A lyrical and fascinating portrait of Australia’s first city, looking to its literary history to fully explore the author's relationship with those parts of it she knows well. However, those readers looking for a book about contemporary Sydney outside the author's self-imposed border of Eastern Suburbs-Lower North Shore-Inner West will be disappointed. Her portrait of Sydney’s suburbs - particularly the Western Suburbs and Sutherland Shire - as constraining and limiting and simmering with an undercurrent of violence seemed unfair at best, and prejudiced at worst. But this might have been a result of the constraint imposed by the book's small format - given more space perhaps the author might have looked more deeply at wider Sydney. ( )

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2010/12/15/delia-falconers-emsydneyem-and-the-...

This is a brilliant book. Delia Falconer combines colonial history, personal reminiscence, reflections on recent headlines (Bogle and Chandler, Anita Cobby, the Cronulla riots, Abe Saffron ...), literary criticism (mainly of Patrick White), physical description (especially of jacarandas), gossip about and from her friends (who give us a couple of unforgettably seedy images), and any number of other elements in an eminently readable and impressively erudite extended essay. She may at times strain for effect ('the light is unquestionably Sydney's' she writes of a scene in the movie Bliss, 'saturating, and warm, but also muted and inconstant'), but the risk more often than not pays off. She makes room for many other voices – William Dawes, Ruth Park, and many others, including eloquent diarists, eccentric photographer-clergymen and letter-writers.

It's not a definitive Sydney, it's Delia Falconer's. The book is honestly personal, and by implication invites readers to reflect on their own experience of the city. I first visited Sydney in the 1950s with my parents, and remember seeing Arthur Stace's'Eternity' chalked on the kerb at Hyde park. I love her sense that it's a city with something unacknowledged always pressing for recognition. I'm persuaded by her reading of Kenneth Slessor's 'Five Bells' as dealing with a displaced sense of the dispossession of the Eora people. ( )