Sydney

You know you’ve officially become a Sydneysider when you become obsessed with “The Southerly”. When’s it due? Why hasn’t it got here yet? It’s reached the airport - bloody-well hurry up.

In Sydney, having the Bureau of Meteorology as your homepage is not considered weird.

We’ve been bitching and moaning for months about how wet it is, how cold it is, how we wanted to spend Christmas at the beach but it raaaaiiined. Then yesterday in Sydney we had our first day over 30 degrees for the summer, and last night it didn’t get down below 25.5 degrees at Observatory Hill. You’d think this event would be welcomed with wild celebrations yes? Not in Sydney. Today we’re all soooo tiiiirrred because none of us could sleep properly.

Continue reading "Sydney people are such sooks about the weather" »

Every New Year’s Eve Sydney’s Lord Mayor takes over the city’s prime harbourside viewing area at the Opera House just so society’s self-serving elites can get their snouts in the trough, quaff free champagne and look down on the poor people below them.

I know this because after years of trying I finally got an invitation.

Last Saturday marked the first time I had ever managed to see the New Year’s Eve fireworks display up close without the water police involved. (This does not count the year that I thought I was watching the fireworks display but had actually just set the kitchen on fire.)

Continue reading "The drunkest, stupidest, greatest city in the world" »

There are many reasons to move to Sydney’s inner west but none of them is more compelling than your girlfriend telling you to.

And so it was that a few months ago I overcame my bitter prejudices and moved across town, upholding a fine family tradition of men doing whatever it is they are told to by their partner, wife, mother, sister or the nearest woman in the street.

The inner west, for those of you who are not from Sydney and indeed the vast majority who are, is a small enclave nestled snugly between the CBD and the real world. People in the proper suburbs have no desire to go to the inner west and people in the inner west don’t want them there. However despite this the people in the inner west have spent the past 10 years campaigning against a motorway that would give both parties the exact result they wanted.

Continue reading "Exclusive: Hipster Invasion Threatens Inner West" »

This is the third and final piece by Penbo for the Herald Sun about what Australia really thinks of Victoria.

When Melbourne hosted the Commonwealth Games in 2006 its opening ceremony was hailed as delightfully whimsical in its hometown and ridiculed as laughably provincial elsewhere.

In our coverage in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph we ran a double-page spread of flying trams and Leunig ducks under the deliberately annoying headline “And the winner is…still Sydney”, an obvious reference to Juan Antonio Samaranch’s declaration of the 2000 Olympic host city and its much more majestic and ambitious opening ceremony.

Continue reading "Trams might fly: Melbourne gets the jump on Sydney" »

The Property Council of Australia - in one of those surveys aimed at getting their name on every news service - has named Adelaide Australia’s most liveable city.

‘Liveable’ is such a beige term. Talk about damned with faint praise.

They used a bunch of different characteristics such as traffic congestion and housing affordability to judge each capital city.

The fact that Canberra came in second goes to show that having a rockin’ good time wasn’t a criterion. (Oh come on, the Holy Grail doesn’t count).

Continue reading "Adelaide. It’s OK! (No, really.)" »

This week, we have seen two incredible women on television who have both made us feel proud to be Australian.

One is Anna Bligh, with her outpouring of emotion, reminding Queenslanders and the rest of the nation that people from the sunshine state are “the people they breed tough, north of the border.”  The other is Oprah.Yes, Oprah.

In Sydney, we are struggling to harness a sense of pride.

Continue reading "How Oprah could salvage Sydney’s pride" »

Tonight, the City of Sydney will squeeze into its glad rags and put on the pyrotechnic razzle dazzle that has become the standard way to see in the New Year.

As always, event organisers have promised this year it’ll be bigger, bolder and with added bang for our $5 million bucks. 

In recent years, they city’s grandiose flair for making stuff explode and decorating the Harbour Bridge has given Sydney a cocky strut.

Continue reading "Sydney sparkles to hide the rot beneath" »

There are several truths about the ritual of the Friday night drink.

They’ll never make you healthy or help you stick to your holiday or household budget, you’ll always stay later than you say you will and you’ll never, ever, just have one.

And if you’re not among those lucky handful of people whose employer wheels out a trolley of drinks at 5pm every Friday afternoon, then you’ll join the thirsty pilgrimage of office workers making a beeline to the nearest local for a “quiet” drink to kiss the week goodbye. Unless that is, you live in Sydney.

