Prelapsarian Sydney

Among the most pleasing aspects of Australian cities is the way the natural world survives in them; the sense that an urban overlay is only recent and a couple of layers of bitumen thin. Of course I love this. I get nostalgic about the 1980s, when you could stand looking out from Mueller Street or Bradshaw Drive in Alice Springs and the desert started from there. Or, as you walked out of Tennant Creek on a moonless night there was a point where the street lights stopped and the dark hood of the desert night fell; where the only way you could tell where you were was from the texture underfoot - bitumen, bitumen, gravel, gravel, whoops ouch spinifex, gravel, gravel...But even in our biggest cities, you can experience the pinprick of nature. Cross the Yarra at East Richmond (in Melbourne), right near the Skipping Girl Vinegar sign, and you're walking through vineyards and remnant bush where signs by the walking paths warn you to watch out for snakes. Sydney has even more impressive fingers of bush reaching deep into the city and its suburbs.

Squat brown blocks of Commission flats have been demolished recently in Glebe and there, revealed for the first time in however many years, are the sandstone terraces that once stood at the head of Blackwattle Bay when the harbour at this point reached up beyond what is now Wentworth Park Greyhound Track.

Once upon a time there may have been aboriginal engravings here. Flat sandstone terraces often served the Cadigal people as galleries. And there are engravings in similar places around Sydney - huge figures of whales at Berry Island Reserve or by the walking track between Bondi and Tamarama. The one overlooking the sea near Tamarama depicts a man inside the whale. What tragic pre-European event does that record?

But this continuing presence of the natural world; the way the natural networks still connect may explain why the place I loved most in New York was that little pocket in the northwest, Inwood Hill Park, which still looks much the same as when Peter Minuit bought Manhattan Island off the Wiechquasgeck Indians.

A walk in the woods (two blocks from Broadway)

I remember when I was a kid, seeing the road dug up outside our house in Prahran (a suburb of Melbourne Australia), and being horrified that the soil was only inches below the bitumen. I had a horror of the countryside. Now I long for the natural environment to creep into cities, and that is one of the features of Inwood, this part of Manhattan. That's New Jersey on the other side.

There may not be bark hanging in strips off tree limbs or the smell of wattle or eucalyptus smoke, but there is birdsong, a woodland smell, and a papery machine-gun rat-a-tat sound as the odd squirrel scuttles over leaf litter on the forest floor. The traffic noise of Riverside Drive is below us. For Sydneysiders who appreciate being able to walk into the bush off city streets, this is almost nostalgic.

We came across the spot where the Indian village once stood. A huge and ancient Tulip Tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) once marked this place, until it died in 1938.

The plaque is nice. It tells us that legend has it that this was the spot where Manhattan was exchanged for a few trinkets. But how much more appropriate would it be in this environmental age, and to acknowledge the prior indigenous population, to replant a Tulip Tree here. I might write to the mayor.

Barely contained (Manhattan, Sunday 15th)

Had another of those experiences of Americans who round out conversations today. We got lost looking for the Lorimar Street L, the train into the city, and finally I asked for help from a minister (preacher), who peered at our map trying to find the Queens Expressway. He eventually realised that what we had was a transport map and it didn't show the Expressway, but nevertheless, there was something wrong with the connection we were trying to make.

He then asked, "Where are you from?" When we told him Sydney, he told us it was one of his favourite places in the world. As an engineer he built three power plants out there in the early 1970s. The Opera House hadn't been built then.

I mentioned that Utzon, the Opera House's architect, had been contacted before he died to provide his design principles, all these decades after the New South Wales had sacked him and replaced him with an architectural committee. The preacher, who was holding our map, and had been an engineer, said that the problem with the Opera House was that the design was for something that engineering hadn't caught up with. "As I was going to say with this," he said, tapping our paper, "You can't get there from here."

We did, though, get into Manhattan, and later to a recital of the complete Duparc songs, with some excellent young singers and accompanists. The venue was the Renee Weiler concert hall in Barrow Street in Greenwich Village, a lovely hall in an old brownstone, backed by picture windows of a green American garden. It was great to hear song this close, where you can feel the physicality of the singing, and find yourself leaning forward on a harmonic suspension (as you're probably supposed to) and really notice the perfection of each number. The program booklet provided English-only versions of the songs and what really struck me was that all languages must have certain words that work better in their language than in another. "Rest, o Phidyle!" said the translation, but 'reposez' was a better word for 'rest' at that moment.

