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Mirror Sydney: An Atlas of Reflections
‘These places were like resistors on a circuit board. My thoughts stuck to them. They had auras: each gave me a strong feeling that there was, embedded amid the everyday, an order of unpredictable things.’
In her delicately wrought essays and hand-drawn maps, Vanessa Berry describes her encounters with unusual, forgotten or abandoned places in the city in which she was born and raised, using their details to open up repositories of significance, and to create an alternative city, a Mirror Sydney, illuminated by memory and imagination. She writes at a time when Sydney is being disassembled and rebuilt at an alarming rate. Her determined observation of the over-looked and the odd, the hidden and the enigmatic – precisely those details whose existence is most threatened by development – is an act of preservation in its own right, a testament to what she calls ‘the radical potential of taking notice’.
Berry’s work combines a low-fi DIY approach with an awareness of the tradition of philosophical urban investigation. Her unique style of map illustration was developed through the making of zines and artworks, collaging detailed line drawings with text from typewriters and Letraset.
In her delicately wrought essays and hand-drawn maps, Vanessa Berry describes her encounters with unusual, forgotten or abandoned places in the city in which she was born and raised, using their details to open up repositories of significance, and to create an alternative city, a Mirror Sydney, illuminated by memory and imagination. She writes at a time when Sydney is being disassembled and rebuilt at an alarming rate. Her determined observation of the over-looked and the odd, the hidden and the enigmatic – precisely those details whose existence is most threatened by development – is an act of preservation in its own right, a testament to what she calls ‘the radical potential of taking notice’.
Berry’s work combines a low-fi DIY approach with an awareness of the tradition of philosophical urban investigation. Her unique style of map illustration was developed through the making of zines and artworks, collaging detailed line drawings with text from typewriters and Letraset.
320 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 2017
9 people are currently reading
233 people want to read
About the author
Vanessa Berry
11 books23 followersVanessa Berry is a Sydney writer and artist who works with history, memory and archives. She is the author of the memoir Ninety 9 (Giramondo 2013), the essay collection Strawberry Hills Forever (Local Consumption 2007), and the zine I Am a Camera (1999–2017). Since 2012 she has been writing the blog Mirror Sydney, on which this book is based, exploring the city’s marginal places and undercurrents. Her zines and hand-drawn maps have been exhibited in the Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Gallery of Australia and the Museum of Sydney.
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November 14, 2017
‘Cities are made up of histories and memories as much as they are made up of their physical environments.’
This book is based on Vanessa Berry’s blog Mirror Sydney (https://mirrorsydney.wordpress.com/) which she has been working on for the past five years. I discovered the blog after reading this book: it is fabulous. But back to the book. In a series of thoughtful anecdotes, accompanied by hand-drawn maps, Ms Berry explores different aspects of Sydney. There are overlooked places, and odd places. There are amusement parks (many of which are now defunct); there are time-capsule stores (such as Ligne Noire in Parramatta Road); there’s the memorial (in Kurnell, built in 1870) to Captain Cook’s landing; there’s reference to a coal mine on the Balmain peninsula. As Ms Berry writes:
‘Cities are ever-changing entities, but in Sydney’s drive towards reinvention there was this time something especially rapacious about the rate and scale of change. The city as I knew it was being overwritten as fast as I could chronicle it.’
There are glimpses into previous plans for the rail network, to the disused platforms 26 and 27 at Central Station, to the plans for Westconnex.
I also enjoyed Ms Berry’s journey through the arcades in the outer suburbs of Sydney, with her reference to Walter Bejamin’s ‘Arcades Project’. There may have been romance in Benjamin’s Parisian arcades, but there is little romance in the more utilitarian arcades visited in outer Sydney. And yet, the history is interesting even where there are questions unanswered. What has dictated the shape of a roof? Whose initials appear above the entry to a shop? What dreams were represented in some of the arcade names, or stores?
I’m on more familiar ground along Parramatta Road. My husband has told me of Parramatta Road when he grew up in Leichhardt during the 1950s and 1960s. My own first visit was in 1970, but I’ve been there frequently enough to witness some of the changes.
‘There are a number of time-capsule stores along Parramatta Road. There is the never open but fully stocked Ligne Noire perfumerie, like a corner-store version of the Mary-Celeste, the ship discovered in the Atlantic Ocean abandoned with everything onboard intact.’