Continue reading "Ten reasons pubs will always be better than bars" »

It’s the wild day of the AFL calendar – Mad Monday – and there’s a BEN-DER alert on those party animals, the Tigers.

After Richmond farewelled Ben Cousins yesterday, the players will pump up the celebrations on Mad Monday.

It was a brave last AFL game for Cousins, who racked up 21 touches while playing with a bung hamstring.

Continue reading "Cousins’ toughest task will be Mad Monday" »

First promised in 1823, today’s announcement by Labor that a $2.1 billion Parramatta to Epping rail link will be constructed within seven years is easily the most visionary transport blueprint for western Sydney since the last one, that other one, and the other one just before that.

This model cleverly synthesises the best of the past blueprints to take the passenger experience to dizzy new heights. The seats will be made entirely out of snuggly mohair. Neil Perry will serve canapes. Female commuters will receive back rubs from members of the Chippendales, while the men will be able to watch Foxsports, Top Gear and Wild On! Cancun via an on-demand passenger entertainment system. For the kids, every fourth carriage will be decorated under Walt Disney’s Fantasia theme, with those surly old ticket inspectors replaced by cheery elves.

If you vote Labor in any of five Sydney marginal electorates next Saturday it is expected that construction on the rail link will start one hour later and be completed by the following Tuesday. All aboard the Bullshit Express.

Continue reading "Labor’s rail blueprint: All aboard the bullshit express" »

So the 15th edition of Rosemount Australian Fashion Week has ponywalked off into the sunset. So too, the event’s founder Simon Lock. What should have been one big knees-up, however, wound up feeling more like a wake for the outgoing IMG Fashion Asia Pacific managing director.

Five years after Lock sold Australia’s most high profile fashion event to the New York-based sports/lifestyle marketing powerhouse IMG and stayed on to helm the company’s regional fashion activities, apparently things haven’t gone so well. As New Zealand magazine editor Marian Simms quipped last week – only to have the phrase transformed into a Twitter hashtag meme, by Lock’s wife Lorraine - #itsalldanhillfromhere – Dan Hill being IMG Fashion’s Asia Pacific general manager.

Then in February this year, eight months before his contract was due to expire, IMG suddenly announced that Lock would be leaving the company. In the interim, reports have surfaced of tensions between Lock and IMG.

Continue reading "Fashion week had its victims" »

There’s a laundry list of reasons Melbourne could probably already be regarded as Australia’s most prestigious city over Sydney. It hosts the Australian Open, the Melbourne Cup and various other prestige horse races, the AFL Grand Final, and the Formula 1 Grand Prix. The last time Tiger Woods came to Australia, he was in Melbourne.

What has Sydney got to compete as regular international attractions? There are a couple of world-class restaurants with obscenely-priced menus and a rarely-used, difficult-to-get-to Olympic stadium. There is the start of the Sydney to Hobart yacht race, though it should be noted that this features a bunch of people with lots of money and significant business connections getting out of the joint as fast as they possibly can.

If size does matter in the battle for status as the nation’s most prestigious city, it now looks likely Melbourne will be bigger than Sydney in the not-too-distant future. A spokesman for the developer lobby that commissioned the report remarked that Sydney had the hallmarks of “a global city in decline”.

Continue reading "Against Melbourne, housing the least of Sydney’s worries" »

Peter Corris’s Glebe PI Cliff Hardy has a modern Australian playlist in his latest adventure, Torn Apart, including the Whitlams, Kasey Chambers and Sydney’s cab-driving troubadour Perry Keyes.

Hardy listens to tunes from Keyes’s second album, The Last Ghost Train Home, which includes the song The Day John Sattler Broke His Jaw, about the revered Souths’ rugby league player and the 1970 grand final that he played with a fractured face. If Hardy doesn’t lose his obvious fine taste, he’ll be in the shops this week picking up the new Perry Keyes offering, Johnny Ray’s Downtown.

It is a stunning record; chock full of compelling, beautiful, sad and joyous songs that places this singer-songwriter at the top of the Australian creative tree. Johnny Ray’s Downtown is an early contender for the best Australian release of the year and will give international competition a shake, too.

