Michael Rose AM

Caitlin Morrissey

What is the DNA of Sydney as you see it? What has shaped its traits and characteristics?

Michael Rose

I think Sydney's history, in a modern sense, is relatively short. And the city, post-European-settlement is only 230 years old. And looking at Sydney, I think, is less a case of looking at the history of the city and more a case of looking at forces which have influenced the city repeatedly over the course of that relatively short history. And some of them have had an indelible effect on the city and have turned up again and again as kind of self-reinforcing aspects of life in Sydney which I think have shaped the character of it. So for me, the story of Sydney is more a story of particular forces that work on the city rather than particular people or particular events in history.

Greg Clark

So please tell us about those forces, Michael.

Michael Rose

All right. Well, I think if I had to sort of approach them in order, I would say the first significant influence on the DNA of the city is the landscape, to understand that the landscape is a basin. So you have the coast on the eastern side and then high country on the north, western and southern sides. And that basin has a flooded river valley in the middle, which is the harbour, which cuts the city through the centre. And then feeding into the harbour, you have all of the rivers and estuaries which divide the city up into a series of valleys and ridges. That topography, that landscape, had a real impact early in European society on how people could move around. It really determined where people could settle, determined how they would move between different places and really laid down what has become the modern map of Sydney. It meant that we couldn't be a grid city. It meant that we had to be a city which was much more sinuous and organic in its layout.

And in addition to the landscape being a disjointed and sinuous landscape in the way that I've described, it's also a landscape which had large amounts of land which were too steep and too rocky and too dry for agriculture or for people to live on, and so it was left as undeveloped bushland. And that means that Sydney has these extraordinary tendrils of bushland that come all the way in as you know. It has these extraordinary tendrils of bushland which reach all the way in close to the centre of the city. And as a result, Sydney has a very high amount of open public space which is relatively undeveloped. So the landscape is a big part of the Sydney DNA.

The second element, I think, is the long Indigenous occupation of the Sydney basin and the management by Aboriginal people of the landscape prior to the arrival of Europeans. And it's a difficult thing to overstate, I think, the importance of that, but it's also really easy to overstate the significance that most Sydneysiders give it. So I think it was an important thing. Interestingly, most of the places that the Europeans thought were attractive places to live, when they arrived, were places that Aboriginal people thought were attractive places to live. The way Europeans moved around the landscape followed the way Aboriginal people moved around the landscape. So you had this management of the landscape by Aboriginal people for a long time and then this incredible discontinuity, where Europeans just came in and ignored all of that, took the land and established themselves on it.

I think the consequences of that discontinuity are still working their way through in the DNA of Sydney. And if you look at the last summer in Sydney, where large parts of the east coast of Australia were on fire, one of the big discussions in Sydney was about how fire management by Aboriginal people prior to the arrival of Europeans had produced a different landscape. And by ignoring that, the modern city has created problems for itself which are more severe than they need to be. So I suppose that goes to my point about how most people don't think about it very much. But it was quite a profound shaper of Sydney.

The third force, I think, which has shaped Sydney, is the history of British colonialism. And I think what's important there is that Sydney inherited, from its colonial era, the institutions which are its core institutions: our system of government, our legal system, our approach to things like police and university and the regulation of professions. The structure of our commercial world is essentially something that was inherited from Britain and came in the initial colonial period but then was really consolidated in, what I would call, the imperial period, sort of the 1880s and 1890s, sort of the high Victorian period. So from that British colonial experience, we have Sydney as an English-speaking city, a city with strong business and commercial institutions, a city with strong educational institutions. And so that is very much, I think, a core element of Sydney's DNA.