Ms Berry’s journeys through Sydney, across the Cumberland Plain and towards the Blue Mountains, are about history. The journeys show changes in land use, and document (in their own way) dispossession. Dispossession? Yes. And not just of the original inhabitants. As land use in Sydney has changed during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, people in search of affordable housing are having to move further and further from the city centre. Many of the low-income housing options once available are being developed into much higher cost housing.
I enjoyed reading this book. To me, it is an invitation to think about the places depicted, about the multiple factors that shape the city of Sydney, as well as the contrasts between beauty and ugliness.
Ms Berry writes:
‘What I hope for is that the places in Mirror Sydney, at the moments at which I encountered them, will remain in collective memory, as a record of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Sydney. This version of the city, an uneven landscape of harmonious and discordant places, deserves this careful scrutiny, for it is a complex city that folds many times and memories within it.’
I agree.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
This book is based on Vanessa Berry’s blog Mirror Sydney (https://mirrorsydney.wordpress.com/) which she has been working on for the past five years. I discovered the blog after reading this book: it is fabulous. But back to the book. In a series of thoughtful anecdotes, accompanied by hand-drawn maps, Ms Berry explores different aspects of Sydney. There are overlooked places, and odd places. There are amusement parks (many of which are now defunct); there are time-capsule stores (such as Ligne Noire in Parramatta Road); there’s the memorial (in Kurnell, built in 1870) to Captain Cook’s landing; there’s reference to a coal mine on the Balmain peninsula. As Ms Berry writes:
‘Cities are ever-changing entities, but in Sydney’s drive towards reinvention there was this time something especially rapacious about the rate and scale of change. The city as I knew it was being overwritten as fast as I could chronicle it.’
There are glimpses into previous plans for the rail network, to the disused platforms 26 and 27 at Central Station, to the plans for Westconnex.
I also enjoyed Ms Berry’s journey through the arcades in the outer suburbs of Sydney, with her reference to Walter Bejamin’s ‘Arcades Project’. There may have been romance in Benjamin’s Parisian arcades, but there is little romance in the more utilitarian arcades visited in outer Sydney. And yet, the history is interesting even where there are questions unanswered. What has dictated the shape of a roof? Whose initials appear above the entry to a shop? What dreams were represented in some of the arcade names, or stores?
I’m on more familiar ground along Parramatta Road. My husband has told me of Parramatta Road when he grew up in Leichhardt during the 1950s and 1960s. My own first visit was in 1970, but I’ve been there frequently enough to witness some of the changes.
‘There are a number of time-capsule stores along Parramatta Road. There is the never open but fully stocked Ligne Noire perfumerie, like a corner-store version of the Mary-Celeste, the ship discovered in the Atlantic Ocean abandoned with everything onboard intact.’
Ms Berry’s journeys through Sydney, across the Cumberland Plain and towards the Blue Mountains, are about history. The journeys show changes in land use, and document (in their own way) dispossession. Dispossession? Yes. And not just of the original inhabitants. As land use in Sydney has changed during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, people in search of affordable housing are having to move further and further from the city centre. Many of the low-income housing options once available are being developed into much higher cost housing.
I enjoyed reading this book. To me, it is an invitation to think about the places depicted, about the multiple factors that shape the city of Sydney, as well as the contrasts between beauty and ugliness.
Ms Berry writes:
‘What I hope for is that the places in Mirror Sydney, at the moments at which I encountered them, will remain in collective memory, as a record of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Sydney. This version of the city, an uneven landscape of harmonious and discordant places, deserves this careful scrutiny, for it is a complex city that folds many times and memories within it.’
I agree.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
November 14, 2017
I recently read Vanessa Berry's Strawberry Hills Forever (reviewed here) while I waited for this work, Mirror Sydney, to be published. This most recent work surpasses the former, and scratches a psychogeographic itch - think Ackroyd or Sinclair - that I hadn't realised I had.
