6 June 24 | Vol 3 Issue 3
I am gazing down from the seventh floor of my main client’s office in Sydney. Below me lies Darling Harbour.
It’s changed.
For many years I held the ambition to live at Darling Harbour, after my father took me there for lunch.
As I await the person I’m meeting to collect me from reception, I study the far shoreline, trying to work out where the restaurant must have been. It’s been a while since that lunch. Possibly thirty years. Actually, exactly thirty years.
It served fish and chips. One of the things I admired in my father when I finally got to meet him — and it seems I inherited, it’s odd to think that DNA forms the way our minds think as much as experience — is a love of the everyday alongside haute cuisine. That said, he did opine it was the best fish and chips in Sydney.
I am trying to recollect the restaurant: it was a converted pier, jutting out over the water. Occupying the full footprint of the pier, fully enclosed with glass windows running along all walls. No decking traversing the sides, the only entrance through doors where the pier met the shore. A hut over the water.
Tablecloths.
I’m told that Darling Harbour has changed in the years that have elapsed. It certainly has. There is no sign of the pier anymore. The shore opposite is dominated by two large warehouses that protrude into the water, side by side. They most likely contain a multitude of restaurants, and a broad walkway surrounds them, allowing crowds to promenade along the harbour’s edge. But they do not in any way resemble the memory of that single pier.
Neither does the area immediately surrounding the warehouses. Along with the restaurant itself, my desire to live there was fuelled by the view of federation houses facing the water, with their ornate wood and brickwork, and wrought iron balconies, and yachts in the harbour. Of course. I remember it being chic and pretty. Distinctly low rise in stature. But not low rent.
And now I’m standing on the seventeenth floor, probably only a quarter of the way up this glass and steel monolith to commerce, trying to fathom how my memory of the pier could be so wrong.
I’m reminded of when, at the tender age of six, I lived in Hampstead, North London. The walk from our flat to the underground station or high street, or up to the top of the hill to look at toy boats floating in Whitestone pond, took us along Flask Walk. Hampstead hill is steep, so the right hand side pavement is up an embankment. A huge embankment. I can remember it towering above me, holding my mother’s hand. I returned twenty-two years later to live one road away. Turns out the embankment is not huge. Not even tall. No higher than a car’s bonnet in fact. [1 ]
Memory is fallible we are told. Witnesses in a court case often recount wildly varying descriptions. A plot device in many films, but apparently also true. It’s disconcerting when confronted with visual evidence that our memory of something bears scant resemblance to the newly refreshed reality. My recollection of the meal is akin to the opening of Henry James’ The Beast in the Jungle. Almost every detail of the meeting between the protagonists is misremembered.
It seems we live in two realities. An objective one, physical, and an imaginary one, constructed in our minds. This experience is commonly felt when holidaying again, somewhere visited once a few years back. Returning to a neighbourhood to try and relocate a restaurant. The surrounding buildings, the streets, have a strange dichotomy of being both completely alien and not how we remembered them; with the occasional store front or architectural detail being familiar.
Later, on another trip to visit my father, I felt this duality very keenly visiting Alice Springs. A surreal experience where there seemed to be two realities overlaid. A superimposition, a quantum many worlds. In the same space there are Aboriginal people lying collapsed from alcohol in a dry river bed, or squatting outside stores, while alongside white people go shopping, and lunch in pub forecourts. The westerners appear not to see the First Nations people. The Aboriginal people oblivious to the whites. It is like crossing tracks in America. One side of the freeway contains museums and shopping malls full of boutiques, and the other parking lots and government housing no more than two stories tall, every resident black. The tarmac drawing a sharp dividing line.
Except In Alice these two states lie on top of each other, both ignoring its counterpart. This surreal duality perfectly embodies the experience of witnessing the fallibility of one’s own memory.
I am my own unreliable narrator.
Postscript.
Two weeks later, and I am back standing on the seventeenth floor, studying the warehouses to my left across the bay, and to my right, the even taller skyscraper of the recently opened Crown Tower, the hotel I’ve stayed in that dominates the shoreline.
The view from the back of The Crown overlooks The Langham hotel, where I’ve also stayed. It amused me to look from one hotel window to spot my hotel room opposite, Langham to Crown, Crown to Langham.
Between these two hotels, vastly different in size and architecture lies a row of Federation houses — replete with cast iron balconies — left alone amongst a huge flattened swathe of building site, awaiting the construction no doubt of another skyscraper.
Then it hits me. That this huge development of Barangaroo wouldn’t have been here thirty years ago. That I am standing where that pier converted into a fish restaurant would have stood, and that singular row of still standing federation houses is all that remains of the view from my table.
A waitress tells me a week later it wasn’t even called Barangaroo thirty years ago. They renamed it in 2007 to promote a newly built shopping and business district.
Sometimes when you’re searching for something, you can’t see it because you’re already there.
🕵🏻
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