This was the second songwriting experience of the week. Last Tuesday we went to a venue in the East Village where folksingers perform. A Scottish singer, Fraser Anderson, made great use of the room and variety in his guitar, but the song that struck me was one by a Florida duo called The Winterlings. 'Jenny Hodges' was the story of a woman who disguised herself as a man and joined the Army of the Tennessee. She remained a man all her life, getting to vote before other women, and asked to be buried in her 'union blues' (the Army of the Tennessee being a union army). But what was so great about the song? Simple words, repeating phrases (both text-wise and musically; the technical term would be isorhythm) and concrete concepts. Great, simple, disciplined storytelling. I once read that concrete imagery and the definiteness of metre was what made Goethe attractive to all those 19th century German composers. It's something I still think about.

Down at Cortlandt Street, we had one of those great experiences you have when you wander around a city, and stumble over something you didn't know was there. We knew the World Trade Center site was down there.

But what we didn't know was that across the road is the oldest continually operating building in New York City, St. Paul's Chapel.

This was where George Washington attended a prayer service after his inauguration in 1789 and continued to go to Sunday service until the capital moved to Philadelphia. His pew is still there. Across the other side, is the pew Governor George Clinton had built there when he became the first republican governor of New York and wanted to sit separate from the congregation but still be seen.

It's a peaceful place. But photographs in the cemetary show Sep 11, 2001, with computers and filing paper, printouts and other debris bestrewing the grounds. Inside the church is a fireman's coat and boots resting on a pew as if one of the relief workers has just come in for a well-earned break. I didn't find it hard to imagine that day. The church must have been cast in shadow by the buildings not much later than midday most days, so close must they have been. Then suddenly, no more. There is a sad quiet here now, but what must the noise have been like then, as two huge jets smashed into the towers and people who had had nothing more on their mind at 9am than wishing perhaps that they didn't have a dental appointment this afternoon, found themselves ending the day at 9.30 by leaping to their deaths?

If I were a Goethe I could probably say this effectively, more simply. But there are so many things to say here. I'll have to see what happens if I do my best to aim, like most Americans, to rounding stories off.

Moments to sing about (Brooklyn)

We love Brooklyn, that wonderfully varied borough, where one block might be Polish and you wonder what a ksiegarnia literacka is, and the next Hassidic. You talk French to your flatmate.Then you feel sure you will get to practise Spanish somewhere a couple of blocks over. We heard Wolof (a Senegalese language) the other day.

We caught the bus to downtown the other night, past the playing fields where girls were playing softball against the backdrop of a Russian Orthodox Church.

As 'lost' Australians we sat up front, and everyone included us in the lively conversation. An Italian-looking guy got on with a bottle of wine in a brown paper bag and asked the driver a question, and as she answered, tapped her affectionately on the shoulder as he went up to take his seat. I asked Kate if she saw that and she had.

The woman opposite us told us she liked Australians. She had some over to her congregation and they were very polite. I told her I thought Americans were polite and the conversation up front became even more appreciative. An older crankier lady got on and complained when someone stood on her feet.

The woman opposite us told her, "Yo' sitting in the hot seat. I got my foot trodden on there, so I moved." The old lady, crankier, said, "Well yo' feet is ve' impo'tant to you." To which our friend opposite agreed, "Aint nobody standing on them bu' choo."

The Italian-looking guy with the wine in a paper bag came up front to get off and said he would've brought glasses if he'd known there was going to be a party upfront. He affectionately tapped the bus driver on the shoulder again. Then it was our time to get off. I saw that we were meant to leave by the back exit, but the driver said, "Oh, come this way; I want to say goodbye to you." When we got off, our friend opposite said she'd show us where to go, but then when we said we wanted to go to Fulton Mall, she said, "Oh you got off at the wrong Fulton Mall. I'll show you where to go. My daughter lives up there." She came with us to South Oxford Street, pointing out the Brooklyn Academy of Music and other sights, then pointed us in the right direction. We introduced ourselves and Kate kissed her. We're experiencing such immediate rapports with people here.

We spent the evening at American Opera Projects and I was intrigued by some remarks made by Daniel Felsenfeld, the composer of a monodrama: Nora in the Great Outdoors. This work, with a libretto by Will Eno, is based on the moments after Nora has left Torvald's 'doll's house'. The composer said he loved how Ibsen could save revelations until the very last moment - the last line even, but that he, Felsenfeld, was always intrigued by what happened after. I thought there was something really key in this which I'll partially put into my own words; perhaps opera pushes drama past the classic Greek stages of crisis-climax-resolution to another step: reflection. This, said Felsenfeld, is the moment where characters sing.

It was late when we came out of the performance, so we couldn't catch the bus back. But I was amused crossing Java Street back down in Greenpoint, when a car turned behind us, with Chita Rivera singing loudly, "I like the island Manhattan/Smoke on your pipe and put that in..."