Sydney Bridge Upside Down (1968) is set in Calliope Bay on the North Island of New Zealand in the
mid-1960s during the summer school holidays. The narrator is high school
student, Harry Baird, who hangs around with his younger brother Cal and
next-door neighbour Dibs Kelly. His mother, Janet, has gone to the city, and
his father, Frank, who has a leg missing and gets around on crutches, works
during the day. Caroline, his 18-year-old cousin from the city, has come to
stay.
The butcher, Mr.
Wiggins, is interested in Caroline. So is Sam Phelps, a scar-faced old man, who
looks after the wharf. And so is Dibs’ older brother Buster Kelly. And Caroline
is such a flirtatious tease. Susan Prosser, a ‘skinny, snoopy girl’ in his
class, watches everything from the fence that divides her place and the Baird
family home. Does she see Harry, Cal, and Caroline running around naked in the
mornings? Susan hints that she did.
Harry starts his tale
with Sam Phelps and his horse, Sydney Bridge Upside Down. Sydney Bridge Upside
Down is an old and saggy horse with a back shaped like an upside down Sydney
Harbour Bridge. ‘They were there for all of the terrible happenings up the coast
that summer, always somewhere around.’ Sam was mysterious. He once
lived in a good house with his daughter, but his house was destroyed, and now he lived a sad, lonely life. Sam found the dead bodies in ‘the works’ – first
one, then the other.
‘The works’ is the old
disused slaughterhouse. The word ‘slaughterhouse’ is never mentioned in the
novel. It was once where animals were slaughtered, including horses, for the
frozen meat trade – ‘the basis of the nascent New Zealand economy.’ But it is here,
in a chute in the killing-room, where Harry found a pistol.
Calliope Bay is a
declining rural coastal town with a clifftop cave and a dying port – a place
where the local teacher, Mr. Dalloway, said was ‘on the edge of the world.’ Susan
said that Mr. Dalloway had gone to the city for the holiday and was never coming back. What
troubled people most when they first came to Calliope Bay was the
loneliness. ‘No part of the country, of the world even, seems so faraway
as this. And when people are faraway and lonely they often behave curiously,’
thinks Harry.
But Harry too, admits
he has dark days. ‘I felt gloomy, mad at myself, sick of everything. Everything
was in a mess. What might happen now was that everything would turn black for
me. On and off, maybe twice a year, I had black times’ that lasted two or three
days.
This is not only a
coming-of-age story, it is also a who-done-it thriller. It is sad and
suppressive ‘slaughterhouse’ fiction. Every page has to be read twice, for
Harry never actually spells things out clearly: nothing is overt – there is
always an undertone of tension, sexuality, and secrecy; a subtle suggestion; people
not where they should be and where they shouldn’t be. It is a well-crafted
sinister tale.
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