Last Days in Sydney

Our final week in Australia was filled – as our whole holiday had been – with new experiences, conflicting emotions and cultural delights.

Back in Sydney we determined to use our weekly, travel anywhere, any time, ticket on bus, train and ferry to see as much as we could before that enervating 23 hour flight back to the UK.

Our visit coincided with the Sydney Biennale – an amazing art exhibition of installation and kinetic art all mounted in disused industrial premises on Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour. Cockatoo Island was an infamous convict settlement, prison to some of the toughest criminals the nineteenth century British justice system chose to transport for the length of their natural lives. The grim evidence has been left in all its stark and chilling brutality alongside the other history of the island which is the conserved but unrestored industrial archaeology of once thriving ship-

yards and engineering works of various sorts, including a tunnel cut through the sheer rock housing a small train with wagons for transporting goods from one side of the island to another. Had this been hewn by convicts? Shudder. The strange landscape of the island, a decaying, uninhabited, almost parallel universe, had become the temporary home of some stunning contemporary art including projected moving shadows of figures in pain, a huge virtual waterfall roaring infinitely in its deserted warehouse building and a collection of giant house structures resembling the witch’s cottage in Hansel and Gretel. The whole effect was rather surreal and alienating altogether adding to the experience.

Far more tame was the visit to the Gallery of Modern Art, interesting though it was with a most spectacular cafe, glass walled, high up overlooking Sydney Harbour. And it was at Sydney Harbour that we spent our last night in Australia at a performance of Madame Butterfly. It will be impossible to forget the sinking sun behind the opera house as the huge set came to life with Pinkerton arriving on a real launch across the harbour and a huge stage moon setting on a silver sea amidst the beauty of these tragic Puccini arias.

Our journey across the world had been once in a lifetime with all its contradictions, wonders, conflicts and joys.