Throughout the work - a collection of meditations on aspects of Sydney in histories distant and near - there's a palpable feeling of love, even for aesthetic ugliness or bureaucratic shortsightedness. There's tributes to clocktowers, to the Old Side of Hornsby, to dams and spillways, to forgotten rivers and buried elephants. Reading it is like catching wind of a juicy piece of town-planning gossip dispensed by Nan over some fresh butter bickies: while there's references aplenty at the book's conclusion, the insertion of hand-drawn maps, engraved with Letraset and typewriter characters makes it feel as if you're reading a kind of family secret.
Some of the pieces cover ground that's been surveyed in Berry's previous work, and some of the pieces have appeared elsewhere before, but I found this collection fit together more solidly than Strawberry Hills Forever. There's a sense of rigour applied here, though not enough to make the prose like reading sawdust. Knowledge is parcelled out as it's needed, like trivia in a conversation, and always at hand is a recognition of the traditional owners of the locales Berry profiles. It mightn't be much, but it means the reader is forced to consider the ramifications of invasion and settlement on Sydney. 40,000 years is a long, long time.
I guess the reason the book appeals to me is that so much of my life and experience seems to fit with those of the author. I spent formative years mere streets away in Turramurra (and while at uni worked at the lamentable Turramurra Village Cakes with a stoner baker who lived upstairs), and have spent more recent times living in Hurlstone Park, two locations covered in the book. The gift of reading this thing is the feeling of familiarity it conveys: especially when speaking of things lost.
Though I am sure I've never met the author, there's a lot in here I've experienced, or seen: the vicissitudes of inner-west rentals, the various haunts of the student (or student-budgeted). There's a lot of stuff in here that fits in with my own periods of wandering parts of Sydney, and I guess this is the book's real appeal: it has a dose of history wrapped in the stuff of memory. Berry provides historical framework which then acts as a sort of aide-memoire.
A lot of care has gone into the creation of this work, and it's nice to see a publisher willing to put such effort into something that is, undoubtedly, a labour of love. This is a wonderful book for anyone who's lived in this grubby old town and loved it anyway. I hope that it's the first of more: the author's peregrinations through the back-streets and hidden spaces are intriguing. Reading Mirror Sydney I'm filled with a longing for the past - both that of the city and of myself - and I want to hang out there just a little more.
(I would recommend anyone whose desires for exploration of space are piqued by this book check out photographer Lyndal Irons' work, particularly On Parramatta Road.)
Throughout the work - a collection of meditations on aspects of Sydney in histories distant and near - there's a palpable feeling of love, even for aesthetic ugliness or bureaucratic shortsightedness. There's tributes to clocktowers, to the Old Side of Hornsby, to dams and spillways, to forgotten rivers and buried elephants. Reading it is like catching wind of a juicy piece of town-planning gossip dispensed by Nan over some fresh butter bickies: while there's references aplenty at the book's conclusion, the insertion of hand-drawn maps, engraved with Letraset and typewriter characters makes it feel as if you're reading a kind of family secret.
Some of the pieces cover ground that's been surveyed in Berry's previous work, and some of the pieces have appeared elsewhere before, but I found this collection fit together more solidly than Strawberry Hills Forever. There's a sense of rigour applied here, though not enough to make the prose like reading sawdust. Knowledge is parcelled out as it's needed, like trivia in a conversation, and always at hand is a recognition of the traditional owners of the locales Berry profiles. It mightn't be much, but it means the reader is forced to consider the ramifications of invasion and settlement on Sydney. 40,000 years is a long, long time.
I guess the reason the book appeals to me is that so much of my life and experience seems to fit with those of the author. I spent formative years mere streets away in Turramurra (and while at uni worked at the lamentable Turramurra Village Cakes with a stoner baker who lived upstairs), and have spent more recent times living in Hurlstone Park, two locations covered in the book. The gift of reading this thing is the feeling of familiarity it conveys: especially when speaking of things lost.
Though I am sure I've never met the author, there's a lot in here I've experienced, or seen: the vicissitudes of inner-west rentals, the various haunts of the student (or student-budgeted). There's a lot of stuff in here that fits in with my own periods of wandering parts of Sydney, and I guess this is the book's real appeal: it has a dose of history wrapped in the stuff of memory. Berry provides historical framework which then acts as a sort of aide-memoire.
