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Culture
Beach culture aside, Sydney's cultural life is uniquely diverse, from high classical at the Sydney Opera House to the most cutting-edge contemporary and experimental performance art. Staging some 3000 performances a year, the Opera House is the major focus of attention for classical music, opera, theatre and dance. The people of Sydney have a great capacity for performance, which is perhaps what makes the performing arts scene such a robustly thriving arena.
An important part of Sydney's cultural life is the contribution made by Aboriginal and Torres Strait islanders. The Survival Festival, held every year on Australia Day, 26 January, is the Aboriginal alternative to more traditional national celebrations, and showcases Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture with music, dance, art and food. The Bangarra Dance Theatre brings that culture right up to date with performances, which integrate traditional elements into modern dance.
Tickets can be purchased from Ticketek (tel: (02) 9266 4800; website: www.ticketek.com.au) and Ticketmaster (tel: 136 100, Australia only; website: www.ticketmaster.com.au). The Halftix booth, located at 201 Sussex Street, Darling Park (tel: (02) 9286 3310), offers reduced price tickets on the day of the show.
Music: Classical music in Sydney is concentrated around a handful of performers and venues, which is a poor indicator of the city's huge appetite for symphony orchestras, choirs and operas. The Sydney Opera House, Bennelong Point (tel: (02) 9250 7111; website: www.soh.nsw.gov.au), is the premier performance venue, although the acoustics in its Concert Hall are notoriously inadequate. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra (tel: (02) 9334 4644; website: www.symphony.org.au) has even threatened to boycott it. The Sydney Philharmonia Choir (tel: (02) 9251 2024), Opera Australia (tel: (02) 9319 1088), and the Australian Chamber Orchestra (tel: (02) 8274 3800; website: www.aco.com.au) still hold most of their performances at the Opera House. The Eugene Goossens Hall, ABC Ultimo Centre, Harris Street (tel: (02) 9333 1500), tends to be used for smaller performances of contemporary music, as does Sydney Town Hall, 483 George Street (tel: (02) 9265 9189; website: www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au). The Conservatorium of Music, Macquarie Street (tel: (02) 9351 1222), hosts symphony, wind and chamber concerts as well as jazz big bands.
Theatre: The Sydney Theatre Company (tel: (02) 9250 1777), is the city's stylish flagship theatre company; performances take place at the Wharf Theatres at Pier 4, Hickson Road, and the Opera House. Acting luminaries, such as Geoffrey Rush and Cate Blanchett, have performed at the highly respected Belvoir Street Theatre, Belvoir Street (tel: (02) 9699 3444), while The Performance Space, 199 Cleveland Street (tel: (02) 9319 5091), and the Seymour Theatre Centre, Cleveland Street and City Road (tel: (02) 9351 7940), are the main venues for more left-field contemporary performance.
Musicals are staged at the Capitol Theatre, 13 Campbell Street (tel: (02) 9320 5000), the State Theatre, 49 Market Street (tel: (02) 9373 6655; website: www.statetheatre.com.au), or the Lyric Theatre, Star City, 80 Pyrmont Street (tel: (02) 9657 8500). Newer Australian playwrights stage their work at the Stables Theatre, 10 Nimrod Street (tel: (02) 9361 3817). Sydney's longest established theatre is the Ensemble, 78 McDougall Street (tel: (02) 9929 0644).
Dance: The Australian Ballet (tel: (02) 9252 5500; website: www.australianballet.com.au) performs mainly traditional pieces during its summer and winter season at the Sydney Opera House each year. Similarly, the Sydney Dance Company (tel: (02) 9221 4811; website: www.sydneydance.com.au), the city's leading contemporary dance group, performs at the Opera House for two seasons in every year. In a more native vein, the Bangarra Dance Theatre (tel: (02) 9251 5333) performs a fusion of contemporary and traditional dance.
