Sydney: The Story of a City

The great navigator James Cook landed at Botany Bay on Australia's southeastern flank in 1770, deemed the area ""safe and commodious,"" and weighed anchor a week later, cruising right past one of the greatest natural harbors on the planet. It's a characteristic wrinkle in the history of Sydney Harbor, and one among many canny observations found in this enjoyable introduction to Australia's cultural capital. Prolific historian Moorhouse opens with a dazzling overture to the harbor, ""the alpha and the omega"" of Sydney, and rambles through the city's colonial, military, agricultural and immigration highlights, pausing at cultural points of interest like Sydney's famed cricket ground or the extravagant Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade. You can almost taste the local Chardonnay and rock oysters as Moorhouse relishes the urban panorama at Circular Quay, and he's spot on in his splendid, mocking portrait of Sydney's urban professional class, whose members are found sipping lattes at the landmark Queen Victoria Building, with cell-phones buzzing and Filofaxes at the ready. Moorhouse also studies the fierce battles waged over Sydney's future, such as the struggle at Woolloomooloo, one of the city's oldest suburbs, which succumbed to developers in the 1970s and was only partially saved by neighborhood advocates. The book can be scattershot, grazing the city's complex aboriginal roots in one chapter and giving a travel guide gloss on the Royal Botanic Gardens (a ""miracle of tranquillity"") in another. But for a place described as ""the accidental city,"" Moorhouse's generous, ambling spirit is perhaps fitting enough. (June) FYI: This year's Summer Olympic Games will be held in Sydney, in September 2000.