Continue reading "The Sydney cabbie who’s writing the songs of our lives" »

Adelaide is no longer the city of churches or the arts capital of Australia. It’s not even Yass with poofs, as famously dubbed by Doug Mulray shortly before he was mercifully removed from national television by Kerry Packer.

According to the people who run the Sydney Fish Markets, Adelaide is now the mullet capital of Australia, a bogan backwater which is ripe for ridicule by the pony-tailed pseuds who run Sydney’s advertising industry.

The Fish Market’s new marketing slogan - “More Mullets Than Adelaide” - says more about Sydney smugness than Adelaide’s earthiness.

Continue reading "Get a dog up ya Sydney" »

The NSW State Government has built a house.

It’s got three bedrooms, rooftop solar panels, state-of-the-art lighting, water-saving appliances, a fuel cell that converts gas to electricity, a worm farm and an electric car. Located in a nice suburb it’s around 30 minutes from Sydney CBD and comes with a 12 month lease. It’s also 100 per cent rent free.

As any member of the begrudging, under-slept and over-caffeinated Sydney rental set will tell you, there’s few opportunities like it. In fact you’d have to see it to believe it. And you wouldn’t be the only one.

Continue reading "A free house for the most undeserving" »

The Daily Telegraph ran the story today as its Monday lead, “Drug lords hit town – cartels get rich on Aussie hunger for cocaine”.

A “generational shift” the paper explained, has pushed the demand for the drug making Australia the world’s most lucrative coke market. 

While this was surely a shock for the few Sydneysiders who haven’t stepped out to a bar, club, trendy restaurant or party in the past few years, for the rest of us, the story was more a case of no shit Sherlock than shock. Because, if you live in Sydney and are under the age of 55, chances are you will run into the drug every day if you knew what you were looking for.

Continue reading "Sydney awash with coke" »

What the hell happened?

Like the other 15,000 fight fans at Acer Arena last night, I’m still trying to work out how a tattooed knockabout - who nobody rated a chance – managed to knock Roy Jones Jr out.

Oh – and he did it in less time than it takes to brush your teeth.

Continue reading "Green wins with courage" »

The biggest problem for the AFL in getting a successful presence in Western Sydney won’t be the choice of Kevin Sheedy as coach, it won’t be the home ground or sponsorship and isn’t even the popularity of rugby league as such.

No, the largest hurdle for the AFL in setting up shop in Western Sydney is this: Australian Football is still predominantly a white Anglo/Celtic sport with a culture that doesn’t look anything like Western Sydney.

Right now the AFL doesn’t even reflect the ethnic make-up of its own Melbourne heartland, so how does it expect to sell itself to kids and their parents in the most ethnically diverse part of Australia?

Continue reading "A game white people like: the AFL’s West Sydney problem" »

Appointing Kevin Sheedy as coach of the AFL’s new Western Sydney team is a terrible idea.

For one simple reason: The game has left the once-great coach behind.

It’s the equivalent of making Bill Collins the face of iTunes.

Continue reading "Counter-punch: old man Sheedy a disaster for Sydney" »

The NSW Labor Party has taken advantage of the confusion caused by the impending end of the world to install its new preferred candidate as Premier. Upon taking office Godzilla told a press conference this afternoon he was committed to “EAT, KILL , DESTROY” as well as holding underperforming ministers to account.

The Punch received this from some creative individual this morning following Sydney’s freak dust storm. It’s amazing how quickly the viral pictures get made and circulated following a news event with any visual appeal today.

Not being in Sydney this morning I can only assume that the dust storm is in fact real, and not some hoax manufactured for the good of bored web designers.

Update:

Thanks for the photo then Ante, while fellow reader James has since alerted us to this contribution to the Sydney dust storm http://www.flickr.com/photos/ivanaclinton/3945420235/

When The Punch woke up this morning it got a little scared. Sydney looks like it’s about to be swallowed into the bowels of the Earth.

Twitter has gone off with people filing their own pics here.

And News.com.au have an amazing gallery running here. There’s no point asking if you’ve seen anything like this before, as apparently the last time it happened was between the Wars.

Is it a sign? Are we being punished for our pre-GFC greed? Or is it a pre-Copenhagen message - a little taste of what’s to come if we don’t act on climate change now?

The ABC has been criticised for not mentioning the “M” word in their coverage of the arrest of the alleged terrorists in Victoria, for planning an attack on the Holsworthy army base in Sydney.

