Sydney

'No other city was born under so cruel a star, but no other city now gives the impressionable visitor such a feeling of still boundless optimism. This is the great city of Sydney, as summed up by Geoffrey Moorhouse in his brilliant history of Australia's principal metropolis. In a broad sweep he takes the reader from long before the arrival of the First Fleet loaded with convicts in 1788, to the preparation for the Olympic Games in 2000. In between he also describes and analyses the life of Sydney as we reach a new century - its aboriginal community and wealth of prehistoric art, its complex racial mix, its great sporting traditions, its cultural aspirations which produced the glorious Opera House, its crucial function as a seaport and its value to the naval strategists, its authoritarian and intolerant streak, its corruptions and mismanagements, its long political loyalty to the Australian Labor Party, its cherished rivalry with Melbourne, its generosities and its tremendous vitality, its many sensual delights. His descriptions of the Botanic Gardens, of the Royal Easter Show, of the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, of ANZAC Day, are as vivid as anything Moorhouse has ever written. But above all there is Sydney's greatest and most incomparable heirloom, its alpha and its omega - 'the most beautiful working harbour in the world'. Geoffrey Moorhouse's Sydney may be seen as a sequel to his highly acclaimed earlier books on Calcutta and New York. Drawing on a lifetime's acquaintance with great cities of the world, he concludes that Sydney represents 'our very last chance to get the urban thing more or less right'; the opportunity for a great polygot community to live together in harmony.