Book Review

‘Mummy, mummy!! Look a drag queen,’ screams a young commuter, and with this exclamation Faro and Wotherspoon commence their enjoyable journey down Oxford Street. They end with a challenging claim: that Oxford Street ‘has come to hold a unique place in Sydney and in the Australian imagination’. This depends, I guess, on the position from which one is viewing Australia. Perhaps not from the vantage points of Queensland or Tasmania? Or perhaps, even Sydney. For it seems that in the twenty-first century, Mardi Gras, while still pulling vast crowds, no longer challenges its audience in the fashion of a decade ago. Some of the legendary Oxford Street gay bars are beginning to look like reluctant survivors of too many bad nights; not instantly recognisable as ‘out there’. And, as the authors hint, their street may soon be launched into yet another cycle of urban regeneration, one far less glamorous than the final phase of Street Seen.	1
The gay era in Oxford Street is perhaps the key theme of this book. But before reaching the current scene, the authors paint a portrait of the street at successive stages in Sydney’s evolution. As the Old South Head Road which linked the town to Macquarie Lighthouse at South Head, as site for convict barracks, as avenue to the beach, gateway to the suburbs, thoroughfare through working-class cluster, crime zone and ethnic quarter, as gentrified and genteel heritage trail and eventually as gay heartland. The historical details of this transition are interspersed with sharp portraits of the parades which have made Oxford Street much more than simply a transport route. There are lively depictions of excursions by the gentry in their Sunday carriages along Old South Head Road; convicts paraded en route to new barracks; St Patrick’s Day Parades, union marches and of course Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.	2
In following these journeys, Street Seen traverses standard phases identified in general histories of Sydney. It localises these to Oxford Street; or that seems the intention. Several of the chapters gesture towards wider change while struggling to identify processes at work along the street itself. A more consistent application of familiar urban history sources might have enlivened the story. The discussion of transport, for example, deals well with metropolitan implications of freeway building. The narrative is less convincing about Oxford Street’s place in the dreams of autophiliac planning boards.	3
The book is fabulously illustrated, with colour shots of Mardi Gras participants granted ample space. These are balanced by many evocative and well-chosen quotations set apart from the narrative chapters. At times illustrations and textual inserts make the historical structure and its stylistic presentation seem a little staid. The book is light on for maps and the reader must wait for nearly 250 pages to find a legible map depicting Oxford Street, and this does no more than identify the locations of gay venues rather than place the street in Sydney’s wider social terrain. The pace does quicken as the authors turn to recent events. It is as if Oxford Street only coheres as true ‘place’ when colonised by Australasia’s gays. This gay boulevard is dissected with a close eye for difference and style. Here the text has an intensity and engagement. The street in the world of the working class, the immigrant and the criminal, pales in comparison. And the gay scene probably could be illuminated more fully had the authors extended their occasional comments on the economic consequences of club, music and style scenes.	4
By taking the street as a focus, Faro and Wotherspoon liberate local history from old strictures. Australian local histories are typically written about local government areas, places which have little recent social or cultural intimacy. Oxford Street tells a different story and it is in the recent past that the street acquires systemic identity. The most obvious methodological comparison is with Max Kelly’s Faces of the Street William Street Sydney 1916. Kelly narrowed his history to several blocks of the street in one year. Street Seen, in taking the longer and wider view, has the advantage of being able to draw out continuities missed by Kelly. But then the book could well benefit from the detailed attention which Max Kelly gave to architecture, building sequences and localised social networks.	5
Towards the conclusion of Street Seen, the authors query the wider cultural acceptance of Sydney’s gay scene. For the most part however, this is a celebratory history. It reflects happily on the rise of the gay street to social and political prominence and on the place of Mardi Gras in Sydney’s popular imagery. Ironically the book reached the market at a time when Street Seen’s defining historical event, the Mardi Gras itself, came under critical scrutiny. Not just diminishing frisson, but costs, audience and political tenor have been queried in the twenty-first century. The authors are perfectly justified in congratulating Sydney’s gays on acquiring their very own street. A more consistently critical reflection on the political economy of that process would have been worthwhile too.	6
University of the Sunshine Coast CHRIS McCONVILLE

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