And there were in that early colonial period also a couple of accidents, if you like, or sort of quirks that have really flowed through into the city's DNA. The first was that the First Fleet didn't bring any wheeled vehicles with it and so it began as a walking town, and all the walking tracks followed the contours of the land. And so if you look at the centre of Sydney, it reflects a pre-industrial walking place, unlike all of the other Australian cities which don't have that. And the second thing is the early governors were instructed, from London, to create an agrarian society. They were quite literally told, ‘do not build big town because we can see already, in England, we're having trouble with cities’. And so right from the earliest time, there was a real pressure to disperse settlement. And the footprint of Sydney today actually reflects settlement that was mapped out as early as the sort of 1790s and early 1800s because there was this idea that what needed to be created was communities of farmers living around orbital towns. And some of those towns are now developing into the centres of a polycentric city, and the places that were laid out in the 1780s and '90s are still significant places in the city. So those two things, I think, are important. And the third thing that came from colonialism is, in the early part of the city's life, the technical and commercial skills of convicts were pretty important. And so a lot of these convicts were granted their freedom early, and they became quite successful people in the life of the city. And not only were they former convicts, very often they were Irish. They might also have been Catholic. They were people who didn't fit within the hierarchy that applied in Britain at the time.

And so from that early stage, success in Sydney could be equated with your capacity to do things and your capacity to make money. And there was always a degree of social mobility which would not have been available in Britain and that fed into the broader DNA of the place. And so social mobility became something that was much more accepted, I think, than might have been in other Australian colonies, and certainly, in other cities around the world. So that's the colonial experience.

Two more and then I'll stop. The next big force, I think, that's relevant to Sydney is this notion of distance and isolation. So for most of its history, Sydney has been a long way from everywhere. So when it was established, it was the most isolated town on Earth. It was six months voyage from London. And then even when other colonies were established in Australia, it was a long way away from them. So Australia is a long way from everywhere, and everything in Australia is a long way from everything else in Australia. And that sense of distance and isolation produces a couple of outcomes.

One is a kind of self-reliance which comes from being so far from everything else. The second is a real interest in what's happening elsewhere. And so Sydney has always, I think, been pretty open as a port city, pretty open to visitors from elsewhere, ideas from elsewhere and engagement with elsewhere. But on the flip side, it also produces a kind of parochialism which I think holds Sydney back quite a lot. And I think those elements have been part of Sydney right from the time it was first established. And then if you take that idea of feeling like you're a long way away and therefore, being quite open to ideas and the idea of social mobility, and you add it to a landscape that had lots of space, you have a pretty good cocktail for a migrant city. And that's the other thing, I think, that Sydney has always been. It's always been a place of opportunity for people who arrived.

One reason they had to invent such a nasty convict system in Australia is that, for a lot of people, their life as a prisoner in early Sydney was nicer than their life in Cork or Waterford or Bristol. And so they had to get these secondary places up and running to make transportation a little uglier. So this idea that it's been a place of opportunity, it's been a place where people could arrive, often, with nothing, and quickly, through the mechanisms of social mobility in Sydney, get themselves established and moving. And so there is this history of successive waves of migration arriving and not only succeeding within an existing model but being able to influence the model and change the model.

And there's a really nice story about the first skyscraper that was built, the sort of first significant skyscraper that was built in Sydney in the 1960s. And the architect was an Austrian refugee. The construction company was a construction company established by a Dutch refugee. All of the construction workers were from Greece and Italy and Malta and Eastern Europe. And in effect, they arrived and didn't feel constrained by the Georgian and Edwardian fabric of Sydney. They said, ‘No, we're here. Let's build a modern city.’ And if you look at the transformation of Australia, but Sydney in particular, in the post-war era, it's not just migrants coming and fitting within an existing system; its migrants arriving and transforming the way in which the city works. And I think that's been a big part of Sydney's DNA over the last 230 years.

Greg Clark

Michael, that's a wonderful start, and we're really honoured that you've taken time to think that through and spell that out. This is absolutely brilliant. In your forces that you've described there, you talked a little bit about Sydney's role in Australia. Can I ask you to reflect on that and say a bit more? Is there something about what Sydney does for Australia that creates certain parts of its characteristics or its DNA today? What does Sydney mean to Australia, and what does Australia mean to Sydney?

