s said that Walker celebrated his wife Suzanne’s fiftieth birthday by ‘buying her’ a corporate jet.
It’s not the sort of thing he would talk about, but it does look as if birthday presents at chez Walker are a little more substantial than just another Nana Mouskouri CD. Check the paper trail: in 1994, three days before Suzanne Walker turned forty-eight, Walker’s companies were filing documents to buy a Beechjet 400A, to replace the former plane, a Grumman; two years later, three days before Suzanne turned fifty, the Beechjet was replaced by a Hawker 800XP, registration VH-LAW; then in 2003, five days before Suzanne’s birthday again, Wells Fargo Bank bought a Falcon 900C in Sao Paolo for the Walkers. As a male gesture, surprising the little woman every other birthday with a private jet with your initials painted all over it really is in a league of its own. Another birthday, another chapter in aviation. Of course it may be that these were all corporate purchases and the aircraft had nothing to do with Mrs Walker. But then that’s the point about giving electric drills to the missus as well.
This is a long way from the Finger Wharf. Back in 1994, Walker had been cogitating over the possibilities at Wool-loomooloo and decided he needed to make the rude Finger Wharf a little ruder still, by adding another thirty metres to its tip to allow for the penthouse apartments that would eventually house himself, radio announcer John Laws and film star Russell Crowe. Walker filled the rest of the wharf with minor apartments and a Whotel, then threw in a handful of restaurants. Which is why the Finger Wharf is famous today.
Restaurants are everywhere in Sydney. They cluster most densely less than fifty metres above the highwater mark around the harbour, like barnacles on the hull of a great sea beast (which is what the harbour resembles when the weather turns grey). Every decade or so a recession leaves Sydney hard up and the hull is scraped clean as restaurateurs by the hundreds go out of business. But they come back. It’s a Sydney thing. Paris has romance. New York is the place for parties. Melbourne is absolutely marvellous for gangland killings. Adelaide has cornered the market for wine and bizarre serial killers. Brisbane has an enviable record for producing political wackos. Sydney has the lunch trade.
Decades ago, the Sydney psyche figured there was more to life than money and sex. There was also food. You can understand much that is otherwise incomprehensible about Sydney’s culture by replacing the word love, wherever it appears, with the word lunch. As in, all we need is lunch. Lunch is a many splendoured thing. That lunch is all we know, is all we know of lunch. There is a culinary philosophy for every occasion: lunch of my life; my long-lost lunch; he lunched not wisely but too well. Lunch’s labours lost. My lunch it is a red, red rosé.
Graham Richardson, that wizened servant of the city, put the lure of political power into perspective, by comparing it with the draw of the dining room. He said his first taste of political power in the Hawke Labor Government in the 1980s was ‘better than sex and almost as exciting as a good feed’.
By the end of the 1990s, however, a strange thing had happened to Sydney’s restaurants. In June 2003, David Dale wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald about the way that Otto Ristorante on the Finger Wharf (which is nothing to do with Ottto Holdings, the bridge-walkers’ outfit with three t’s) had come to have a social and celebrity cachet akin to Romano’s and Beppi’s, the killer restaurants of the 1950s and ’60s. Four decades ago, one lunched at Romano’s on Wednesdays to be seen, to be photographed, to fill the social space. But in the 1970s and ’80s a plethora of new eating places sprang up. Every tribe in Sydney had its favoured waterhole, with half a dozen superior establishments frequented by the A-list of Sydney socialites. Dale argued that by the end of the 1990s, this diaspora had reversed: ‘. . . in 1999, all the tribes seemed to coalesce at Otto, on the newly developed Finger Wharf . . . You can see them there most Fridays, table-hopping and boldly lingering till 3.30 p.m.’ According to Dale’s rough census, Otto was now the only place to be seen. Sydney still had many fine eating places, despite Dale’s references to the ‘gastronomic bleakness’ and ‘alarming moderation’ of the new century. But in an age of unmatched choice and variation, the social range was back where it was in the ’50s.
The amusing aspect of this was that Maurizio Terzini, the man who had transformed Sydney’s eating protocols from his post on the Finger Wharf, had come from Melbourne. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Terzini had run Caffe e Cucina and Il Bacaro on the Yarra before coming to his senses in 1999 and heading north. ‘Sydney was a dream come true for me, I love this city,’ he confided. By early 2004, Terzini had moved on to open Icebergs at Bondi, but he remained a consultant at Wool-loomooloo. It was Terzini’s influence that filled Otto chockful of ambience, transformed it into a Sydney institution. Walker had been one of his original backers along with a group of investors headed by Neil Wild and James Burkitt. By the time John Laws bought into it two years later, the Finger Wharf had been established as A-list territory. For the very rich and the very indebted, for actors, television presenters, fashion designers, ageing cultural icons and social lions, for bright young things, property developers, upmarket flaks, merchant bankers, celebrity doctors and socialite psychiatrists, organisers of charity balls, sports heroes of the moment, international celebrities, major music acts, reality television identities and soap stars, Otto was the place to be seen. This, after all, is the age of appearances.
Something more was going on here, though, than just a change of restaurant. To look at Otto is to confront a deeper question of what has happened to Sydney, and to Australia. Where did the parties and the lunches, the diversity and confidence, the wild times and blithe spirits of the 1980s go? How did the twenty-first century get to be so straitlaced and dull? How did the zeitgeist for a new millennium get to be so boring? More simply, when did the 1990s turn out to be such a bad idea? Part of the answer is a survival story.
There was the generational thing going on. John Winston Howard had become the number one ticketholder for the pre-Boomers. He represented that cohort of Australians who were born just before or during World War II, who came into their prime in the late 1970s. Almost thirty years later, Howard, like the rest of them, was still clinging to power, shrugging off the lightweight challenges by the Baby Boomers. Mark Latham, Peter Costello and the rest of the generation that followed Howard had yet to lay a glove on him. But globalisation was also changing Australia.
The pressure of globalisation and the tyranny of the market had been ratcheting its way through every part of Australian culture. The 1990s had been a story of failing resistance. In place of the entrepreneurs of the 1980s, corporate power had accumulated around a new breed of institutions—the Macquarie Banks, the fund managers and the rocket scientists in the infrastructure bonds set. This is what was so threatening for Sydney, a town that had always been run by and for insiders. It still was. But increasingly now it was a different kind of insider. Rene Rivkin, Trevor Kennedy and Graham Richardson had put together some remarkable deals. They ended the 1990s wealthy, powerful and successful. But their power was waning. Few could have seen how dramatically their fortunes would change. But their story was only a chapter in a wider saga, the fall of the old network . . . and the end of the long lunchers.