Free 30 Days in Sydney by Peter Carey

see the headlights of a single car moving along Military Road, so called because it is the military highway to the batteries down which at Eastertide, with drums beating, colours flying, go the gallant guards of the city and colony.
    The gallant guards of the city and colony. That's a quote.
    In so saying he reveals that he can read my mind. It is from A Traveller's Tale, I confess. From Manly to the Hawkesbury.
    Is not that hanging fellow making you giddy?
    But I cannot see the hanging man and I am not giddy in the least. The bridge, it seems, is finally conquered. Now Sydney can be really mine. Now I actually dare to look calmly down into the quay where I can hear the comforting squeak and groan of the big steel ferries protesting their moorings.
    And there, sweeping above and behind the ferries, a single motor-cycle comes off the bridge and sweeps down the Cahill Expressway.
    Down there is the birthplace of modern Australia, although you would not know it. The expressway is like a steel wall, cutting water off from earth, slicing like a knife across the moment of our birth. Further back, in the midst of all that very ordinary architecture, is the towering building at Australia Square, beneath which runs the Tank Stream, which was our nation's breast, at which our founding fathers and mothers, jailers and jailed, all drank side by side. Now, of course, the Tank Stream is buried, a sandstone drain which will take a week of phone calls to get access to and where, in the freshly disinfected air, cockroaches flee before your light.
    Above my head the clouds are racing, but I am in a sort of ecstasy where everything means something and I am awash with the giddy thrilling feelings that must come to schizophrenics when all the secrets of eternity are suddenly laid bare.
    Read the signs to me, my companion demands.
    Staring down into the Central Business District, I see the street signs have begun to burn like glow-worms in the velvet night.
    Phillip Street, I offer.
    And who was that?
    Our first governor, a naval officer.
    Hunter Street?
    After the foolish second governor, a naval officer.
    King Street? Not the damn King of England?
    No. Another naval officer.
    Bligh Street. This cannot be the same bastard who drove his poor crew to mutiny?
    Yes, the Colonial Office appointed him governor. He was recommended by Sir Joseph Banks in fact.
    Why would you celebrate a tyrant with a street name?
    Oh, we rose against him, I said.
    Ah, at last some heroes. It takes great courage to go against a bastard like that. Were the rebels hung for it? What were the names of the martyrs? Which streets are theirs?
    The leader was a Captain John Macarthur. The event was called the Rum Rebellion.
    Macarthur? That is not a name I see. There is a lot of arse-licking: Kent and Bathurst and Goul-burn and Sussex and York and Pitt and George. But where is Macarthur?
    Well, Macarthur is a complicated figure for us. He's a hard one to embrace. He was a Tory.
    But did he get rid of the bastard Bligh or did he not? Was he not a brave man?
    Yes, very brave, and headstrong, but he was in no way democratic. His notion of a parliament would be four cronies and himself in charge. The only convicts he had time for were those that worked as slaves for him. He lined his own pockets. He was an army officer but he used his privilege to get rich. He and his officer mates controlled the rum.
    Ah, so a man who will not share a drink.
    It was a monopoly the soldiers had for themselves. It was like being in charge of the mint. This was a place where a man would work for grog when he gave not a damn about the lash. If you earned twenty shillings you would be paid a pint of grog instead.
    Wait a minute. Is this the same Macarthur who is called the father of the Australian wool industry?
    The very same man.
    And is wool not the business that made the colony feasible? Should you not acknowledge him in some way? A Tory, yes, but is he not worth more to you than Kent and Sussex?