Michael Rose

Well, there is an interesting way to answer that. If you look at national businesses in Australia, national businesses, which are headquartered in Melbourne, make a point of their Melbourne-ness. And they're proudly Melbourne and they let people know it. National businesses that are headquartered in Sydney often have to play that down because there is an attitude, I think, towards Sydney in other places that doesn't exist in Sydney looking the other way. So I think there is-- so what does Sydney do? So, again, if you look back in history, Melbourne was the commercial and manufacturing city that was sort of first stop on the ships coming from Europe, and so I think for a long time, Melbourne was seen to be the sort of headquarters of business. It was certainly the headquarters of the mining industry, headquarters for most of Australian manufacturing probably from the 1960s onwards.

What Sydney has done, I think, is it has been better at adapting to what was new in terms of global economic and commercial activity. It has, I think, been a more attractive arrival point for foreign investment and for migrants or even just expats who wanted to work in Australia. It has become probably the preferred landing pad for companies that are looking to have a broader regional presence. Although, I think that's often overstated. I think, as you do, Greg, it's easy to talk about Sydney being in the same time zone as Asia, but Sydney's as far from Beijing by plane as London is, so it's, I think, sometimes overstated. But we, I think, provide the financial services hub for Australia, the inbound investment hub for Australia, the foreign-business headquarters hub for Australia. I think we are probably the central focal point for media and technology business. And what else? So I think, if you like, we've engaged with the new a little bit better in Sydney.

In terms of Australian cultural life, if you said to someone, what's the cultural capital of Australia? They will say Melbourne. And if you say to Sydney people, what's the cultural capital of Australia? They will say Melbourne. If you look at the cultural institutions that punch above their weight around the world, they are the Sydney Theatre Company, the Sydney Dance Company, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. And if you look at establishments that are known around the world, the Sydney Opera House comes in there. So it's strange. Sydney is a serious cultural engine for Australia, and yet that's not something that Sydney people would necessarily understand.

Greg Clark

Thank you, Michael. Caitlin, over to you.

Caitlin Morrissey

I was wondering, what is the relationship between Greater Sydney and the city of Sydney and how people from Sydney perceive themselves in relation to those two kinds of scales?

Michael Rose

Sydney people, when they talk to each other and someone says, ‘where are you from?’ they will be very, very specific about where they're from. They will name the suburb that they come from, and sometimes, within suburbs, they'll be specific, you know? They'll say, ‘Oh, I'm from Coogee but not from the north end of the beach. I'm from the south end of the beach’ or whatever. But when they are outside Sydney, they will say they're from Sydney.

So particularly in the last few years, there's been a lot of discussion in sort of the planning world of Sydney around the polycentric city and the Three Cities within Greater Sydney: the Eastern and the Central and the Western City. But they're not terms that people who live in Sydney think about or talk about. Everybody sees themselves as essentially being from Sydney.

Having said that, though what's sometimes talked about with Sydney is that it's a city of neighbourhoods or a city of villages. And Sydney is a very large city, and there are lots of very distinct town centres right across the city, and they are very different from each other. Some are highly influenced by the fact that they're on the harbour or next to a beach. Some are highly influenced by the ethnic community that lives there, so the Vietnamese part of town or the Indian part of town. So I think Sydney's neighbourhoods have very, very distinct characters, and that is a reflection of landscape history, migration patterns and choices that people make.

Greg Clark

Michael, you're a leader in both the kind of business and civic leadership spaces. As Chairman of the Committee for Sydney, you're also a leader in the cultural space where you've been very much a patron, a chairman, a leader in the arts and in culture in Sydney. How would you characterise these two communities in the sense of, what is the agenda and the attitude of business leaders and of the cultural leaders in the city?

Michael Rose

That's a great question, Greg. I think there's a really healthy conversation in Sydney at the moment about the future of the city. There is an understanding among business leaders, cultural leaders, politicians, that the city is a very dynamic place. It is growing. It is growing quickly.

It's had a period, which is a while ago now, but a period of kind of chronic underinvestment in its institutions and in its infrastructure, and so there's been a period where there's been a need to catch up on those things. And now, I think people feel that that is happening; now is the time to be looking forward to make some decisions about what kind of city we want to have 20, 30 and 50 years from now. And so I think it was quite a healthy conversation about the future of the city which includes where people will live, how they will spend their time, what the fabric of the city should be like. How do you take the city's best attributes and build on those and enhance those whilst accommodating growth?