A lot of care has gone into the creation of this work, and it's nice to see a publisher willing to put such effort into something that is, undoubtedly, a labour of love. This is a wonderful book for anyone who's lived in this grubby old town and loved it anyway. I hope that it's the first of more: the author's peregrinations through the back-streets and hidden spaces are intriguing. Reading Mirror Sydney I'm filled with a longing for the past - both that of the city and of myself - and I want to hang out there just a little more.
(I would recommend anyone whose desires for exploration of space are piqued by this book check out photographer Lyndal Irons' work, particularly On Parramatta Road.)
December 10, 2017
Most of the reviews I’ve seen of Vanessa Berry’s Mirror Sydney are written by Sydneysiders, or by people familiar with the city if not the alternative city she evokes. Bradley Garrett at the SMH is a recent arrival from London, so for him the book offers an opportunity to explore his new home. Louis Nowra in The (paywalled) Australian finds the book Proustian; Tom Patterson at The Newtown Review of Books is unabashed about the homage to the city he loves.
But what if the reader isn’t a Sydneysider? What does the book have to offer someone not familiar with the city?
I think what it offers is a different way of looking at the built environment. Berry is a rebellious flaneur, presenting ragtag and piecemeal suburban Sydney, most often in dingy and abandoned places off the beaten track. She’s interested in the recent past in suburban ‘ruins’ where change and development swamp, but don’t entirely obliterate, what was there before. She finds these places disruptive…
It’s these details that explain why the book is illustrated with hand-drawings for each chapter, not exactly maps, but not collages either. (You get a sense of them from the cover design). Taking photos simply wouldn’t work. The book celebrates its idiosyncratic focus with highly selective images for each chapter. The reader begins to see with Vanessa Barry’s eye.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/12/10/m...
But what if the reader isn’t a Sydneysider? What does the book have to offer someone not familiar with the city?
I think what it offers is a different way of looking at the built environment. Berry is a rebellious flaneur, presenting ragtag and piecemeal suburban Sydney, most often in dingy and abandoned places off the beaten track. She’s interested in the recent past in suburban ‘ruins’ where change and development swamp, but don’t entirely obliterate, what was there before. She finds these places disruptive…
Think of everything that makes up a city like Sydney. The land underlying it, the hills and valleys and waterways, then the buildings and the infrastructure, the roads and the railways. Then the living beings which animate the urban scene, the people, the animals, the trees. Then think of the details in between, all the layers, all the particulars, intricate and ever-changing.
This is a practically impossible exercise. Cities are complex entities, made up of details in unlimited abundance. (p.209)
It’s these details that explain why the book is illustrated with hand-drawings for each chapter, not exactly maps, but not collages either. (You get a sense of them from the cover design). Taking photos simply wouldn’t work. The book celebrates its idiosyncratic focus with highly selective images for each chapter. The reader begins to see with Vanessa Barry’s eye.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/12/10/m...
February 13, 2023
picturesque love letter to Sydney, its esoterica and local histories. really helped fuel my ardent Sydney ‘patriotism’ whilst everyone was travelling. never knew how little i knew about my lifelong home !!
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February 20, 2023This is one of those books thats charming and interesting but probably would of been 100000% more enjoyable if you are more familiar with sydney. because the parts I enjoyed most were about the areas I know better. that said, still some really great things in here!
Found Berry's writing style super easy to engage with and she's able to paint a picture well. Some of her descriptions of place and atmosphere are very vivid. It made this so charming, and very immersive. Of course some chapters were better than others, but overall really good
Found Berry's writing style super easy to engage with and she's able to paint a picture well. Some of her descriptions of place and atmosphere are very vivid. It made this so charming, and very immersive. Of course some chapters were better than others, but overall really good
January 15, 2018
Vanessa Berry is a life-long resident of Sydney with an eye for detail in the suburban landscape. In this book, she chronicles the underside of the city - the details that most people don't notice. She describes the ghost signs from businesses long gone, the memorial shops belonging to people who have moved on (or died), the unused tunnels beneath the city.
It is a fascinating journey, beautifully illustrated with hand-drawn mud maps and little detailed drawings of the places she describes. It is a true delight to delve into, and perhaps will inspire the reader to look beyond the obvious in their own part of Sydney (or elsewhere).
