Another Voice

8 November 2008

I am woken by the song of the kookaburra in this ancient, haunting landscape

Kookaburras don’t really laugh, but I can see why the old song suggests it: a weird, taunting call, which does have a kind of dark comicality about it. And this is one of the sounds that wake me each morning in Hunters Hill — where I find that The Spectator now has an Australian edition.

I’m staying in a lovely Victorian house in Sydney, built from huge blocks of the warm yellow sandstone that characterises many of the older residences here. This house dates from the 1880s and, apart from its size and generosity and the extent of its garden tumbling down towards the Harbour, it is almost indistinguishable from the grander sort of detached suburban houses that were being built in Britain, in places like Edinburgh, Cheltenham or Leamington Spa, around the same time.

Here the tree-lined street is called Glenview Crescent and houses have names like Glenrock and Glencairn. It is not, most emphatically not, modern Australia — Hunters Hill is the oldest municipality on the continent (1861) — but it’s part of Australia nonetheless, and perhaps closer to its complicated heart than some commentary suggests.

I like this house: one of a number constructed hereabouts by a 19th-century property developer, to an exacting standard, and part of a high-class suburban development. The stairs are lit by a full-length hall window with a stained-glass representation of a sailing ship as one of its panes; the marble-framed fireplaces, though hardly used, provide an English-style focus to high-ceilinged rooms with moulded margins and plaster roses; and some of the bedroom windows have sealed coloured glass window-lights in an abstract late-Victorian pattern.

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