SYDIVEY SIDE WITH JANET PARR N.Z. wares on display

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32676, 4 August 1971, Page 7

SYDIVEY SIDE WITH JANET PARR N.Z. wares on display

It seemed a bit odd to be trotting through the Wentworth Hotel’s plush, lush acreage to view toy koalas imported into Australia, but it was true enough. And probably not quite such a carrying of coals to Newcastle as it might appear at first glace.

A good many visitors buy souvenirs of Australia that originated in Japan and Northern Ireland and Britain, and probably never know the difference unless they read the labels. But the koalas were handsome enough with long fur in rather smoky colours, quite different from the locally made ones and no two of them seemed to be exactly alike. They were, said the girl in charge, made from New Zealand opossum fur which, she said, achieved two things at once. It kept down the opossums which are a pest and gave New Zealand another product to sell. And, she said, they’re very popular. People buy them because of the long fur and the colouring. There were other koalas around. There’s money in these toy Australian animals apparently. A visiting English friend was asked over $3O for a medium-sized kangaroo with a “joey” in its pouch when he went shopping for a present for his small daughter. That was in a hotel gift shop. He compromised with a smaller one from a chain store and saved about $25. There were kangaroos on show too. You could reasonably expect to find them at the Sydney Gift and Jewellery Trade Fair along with the opals from Andamooka and Lightning Ridge and the Sydney Harbour Beach towels. Greece had some lovely things to show, embroidered bags and splendid heavy jewellery. There were hand-blown Swedish glasses. Philippine carvings, crystal scent sprays from Paris, wine sets, cooking pots and bedcovers from Italy. Spanish

uncomfortable city. It’s too big say many people, and too noisy and it’s getting too dirty. There have been many, many suggestions as to how to make it better by limiting the population or taking the cars out of the centre or doing something else. I have a friend who doesn’t want the population limited—he wants it cut back to what it was about 20 years ago. His theory is that it was' then comfortable and its services were adequate. Now they’re neither, he says. To stretch and increase the existing services to fit an increasing population, he says, is a waste of money when these services could be provided much more cheaply from scratch in new de-centralised towns where, after the establishment of industry and jobs, people would be happy to follow. That’s one man’s private opinion. This exhibition speaks with a voice of more public authority. “People are alarmed at the city’s loss of retail stores, theatres and cinemas. Those government bodies concerned with the earning of foreign exchange from tourism want more tourist hotels and many people want more theatre and entertainment facilities, restaurants, taverns and more shops in office areas. “The people who live or work in Sydney and those who visit it to use its facilities need and demand many things from the City. Many of their needs are common ones; everyone would like to be able to move about the city easily . . .” And a word from the Lord Mayor (Alderman L. Emmet McDermott): “Sydney urgently needs a definitive statement of the kind of city it wants to be. Oves the last 20 years redevelopment has gone on in bits and pieces without benefit of any guiding strategy , . .” GUIDING STRATEGY This exhibition is the definitive statement, the guiding strategy. About a year ago the City Council created a new committee—the City of Sydney Development Committee—which in turn commissioned a group of planners to help in working out a strategic plan. Now the plan is out and, while the full bound copy at $l5 is hardly cheap, it’s a bestseller. The original printing sold out in a day or two. Council staff are kept busy taking orders for the second printing and handing out summaries of the plan at 50 cents a time. The plan is not a hard-and-fast blueprint of how the city will look eventually. It is a planned effort to coordinate the many authorities that now have a hand in saying what comes down or goes up, that plan where people will walk or ride or play. It aims to bring together planning authorities