It is a fascinating journey, beautifully illustrated with hand-drawn mud maps and little detailed drawings of the places she describes. It is a true delight to delve into, and perhaps will inspire the reader to look beyond the obvious in their own part of Sydney (or elsewhere).
April 15, 2018
Mirror Sydney documents the overlooked and underappreciated parts of the city. Short essays fold together history, change, poetry, and a keen eye for detail. Berry captures her mission early in the book: 'This way of knowing Sydney involves a willing subversion of its identity, turning away from the monumental to the marginal.'
The logic that pulls together some disparate ideas tends to be surprising: shopping arcades, copies of the Harbour Bridge, the ways that animals make lives in the urban and suburban landscape.
Each essay is followed by a hand-drawn map, and the detail in these is a real treat. Playful but also very serious and important. This is a new favourite for me.
The logic that pulls together some disparate ideas tends to be surprising: shopping arcades, copies of the Harbour Bridge, the ways that animals make lives in the urban and suburban landscape.
Each essay is followed by a hand-drawn map, and the detail in these is a real treat. Playful but also very serious and important. This is a new favourite for me.
January 25, 2018
Vanessa Berry has produced a labour of love, and Sydney is her mysterious & playful child.
Berry’s dream-like descriptions of Sydney’s hidden oddities are an interesting mix of melancholy charm and fractured hope, as she traverses such locations as underground tunnels to forgotten amusements parks.
Who is Vanessa Berry and why is her narration deeply intoxicating?
She is an urban explorer, drifting between the lesser-known gems of a changing city. She is the museum curator, and we are the artefacts she’s catalogued in Mirror Sydney.
Berry’s dream-like descriptions of Sydney’s hidden oddities are an interesting mix of melancholy charm and fractured hope, as she traverses such locations as underground tunnels to forgotten amusements parks.
Who is Vanessa Berry and why is her narration deeply intoxicating?
She is an urban explorer, drifting between the lesser-known gems of a changing city. She is the museum curator, and we are the artefacts she’s catalogued in Mirror Sydney.
August 2, 2023
3.5/5. This was hard to read now I no longer live in Sydney, both because it made me homesick and because the places it describes are so specific. This is a book about memory, and I don't remember enough of Sydney for every piece in this to be meaningful to me. The details Vanessa talks about are hard to picture once you're not among them every day. It made me realise how easy it is to not pay attention to your place, to not explore outside your bubble, and to lose important parts of the whole as a result.
January 9, 2019
The hidden, overlooked and long forgotten areas of Sydney are explored in Vanessa Berry's beautifully rendered essays and detailed hand drawings.
June 24, 2018
Loved this book!
December 27, 2017
Having grown up in Sydney and sadly remember the afternoon Daily Mirror (and The Sun) this ws like walking down memory lane for me.
The book reveals the complexities of the city and that it is NOT all about the harbour...and that is not in any way detracting from its stunning beauty!
The book reveals the complexities of the city and that it is NOT all about the harbour...and that is not in any way detracting from its stunning beauty!
January 10, 2018
I really liked this observant view of Sydney. Vanessa Berry writes carefully and very well. She is also a lovely artist - the maps, and the illustrations within the maps, are beautifully done. Some triggered memories, like The White Elephant Op Shop at Chatswood, the African Lion Safari and the Bear of Macquarie University. Lots more, too, and a lot I never knew. I couldn’t help smiling.
Berry manages to see the odd and quirky in our everyday urban surroundings. From objects as seemingly mundane as public notice boards and public clocks to monuments and statues which we take for granted. Sometimes melancholy and reflective, Berry frequently highlights what has disappeared from the built environment - businesses, advertising signs, people, the natural environment and the built environment.
The kitschy and barely noticed of yesterday become memories. “Eyesores of past eras now beautiful.” The “mirror” of the title is as much for ourselves as it is for Sydney the city, as this is a book of memories for those who have grown up in suburban Sydney.
I loved reading this and hope for a sequel.
Berry manages to see the odd and quirky in our everyday urban surroundings. From objects as seemingly mundane as public notice boards and public clocks to monuments and statues which we take for granted. Sometimes melancholy and reflective, Berry frequently highlights what has disappeared from the built environment - businesses, advertising signs, people, the natural environment and the built environment.