There have been calls from media pundits that members of the relevant community condemn terrorism.

As a member of the relevant community I’m not afraid to use the “M” word: Melburnian.

Continue reading "As a proud Melburnian, I denounce all terrorism" »

My grandmother is 92 years old and lives in public housing in Adelaide’s southern suburbs. She is a custodian of wonderful old Australian expressions and a woman of firm and earthy convictions. One of her convictions is that Sydney is basically a dump, “a den of iniquity” as she puts it, its harbour wasted on spivs, tarts, crooks and hookers. A morally-bankrupt dive which has never really shaken off its uncouth convict past, and where no-one of sound mind would choose to live.

I’m starting to think she might be on to something.

This might sound odd given that it’s barely a month since I penned a sweetheart’s letter to my adoptive home of 10 years by listing the 40 things I love about Sydney.

This column is about the one thing I really hate, and am hating more with each passing day. It’s not the roads, it’s not the cost of living, heaven forbid it’s not even the State Government. It’s Sydney’s out-of-control gangster culture, which in the past few months has gone from a relatively controlled background phenomenon to a full-blown cult of violence and vanity, where the authorities have been made to look like fools as the lawless increasingly act as they wish, egged on - most alarmingly - by apparently sane people who come over all giggly and start twirling their hair in the presence of drug-dealers, bikie leaders and stand-over men.

Continue reading "Crims and their clique turn Sydney into an open sewer" »

It’s not exactly a cheery Tuesday morning photo, but there is an intriguing mystery surrounding this skull that washed up on a Sydney beach.

It’s 700 years old, but the trouble is it’s not Aboriginal. So where did it come from? The Manly Daily has the full story here.

As you’ll see from the report, police are appealing for the owner of the skull to come forward. He or she is described as being between four and six years old and having no head.

What do you think is the story behind the skull? Tell us in the comments. Some background on what was going on in the 14th century is here.

THIS is the story of two games of football, the first of which proves that the AFL is an absolute powerhouse which is rightly the envy of sports administrators the world over, the second of which casts doubt on its ability to extend beyond its tribal powerbase in the civilised AFL states.

Carlton-St Kilda at Etihad and Sydney-Collingwood at Stadium Australia.

I was lucky enough to be at the first match. It stands as one of the greatest games of footy I have ever seen. And like many people in Sydney I could have got tickets to the second match but piked due to the drizzle, the fact that it was televised, and also because I (rightly) suspected the Swans would lose.

Continue reading "Sydney’s fair-weather fans no match for Melbourne passion" »

In the movies the “underworld” stays on the right side of uncivilised – law abiding citizens, other than small-business owners in the wrong part of town never have to see it, interact with it, or admit to their parents they may have been out on a date with it once or twice.

But in Sydney, the line between the “underworld” and the rest of has always been a bit blurred.

A couple of years ago it wasn’t a red carpet without at least two members of the Bra Boys. The big PR fish was big wave surfer Koby Abberton, but if you couldn’t get him any old Abberton would do, even Jai, who was tried, but found not guilty of the murder of Anthony Hines.

Continue reading "Sydney’s red carpet running redder than usual" »

As a youngster I used to catch the bus to North Sydney Oval on a Saturday to watch my local team get flogged.

It was like confession for a Catholic – you knew you had to go and you knew what the outcome would be, but somehow you also knew that it was good for you.

Rugby League was always the working man’s sport.

Continue reading "Bring back the Bears and rugby league’s lost soul" »

SOMEWHERE in a cave in Afghanistan, a guy has just got home after a hard day’s jihad, cracked an ice-cold tube of something halal, and is laughing himself silly watching Australia’s Funniest Home Videos.

Not the normal program, where parents deliberately place their toddlers in front of the swing in a bid to win the Sony camcorder.

But the 6pm Sydney news from Monday night, where one of the biggest cities in the southern hemisphere shuddered to a halt because a few power cables cacked themselves and shut down two sub-stations.

And despite our alleged possession of a world’s best practice city-wide warning system, nothing was done to activate it - and, more importantly, nor could it have been. It’s not like we’re not prepared. The authorities have helpfully armed the nation with fridge magnets.

Continue reading "The Joker would have been proud of Sydney’s dark night" »