And the other thing, I think, which is also part of the discussion now-- and perhaps it took COVID-19 to bring it into focus-- is, what kind of society do we want to have in this city? How will people want to live? What will be the things that are most important to them, and how can the benefits of the city be distributed equitably across the city? So that, I think, is the plan of all of the three groups I've described, which is how to manage the growth of the city into the future in a way which is going to produce good outcomes for--

Caitlin Morrissey

On the back of Greg's question, I was wondering whether now or in Sydney's past, whether there are individuals that stand out to you as being leaders that have really shaped the city?

Michael Rose

Yeah. Well, obviously, in the history of the city-- so Sydney kind of runs on a boom-and-bust cycle. There are periods of extraordinary energy and city building, and then there are periods where nothing much happens for a while. And so if we go right back to the colonial period, there are people that we could talk about.

But if you look, say, at the last, I don't know, 50 years or so, there were a couple of politicians who were very focused on city building. So in the lead up during the 1980s and '90s and sort of in the lead up towards the Sydney Olympics, there was a New South Wales Premier called Neville Wran who drove a lot of city-building projects. Also, during the '80s and '90s, there was an Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, who was from Sydney, and continues today to have quite a lot of influence in the debates around the shaping of Sydney.

There have been a series of government architects who have left a strong legacy in the city and also planners who have had similar impact. I think, of the people who are today still active, if I can put it that way, I think Clover Moore, who is the Lord Mayor of Sydney, has had a very significant impact on the shape of the central part of the city, which is what she's the mayor of. She's been the mayor for 16 years and has, I think, had real ambition to ensure that that central part of Sydney was as good as any city in the world.

The current Premier of New South Wales, Gladys Berejiklian, is an important leader, I think, in the sense that she is the person who has been driving the major infrastructure projects which have been dominating Sydney for the last 10 years, and she's done that as a transport minister and then as a treasurer and then as the State Premier. So she's been very significant and continues to be significant.

And then, as I said, there are these different institutions. There are some quite important leaders of cultural institutions and vice-chancellors of universities and various other organisations, people who are trying very hard to ensure that the city is being shaped correctly for the future. But that handful I just named, I think-- oh, and I'd add Lucy Turnbull in there. Lucy, a former Lord Mayor of Sydney, very involved in the development of the modern plan for Sydney through her leadership of the Greater Sydney Commission. And her successor, Geoff Roberts, I would mention also.

Caitlin Morrissey

So we've spoken a bit about how, when people come to Sydney, they bring ideas and inventions. We spoke about this amazing story of the skyscraper. And do other kind of inventions stand out to you or are there discoveries that have been made in Sydney that stand out as being among those that the city is most proud of?

Michael Rose

It's interesting, isn't it? I've been thinking about this question. One of the things about inventions in Australia or what we like to claim as Australian inventions-- the way in which academic and scientific careers operate in Australia is, at some point in their careers, a lot of talented Australian scientists go and spend time elsewhere. And so, I'm sure Cambridge University claims penicillin as something that was invented in Cambridge. Australians think of it as an Australian invention because the person who got there was Australian.

And so I was looking earlier through a list of great Australian inventions to try and find any of them that I could tag to Sydney. The heart pacemaker, incidentally, is one of them but, you know, it isn't something that Sydney people talk about, funnily enough. I mean, I can tell you what they will talk about. They talk about some great surfboard designs from the 1960s and various yachting breakthroughs. I looked at that question. I thought, even for me, it doesn't even seem like a sensible question to ask about Sydney.

Caitlin Morrissey

Greg's spoken before about this kind of dynamic that Sydney has where it can use its platform to promote kind of the inventions of other places in Australia. And I wonder if any of those stand out as things that aren't necessarily from Sydney but have been made famous in Sydney?

