Leviathan: The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney, John Birmingham, Vintage Books, 2000

‘Sydney as psychopath’ said McKenzie Wark. A mad, bad and dangerous place? It depends on your perspective on life; whether you love it (you live there) or hate it (you don’t), Sydney has a fascination which Birmingham illustrates from the bottom up and the inside out. This is a book about class, privilege, status and, above all, power. Birmingham asks: ‘Where lies power in the city?’, and digs deeply and widely to find out.

In the middle of the book, after a detailed account of the property rorts around the great Depression and before an excursion into Jeremy Bentham and the rule of law in a penal colony, Birmingham summarises what the book is all about: ‘the protean nature of power in Sydney and the fierce, uncertain currents of creation and destruction … as potent in the digital city as in the mud-brick village’.

The book scarcely begins before the late 18th century official brutalising of Sydney’s Aborigines is juxtaposed with the late 20th century official assaults on Sydney’s Aborigines, and the killing of David Gundy. The book finishes with a description of Sydney suburban police and criminal culture which harks back to the settlement’s earliest days of suppressed lawlessness. In between, the joy ride careers through plagues, prostitutes, politicians and ‘pigs’; National Action and the Rum Corps; Detective Fred Krahe and Judge Advocate Collins; Caroline Chisholm and Helen the 15-year-old junkie hooker.

In a driving detailed narrative, like Robert Hughes (cf Fatal Shore) with a New Journalism gonzo edge, Birmingham tells a ripping yarn of Sydney as a monstrous living thing.

Published in the (2000) 26(1) Alternative Law Journal, 53