Walking the Dress Circle
December 15, 2015
When people ask my suburb I say East Ryde and quickly add positive qualifiers such as large, newly built home backing on to the Field of Mars, “you know, above the aqueduct along Pittwater Road”. In doing so I realise I have played and probably lost the Sydney game.
Over a decade ago we exited the Inner West and its fast upwardly moving house prices, Green politics and smashed avocado breakfasts and moved into our Art Deco grandeur on the edge of the Field of Mars in East Ryde. This has become our home and our place as a family and for me as an individual.
I have come to know East Ryde well, this hand full of square kilometres defined by no more than a dozen streets and surrounded by natural and protected bush. The suburb itself is a creation, a redemption of a spillage dump. The euphemistic night soil, that product of humans we now so easily flush away without a thought, was collected and dumped here.
Quite literally the suburb grew out of shit, with the developer Hooker Rex so taken by the area known as the Dress Circle that he met Council’s restrictions to building on the pile for 50 years by bringing in bulldozers, removing the contaminated soil and replacing it with clean topsoil. This was the birth of the Dress Circle Estate. Maybe a beautiful folly, or the benefit of power and money, or maybe even the love of the arts and Australian performers; regardless of the suggested motivation Hooke Rex proceeded to name new streets and rename old ones in his estate after famous Australians of the stage and screen: Bronhill, Melba, Cilento, Finch, Pate, Rene, Moncrieff and Lumsdaine.
East Ryde is a Dress Circle facing the theatre that is Sydney, it’s dramatic skyline, it’s bright blue, reds and white in the night sky all focused on the most iconic CenterPoint Tower. Sitting on the hill maybe we imagine positions above our status.
The defined suburb, its iconic nomenclature and its positioning led a local developer to petition the Council in 2006 to change the name of the suburb. East Ryde is one of the Rydes; joining North Ryde, Top Ryde and West Ryde as defined areas of what is truly a massive collective Ryde. This was the rub, did the East Ryde locals want to be tarnished with the lower middle class mantel attributed to the suburb, a beigeness that has certainly not kept up with the hipness of Newtown, Surry Hills or more recently Chippendale and Waterloo.
Ryde: even the name is non-descript. Riding through, being taken for a ride, roller coaster ride. It is not a place it is movement. Many have lived there and moved on.
The proposition was that the area is so visually beautiful that it should be ranked alongside that other suburb visible across the valley and Buffalo Creek which is Hunters Hill. So close but yet so so far, in fact a whole one or even two socio demographics too far.
The names proffered were Wallumatta, Bennelong, Boronia Heights and the aspirational Bel Air, but the locals rebelled. They were born and grew up in East Ryde, it was their place and they did not want the name to change. In doing so they probably gave away thousands of dollars in the suburban status mad Sydney.
I have walked the dress circle occasionally over the last decade but lately this has changed. Honestly far better entertainment than the numerous Foxtel channels spewing out repeats and the commercials with numerous and derivative lifestyle programs that conflate and confuse (my blockette’s biggest vocal losses), these bearing absolutely no resemblance to my life or style or my interests.
Over the last 6 months I have been assiduously walking the Dress Circle, its miss mash of housing styles and its reference to its bush surrounds.
I walk it at night, quite often late at night as I like to walk the middle of the road.
I start in Finch Avenue, my avenue where I live at its end bordering the Field of Mars nature reserve. I not only love the name, which I do not have to spell but I love the person it was named after, Peter Finch. I have recently quoted Finch’s character Howard Beale in a speech to an anniversary of an anti-racism organisation. I referred to his outcry in the cynical, brutal and confronting film Network in which he leads a popular movement by opening his window and screaming out, “I am mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more”.
This is often my state of mind as I take off. I can feel my heart in my drum tight chest stretching on the beat and barely keeping in my breath. I can hear you Peter and I am also angry about so many things; our politics of mediocrity and conformity, our populism of hate and fear, and our lack of freedoms. But if I scream it out no one is around to either listen or hear.
