SYDNEYSIDE REFLECTIONS

Crimmins describes 10 aimless days in Sydney, Australia, in this literary travelogue.

In late January 2019, the author, a middle-aged Englishman who’d spent his adult life bouncing between the United States, Japan, Canada, and China, arrived in Sydney. He was based in Hong Kong and taught at a university in Shenzhen, but he decided to spend the Chinese New Year holidays exploring Australia’s Harbour City: “You know nobody in Sydney, and there’s nothing in particular you need to do,” Crimmins—who narrates in the second person—tells himself. “You just saw a chance to go to a new place and write. You would wander around and write what you saw. That was what you decided.” The author managed to pack his days full, even though he walked the streets without any specific goals, stopping in cafes to write, drink black coffee, and sample local pies, for which he had an extreme fondness. He chatted with locals and tourists alike, marveling at such gems of Australian English slang as “bikie gang” (for “biker gang”) and “big wet,” referring to torrential rain. He observed Sydneysiders, admiring their easy manner of existing in the world. He also mused on the nature of Australia Day, a holiday for which he happened to be present, as well as the status of Indigenous Australians, immigrants, and unhoused people in contemporary society. Along the way, he considered war memorials and vestiges of British colonialism. Mostly, he allowed the things he observed to spark memories of the many other places he’d already been. Thus, Crimmins explored not only the city around him but also the bustling metropolis of associations that it stimulated in his mind.

The book is a blend of memoir and travel writing, but it reads more like a novel. Readers may be reminded of the works of W.G. Sebald or Teju Cole, although Crimmins’ work lacks the slight gestures toward plot that those authors provide. The prose is rich and lyrical, despite the relatively low stakes of the endeavor it describes: “The beach is stasis, endless repetition, nothingness,” writes Crimmins in a cheerful existentialist mode. “You lost a Facebook friend once, for expressing this. She wanted to know why you didn’t like the beautiful blue sea and lovely beaches. The sea is nothingness, you Messengered her back. She promptly unfriended you….” Ultimately, the city itself doesn’t feel very important. Even though the author describes his peregrinations through Sydney in considerable detail, readers won’t come away with a strong understanding of its geography; as Crimmins describes the place, it could be any number of modern urban areas. What he captures instead is the sense of what a new city stirs in a traveler: a blend of familiarity and alienness, of the local and the globalized. Whether comfortably homebound or, like Crimmins, exploring a new urban center for the first time, readers will find in this book a formula for rewarding travel: to go without expectation, with deep curiosity, and with a desire to see everything through new eyes.

An unexpectedly immersive and often wise account of a holiday Down Under.