Leviathan. The Unauthorised Biography Of Sydney

Cover Type: Hardcover
Book Condition: Good
Jacket Condition: Good
Publisher: Random House Australia
Publisher Place: Milsons Point
Publisher Year: 1999
Edition: First Edition

Description: 563 pages. Book and Jacket are both in Good condition. There is some light shelf and reading wear, but still a presentable copy. The only exception is a small inscription to the inside page.

Publishers Description: The strange confluence of forces which combined to destroy Governor William Blighs administration have long since dissipated and their protagonists turned to dust in the ground. But the protean nature of power in Sydney and the fierce, uncertain currents of creation and destruction which were exposed by the coup, remain as potent in the digital city as in the mud brick village Sydney once was. To understand the origin of these forces is to see the modern city anew, with a sort of z-ray vision, which reveals the underlying structure not to be concrete and steel, but rather lust, greed, hubris and a ceaselessly shifting but morally inert and insatiable will to power. To peer deeply into this ghost city, the one lying beneath the surface of things, is to understand that Sydney has a soul and that it is a very dark place indeed.LEVIATHAN is history for the Tarantino generation. A epic study of theviolent, the beautiful and the weird in one of the worlds great cities itraces through the chicanes of Sydneys history with the pedal to the metaland no respect for the road rules. From the eerily quiet swampy plains of two hundred million years ago, to the roaring gun fire of modern daygangland, LEVIATHAN rips through topics as diverse as crime and corruption, money and power, architecture, sex, food, art and tsunamis.LEVIATHAN is a long study of Sydney divided into five book-length chapters.It is both a history and a portrait of the modern-day city. The chaptersare organised as follows around five themes which are characteristic of thecity.(1) The Long Goodbye: The story of migration. Opens in Saigon in the lastdays of the Vietnam War. We follow a school teacher, Dinh Tran, around thedisintegrating city as he tries to find an escape route for his family. Hefails. Over the next few years the Tran family repeatedly attempt to escapeto the West, finally making it out on a small fishing boat and settling inBankstown. Their story is told to establish a pattern for post-1788migration to Sydney where generations of desparate families and individuals- Irish convicts, poor British, anarchist Italians, German Jews, Asianrefugees - have fled from the worst places in the world to create one ofthe worlds finest city. The disastrous impact of this movement on thelocal aborigines is also examined. The endurance of violent authoritarianattitudes towards the blacks is examined through comparison of WatkinTenchs revenge raid on Botany bay with the killing of David Gundy by theNSW Police SWAT force. John has uncovered the truly shocking scoop thatslavery is alive and well in Sydneys Eastern suburbs, and recounts the story of an Indian man who was brought out by a benefactor and literally imprisonedin his home and made to work for him for years to pay off his debts.(2) The Virgins Shining Lie: built and natural environment. Opens inpresent day Sydney with the author considering a surf. From there we tracethe developing European consciousness of the difference of Sydneysenvironment and the early refusal of the English and Australians to acceptthat difference on its own terms. Environmental destruction ensues. Thephysical growth of the city from a clutch of tents around the tank streamto a megalopolis is traced through the bulk of this chapter with anextensive comparison of 19C slums to 20C fringe suburbs.(3) Only The Strong: money and power. This chapter is divided into threesections each examining a violent era in the citys history and drawing outlinks between them. The thesis of Only the Strong is that because Sydneysimply winked into existence on 26 January, 1788 there was no settled powerstructure such as existed in London, or in any of the medieval or Roman-eraEuropean cities. Sydney was a creation of the global expansion ofcapitalism, a tabula rasa on which only the strongest would be allowed toshape a story. The three episodes are the Rum Rebellion, the election dayriots of 1843, and th

ISBN: 9780091832612