swords, wood and alabaster, leather and pearls, chryso- ■ prase and black coral. But New Zealand had taken the biggest space to show its wares and filled it with fine prints and pottery and jewellery, stainless steel, candles, wood, fur and leather. There were candles that looked just like the little Maori carved wood figure on my mantelpiece even down to the paua shell eyes—what happens to those when the candle bums down? —a Polynesian chess set, ceramic earthenware murals by Jack Laird and, in a gleaming public exhibition section, jewellery by Kobi Bosshard, Jens Hansen and Paul Popa. Over there too was the new “Showbiz” award given by a city jeweller to be presented each year to the individual judged to have made the greatest contribution to the standing and status of the entertainment! industry in Australia. It will be awarded for the first time this year. , BETTER DESIGN It seemed to me that New Zealand design was even better now than I remembered it and I said so but was met with becoming modesty. I don’t know what New Zealand's exports to Australia are worth but it seems to be a growing market. Down the road a store had classic pleated wool skirts on sale. New Zealand manufacturers were showing at the Boat Show; there are cheeses at the grocers, and strawberries and Chinese gooseberries at the greengrocers. I don’t doubt that I was looking at a fairly hand-picked display, but these days when even kitchens have their “boutiques” and not all the stuff that passes for adornment is good there seems to be a pleasant absence of “tat.” Then it was out of the Wentworth and across town, which can be a time-consum-ing business when every crossing is flashing the red “Don’t Walk” sign. From Phillip Street to the Town Hall there are something like a dozen of them in what isn’t really a very long walk—and the relevance of that will be apparent a little later. Down in the Lower Town Hall there was an exhibition by the Junior Red Cross. They were expecting 10,000 children to see it and my guess is that every one of the 10,000 had something on show. Even one of the organisers couldn’t say how many exhibits there were. “Thousands and thousands,” she said. I was happy to believe her. It wasn’t so much an exhibition as a gigantic montage, an encrustation of exhibits and you couldn’t have stuck the proverbial pin between them. The wool sweaters overlapped the crayon drawings; the crochet ponchos were 10 feet up, the jars of jam and jelly jostled the home-made cakes. Yet I doubt if any of the children who put all those thousands of childhours into making the things would miss finding their own. Upstairs in the panelled halls of the main building there was another exhibition with no space problems. There were about a dozen boards, maps, plans, photographs, fairly austere academic looking stuff and not much of it. But the thinking behind it was and is, big. There are plenty of people who will tell you that Sydney is not a very nice place to live. And there are plenty of days when I would agree with them. As I said before, just walking through it some days can be timewasting and frustrating, tiring both for the feet and the eyes. It can be a very

and the providers of services in an attempt to let the left hand know what the right hand is doing about something so that the whole thing can be done harmoniously and constructively. It goes a lot further than that with detailed over-all planning for this area of 3310 acres that is the city proper. It contains most of what, for most people, is Sydney. Briefly, the plan divides itself into four objectives—management, accessibility, diversity and environment. Each objective breaks down again into four policies under headings such as administration, city structure, parking, pedestrians, open space, pollution control, residential life, leisure and learning, urban design. Each policy breaks down further into a series of detailed action priorities, dealing with specific areas, specific roads, specific end products. The year 2000 A.D. seems to have been picked, if only in the public imagination, as the date for the complete end product. And the end product? Without going into detail it has some pretty exciting things in it. A lot more open space is included for a wooded area for pony riding and adventure trails right over the harbour if the Navy will give back the Garden Island and Rushcutters Bay depots; a series of pedestrian malls and over and under walkways right through the city from the Quay to Central Station. The fact that pedestrians do exist has been at last clearly spelt out along with their right and need of a space of their own separate from vehicles. The good old buildings and the interesting areas will be saved; more and better public transport with, perhaps, little electric trolleys for getting around certain areas quickly; some restrictions on cars and goods vehicles; concessions for builders willing, to give something back in providing open space and people facilities; a reduction of noise nuisance and pollution of air and water; leafy boulevards; places for drinking coffee and sitting in the sun and watching the passing scene; quiet areas and areas where more people can live more pleasantly within easy reach of everything the city has to offer. There’s an odd thoughtful touch too—the provision of layback kerbs and ramps for wheelchairs and prams in the streets where needed, and hand rails and aids for the disabled in major buildings. Generally, the plan has been very well received with people seeking to add to it rather than detract. Another planner has already proposed a major addition across the Harbour and outside the actual City Council limits. He wants an end to Luna Park, the amusement park close to the other end of the Bridge. This space could, he says, hold thousands of parked cars whose owners would then go on by ferry—just as they did in the old days—cutting down congestion on the Bridge. There’s no doubt that Sydney in 2000 A.D. could be a much better place to live if it ail happens. I’m certainly watching with a lot of interest. The middle of the road outside my house is the city boundary, so what goes on across the street is very much my business. And I can’t say that the neighbours over the way are ideal at the moment But now our street is scheduled to be one of those wide leafy boulevards which, provided no merry boulevardier decides to knock my house down to achieve it, will suit me very nicely. So I think I’ll go out and finish the railings I started painting six months ago. We could yet find ourselves keeping up with the Jones’s.