Michael Rose

Yeah, and that's what I was looking for before, and I really am afraid I can't help you. I might have to go and do some more homework. But I was really astounded, actually, what was in the list. So Wi-Fi, for example, is an Australian invention. Bionic skin. Bionic ears. I mean, there are some astounding inventions, the escape slides on aircraft, all these sorts of things. And you try and dig into where they happened, and they're very often collaborations between CSIRO scientists who might be based in both Sydney and Melbourne. A lot of the agricultural innovations came from South Australia for some reason. But look, I'm sure-- and I know I have a role at UNSW, and there are incredible inventions rolling out there all the time. It's Australia's leading centre for quantum computing, for example. One of the world's leading centres for quantum computing. But I don't know. I think we're not a town that says 'welcome to Sydney: home of the Otis elevator' or whatever, you know? It's just not our thing.

Greg Clark

Is Sydney a town that would say 'welcome to Sydney: home of the flat white coffee'?

Michael Rose

Perhaps. Perhaps. I've noticed that in London, I walk past cafes that advertise that they had Australian baristas as if that was a guarantee of quality. Perhaps. Perhaps we would-- well, I think we're very proud of our coffee, but we're also proud of our tom yum soup and our banh mi rolls. I mean, that is a unique aspect of Sydney, the way in which-- I was lining up for a Vietnamese banh mi roll the other day, and I was surrounded by construction workers in high-vis vests, and some of them were Māoris from New Zealand, and some of them were big burly Lebanese guys. And they're all standing in the queue waiting for their Vietnamese chicken roll. And you think, this is Sydney working at its finest.

Caitlin Morrissey

Is there anything to understand about the myths of Sydney?

Michael Rose

One big myth is the sort of Robert Hughes Fatal Shore myth, which is that the brutal convict system sort of set Sydney up as a place of torture and disaster. And as I said before, I think the more accepted view now is that Sydney actually is and has been for a long time a real place of opportunity for people to arrive even if they didn't choose to come in the first place. So that is one myth.

The surf culture thing: see, that's another one which is really easy to overstate. We have these extraordinary beaches, and a lot of people, like me, grow up with the beach. But surf culture's kind of-- it stops at the beach and the suburbs that are next to the beach. And so if you were to talk to someone who lives in Parramatta or someone who lives right over near the Blue Mountains and said, tell me about surf culture, they wouldn't know what you were talking about. I mean, they literally would not know what you were talking about. And that's what I said before about different neighbourhoods. If you go to Manly, and you want to talk about surfing, well, that's the only thing you can talk about, but if you go to other places, it'll be quite different.

I think the big myth about Sydney is the myth-- and this is repeated all the time and repeated in our kind of official branding through our tourism efforts-- that Sydney is this super laid back, relaxed place. And that notion of Sydney being a relaxed place almost conveys that it's nearly a lazy place, that everybody is spending their time sitting around outside drinking flat whites or beers and going to the beach to surf. And that's actually a really attractive image, and it’s true in the sense that we are an informal place. So we're relaxed in the sense that we're not as hierarchical as some places. We are more informal than some places, but on the whole, Sydney people work really hard. Sydney's business and cultural and educational institutions benchmark themselves against the world, and they perform at the levels that they need to perform at in order to hold themselves up against the world. So our lifestyle and our climate might allow us to live in a more relaxed way, and they might permit a more informal approach, but the notion that we're somehow kind of laid back and permanently on holidays, I think, is a myth. That is really not part of our daily experience.

Greg Clark

Michael, that's a perfect segue for the question I wanted to put to you which is-- in a sense, the question is, how well does the world understand Sydney, and does it matter? But maybe another version of that is also, how well do you think Sydney tells its story to the world, and are there improvements that can be made? Maybe you can tackle it from both ends.

Michael Rose

Yeah, well, as you know, that's something I have been spending a lot of time thinking about. And I think Sydney has for a long time been a little bit complacent about its positioning in the world. And we kind of understand that the world knows about Sydney. So the Olympics, I suppose, was the last-- or was a point at which the world's attention was brought to Sydney. And the world kind of said, ‘Hey, wow! Look at that. That's a pretty modern-looking city down there with a pretty interesting population’ and ‘Gee, they seem to live quite a nice life. Let's pay some more attention’. And so we know that a lot of people think about Sydney.