So I walk and at the top of the street turn into Cilento Crescent. The beautiful, the sultry, Diane Cliento who lived and loved many lives, and caused many hearts to melt including that of Peter Finch in the film Passage Home. It is just a short street but I look over my shoulder and not only does she look down on Finch Ave but above the trees the city skyline shines as brightly as her eyes. She calms me as I walk through her as I enter the circle.
The circle itself is made up of one street that resembles the Circus Maximus divided into two: Moncrieff Ave (Gladys) and Melba Drive (Dame Nellie). Their coming together at the extremity of the loop and at the top of Rene Street (Roy) provides the best view of the city and this becomes my prize; the visual beauty of a city sitting above the leafed suburban foreground. It stands provocatively suggesting that it owns the city’s energy, its life force, and its attractions.
Yet it is me who gets to enjoy it from a distance, from a perspective. I do not need to be in its bosom to appreciate its beauty.
Returning to task I continue along Melba Drive. The passing of cars here is infrequent and I occupy the centre listening to my music and walking a long straight stretch.
By this stage I get contemplative if calm or even more agitated if there is an issue I can’t seem to resolve or reconcile. Every night differs. Sometimes my music feed dishes up a song that causes me to move differently and even fit in a sneaky dance step, hoping that no one is watching. Most probably they are not; this is East Ryde not my birth town of Grumo Appula where walking any street is observed and acknowledged by the sly movement of a curtain.
On Melba Drive the view is to the North to the illumined Honeywell sign and the more distant lit towers of Chatswood. My focus shifts for distant to near.
I see the same lit rooms as I pass.
A front parlour with an upright piano and music stand; sometimes the piano is being played by a young girl, sometimes a slightly older boy and occasionally the standing figure of a father with aspirations, fulfilling the middle class promise of realised potential or at least his late life defence, “I gave them every opportunity”.
I pass a number of boats covered and stationary. How many days do they get to kiss and to slap against the waves of our harbour? Out of place, covered in fallen leaves and bark from the gum trees who refuse to be tamed and who mock these things of the water. I recall the adage about the only two good days for a boat owner but it smells too much of envy and resentment. The boats are part of the area. We are close to water. Maybe it suggests the promise of the next move to the water front with the jetty, or even better, a deep waterfront
There is another room that is often lit which also fronts the street. It is a bed room with an unmade bed, a fluffed doona indiscriminate in is structure, a pile of softness and comfort. The room is beige from the walls to the closet to the bed clothes, it is bright but it lacks colour, it lacks visual interest, art or icon and yet it still suggests so much: an unmade bed in a quiet street of a quiet suburb. This could so easily be the opening scene for our own Rear Vision.
Over the last weeks the Christmas lights have started to appear and multiple. Every night there are more and more. They have taken away the diffused light that comes onto the street from the full wall flat screen TVs that have taken over. The number of tube TV sets on the grass verge has decreased, counting only one in the last few months. The migration to technical modernity is now almost complete.
Each night there is more colour, more strobing, more animated Santas and it is all so, kitsch. Do I adopt a cynical attitude or do I accept at least some outward expression of engagement between the house and the environs is a positive thing. I keep walking and realise that while there is visual stimulus there is a prevailing quiet which makes the scene incomplete and slightly surreal. There is no sound, no carols, just the flickering of light and depth of visual created against night skies.
As I leave Melba Drive and turn for home I think about this operatic enigma whose name has become synonymous with the numerous farewell tours she performed to the point that it ‘doing a Nellie Melba’ has become a generic. She had every right to return as long as her audiences wanted her and she was prepared to sing.
I will continue to walk the dress circle, to have time to think and to contemplate the passing of time, the seasons and the material changes that I register in the bricks, tiles and glass of the structures that define our material presence.
I walk, therefore I am.