Film: The city's central cinemas near Town Hall have all merged into the 17-screen Greater Union Village Hoyts George Street (tel: (02) 9273 7431; website: www.hoyts.com.au). Fox Studios Australia, Driver Avenue, is home to two new cinema complexes, Hoyts (tel: (02) 9332 1300), including a luxury cinema, and the arthouse Cinema Paris (tel: (02) 9332 1633). Other arthouse cinemas include the Academy Twin, 3a Oxford Street (tel: (02) 9361 4453; website: www.palace.net.au), home to the Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Film Festival (tel: (02) 9332 4938); the Chauvel, Paddington Town Hall (tel: (02) 9361 5398; website: www.chauvelcinema.com.au); and the Art Deco Hayden Orpheum, 380 Military Road (tel: (02) 9908 4344). First-run movies open on Thursdays and discount night is on Tuesdays.
The Sydney Film Festival (tel: (02) 9660 3844; website: www.sydneyfilmfestival.org) takes place every year in June, with most screenings in the magnificent marble auditorium of the State Theatre. Makers of short films enter Tropfest (tel: (02) 9368 0434; website: www.tropfest.com) every March, with finalists shown on open-air screens set up around the city.
Notable films set or partially set in Sydney include Peter Weir's The Last Wave (1977), P J Hogan's Muriel's Wedding (1993), Stephan Elliot's The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1993), and John Woo's Mission Impossible 2 (2000).
Cultural events: Sydney Festival, held in January, features open-air concerts and street theatre from around the world, alongside Sydney's best. Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras is a month-long festival in February/March, which is famous for its colourful parade along Oxford Street attracting over half a million spectators every year.
Royal Easter Show is a traditional 12-day show that brings farm life to the city. The Festival of the Winds is Australia's largest kite-flying competition, held annually in September at Bondi Beach. Kite-making talent from Australia and abroad compete for title of Best Home Made Kite.
Manly Jazz Festival, held on the Labour Day long weekend in October, is Australia's largest, longest and best-known jazz festival features trad, big band, fusion, bop and contemporary jazz. Sleaze Ball, a fundraiser for the Mardi Gras Festival, is also held on the Labour Day long weekend. About 16,000 gays and lesbians dress to a theme and party all night at Fox Studios.
Literary Notes
'One of the finest, most beautiful, vast and safe bays the sun had ever shone upon', wrote inveterate traveller Joseph Conrad in 1906. Sydney Harbour continues to inspire eulogies from writers including Miles Franklin who, in 1946, wrote, 'A month would not be long enough to imbibe such beauty.' More recently, Clive James, the writer, satirist, broadcaster and critic, was rather more blunt: 'Sydney is like Venice without the architecture, but with more sea.'
Sydney's literary luminaries include Peter Carey, who lived in the city before moving to New York, and set his Booker Prize-winning Oscar and Lucinda (1988) in nineteenth-century Sydney, where country girl Lucinda dreams of self-reliance and an industrial utopia. Carey is one of Australia's most prestigious writers, having won a series of prizes both at home and abroad.
Novelist David Malouf has also set some of his work on home ground, with New South Wales the backdrop for his novel The Conversations at Curlow Creek (1996). An idiosyncratic streak led Thomas Keneally, who was born in Sydney and lives there today, from the priesthood to the life of a full-time novelist. He published his first novel in 1964 and was awarded the 1982 Booker Prize for Schindler's Ark. In 1983, he was awarded the Order of Australia for his services to Australian Literature.
Modern Sydney receives a sanction of sorts from Robert Hughes (1938-), who wrote in The Liberation of Sydney: 'The provinciality that seemed to characterise Australian society, and could be plainly seen in Sydney twenty-five years ago, is all but gone. To a striking degree, the city's habits have softened. Its harsh intolerant machismo - the bad-dream side of 'mateship', which ran from the Anglophilic stuffiness of the Establishment clubs to the raucous all-male suburban pubs - has toned down. Sydney is no longer quite so keen on the ocker (Pacific redneck) image of the Australian: beer gut, thongs, nasal foghorn voice, and a truculent certainty that, short of Paradise itself, Australia is the only ticket and that the rest of the world only displays its inferiority by not necessarily wanting to come here.'
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