We know that a lot of people know about Sydney. We know, for example, that our beaches and the Harbour Bridge and the Opera House are kind of instantly recognisable aspects of the city. And I think we've been allowing them to do the work. And certainly, in the tourism space, we've allowed them to do the work. And in most of the other spaces where the city's positioning and branding matters, we haven't really concentrated hard enough. And other cities in Australia that have that kind of second city mindset-- so I'm not talking about Melbourne there, but I'm talking about some of the smaller cities-- have had to be much more strategic and much more focused about how they sell themselves to the world and what it is that they're trying to sell. So I personally think Sydney's been complacent, not terribly thoughtful.

And as a result, so much of what Sydney has to offer the world is jammed up behind Sydney's visitor brand. And even if you were to go to the websites that promote Sydney as a destination for foreign students, what you'll see is the Opera House, the Harbour Bridge and the beach. So everything's jammed up behind the visitor brand. Now, there's been some of us who have been making that point to government for a while now, and I think they do understand that that's not necessarily going to be helpful in the longer term.

Interestingly, COVID-19 has interrupted the flow of visitors from overseas, and so the focus of the sort of tourism branding has gone to domestic tourism, and so we're back at Opera House, Harbour Bridge and Beaches again. But I think people are starting to unpack what it is that Sydney has and why the combination of its features put it into a unique position as far as cities around the world are concerned. And Sydney's beginning to recognise that there's a need to talk about those things. And I've touched on some of them in this discussion, obviously. So there is our landscape, which is great for the tourist visitor, but there is also our financial and commercial systems, our education system, our health system, our diverse, multicultural, multilingual society. These are all elements of a dynamic city with lots of opportunity and they're the things we should be talking more about in the future.

Greg Clark

Michael, if we had only asked you the right question, what's the other thing you would have said?

Michael Rose

I don't even know where to start with a question like that. So is there anything else that I would say to you about Sydney? Yeah. Obviously, at the Committee for Sydney, we've been doing a lot of thinking about, what are the significant changes that cities will experience as a result of COVID-19, and what are the particular issues and opportunities that will arise for Sydney out of the changes that COVID-19 will bring? And you've been part of that discussion yourself, Greg.

On the plus side, we have, by world standards, responded to the pandemic pretty well, and we've been pretty fortunate. Once again, distance and isolation become part of the influencing force on the city. So we've done ok compared to the rest of the world. And until Melbourne started to have its current difficulties, we were feeling pretty confident that Sydney might present to the world a kind of safe place to go and a safe place to be. Now, I suppose that's still, now, a little bit open as an issue. But I think what COVID has demonstrated is that Sydney is a well-governed place, a place with a good health system and a place which is resilient to shocks of this magnitude. So that's the positive.

The issue for Sydney that arises from the pandemic is, if it goes on for a long time, and people are not travelling around the world, that has real implications for business in Australia. It has implications for our connectedness to the world, it has implications for our tourism industry, our education industry which is reliant on foreign students. So I think what happens in the next six months will be really critical for Sydney, as it will be for cities around the world. But the connectedness of Sydney, in a human sense, that is part of Sydney's DNA, actually. It's a personal place. And navigating through COVID, I think, will be an important thing for us. And coming through it will, as a city, be dependent not only on decisions we make but how quickly we can connect back up to the world.

Greg Clark

Michael, I'm struck by, in a sense, your last statement there, and it's reverberating because you've said at the same time its distance and remoteness that defines Sydney-- and on the other hand, it's connectedness, it's global reach, it's intimacy that defines Sydney. And both things are simultaneously true. It seems to me that you've really struck gold with that observation because that is exactly both the geographical nature of the place but also the social and economic and civic nature of the place.

Michael Rose

Yeah, it is and one drives the other. If you feel like you're a long way away from everything, then you have a particular interest in knowing what is happening elsewhere and in connecting elsewhere. And if you look right back across the history of Sydney, whether you're talking about the earliest colonial time or the early aviation age or whatever, this ability to connect to the rest of the world has been driven hard by that sense of isolation, so the one drives the other. And then the other aspect of it is, by the standards of modern cities, it's a small town. It's still within the different communities. You really do know people and you will already have that knowledge of Sydney, Greg, from your own experience. So it is personal at that level. And maybe that's part of the genius of Sydney: its capacity to combine a local intimacy with a global outlook and pull that off.