The kitschy and barely noticed of yesterday become memories. “Eyesores of past eras now beautiful.” The “mirror” of the title is as much for ourselves as it is for Sydney the city, as this is a book of memories for those who have grown up in suburban Sydney.
I loved reading this and hope for a sequel.
November 28, 2024
Aside from Berry’s chapters about places that I already had relatively strong personal attachments to (St James tunnels, St Peters, Wishing Tree, Parramatta Road), I was most invested in the parts of this book where her personal voice came through (e.g. when she decides to interpret vague details of the seemingly mysterious locations she explores and when she reflects on her own past and emerging personal experiences with the spaces she writes about).
While observing her illustrations and reading her descriptions of Sydney’s train tracks, tunnels, powerlines, bridges and telephone towers, I found myself imagining Berry entering the frame of Gus Van Sant’s film Paranoid Park: Christopher Doyle’s camera sitting on a tripod - forgotten amidst the rush of the day, but still recording. She wanders through after all the actors have gone home, examining remnants of the set and natural environment, trying to decipher the plot of the scene filmed that day. For the most part, she misguesses. Instead, she creates a whole new and equally vibrant story through her contemplation.
I am very keen to explore the rest of Berry’s works.
While observing her illustrations and reading her descriptions of Sydney’s train tracks, tunnels, powerlines, bridges and telephone towers, I found myself imagining Berry entering the frame of Gus Van Sant’s film Paranoid Park: Christopher Doyle’s camera sitting on a tripod - forgotten amidst the rush of the day, but still recording. She wanders through after all the actors have gone home, examining remnants of the set and natural environment, trying to decipher the plot of the scene filmed that day. For the most part, she misguesses. Instead, she creates a whole new and equally vibrant story through her contemplation.
I am very keen to explore the rest of Berry’s works.
February 29, 2024
A decade or so ago it felt like every person in the whole world was becoming a flaneur. The word must have started popping up in the New Yorker or London Review of Books or wherever the bourgeoise get their ideas from and then the next thing you know. BAM! Every person who was walking anywhere was a flaneur. Every walk needed to have some bullshit philosophising with it. And what's worse was that the original flaneurs didn't feel the need to share their milquetoast observations with everyone, they were content to frolic in their own little psychogeographic spaces but now people's dogs have Instagram accounts. Dog's don't have opposable thumbs so I'm pretty sure they're actually not the dog's accounts. And people's babies have Instagram accounts and while the babies do have opposable thumbs, they certainly don't have the mental capacity to put together a witty caption and they're surely yet to be filled with the drive to feed the 'gram.
I'm rambling.
Despite the above, Vanessa Berry actually suits the word flaneur. Her observations are insightful and her prose is easy to read. You can tell Berry is a bit of an odd bod, has a strong dose of alternative to her but Mirror Sydney is a neat book. Berry has preserved parts of Sydney in words for future generations to unearth.
She rightly identifies that the built environment is relentlessly changing and that there are important features that need to be preserved in the cultural memory if nothing else.
Berry's alternative leanings guide a lot of what she finds interesting. You won't see a single sports field or stadium in here. Despite sport being embedded deep in the heart of Sydney, she only briefly mentions an abandoned velodrome, which is interesting to her as a space completely devoid of its sporting nature. There's also more of a focus on the built environment than the social fabric that fills that environment. There's definitely some interesting characters that crop up but the stars of the show are always the buildings, monuments, plants, walkways, parks, roads, creeks, and tracks. Berry imbues a lot of these inanimate objects with their own quirky characteristics, such that they often feel more real than the people who interact with them. It's understandable when so many of these objects outlast the people who first created them.
At times Mirror Sydney does feel a little bit like a collection of blogs turned into a book. That's probably because a lot of these pieces were originally blogs, and those that weren't come from a similar writing tradition. It does make the book feel a little bit piecemeal. The themes don't really create any structure. Which means that reading the book cover to cover is almost not necessary, better perhaps to dip in and out when you're looking for a little interesting piece about Sydney.
The drawings are cute but aren't really constructed in a way that actually helps you conceptualise things while reading, unless you already know what Berry is writing about. That is actually the key issue with the book. If you aren't a Sydneysider a lot of this book will feel almost nonsensical. Even for someone born and raised in Sydney there'll be moments you'll be completely incapable of imagining or picturing where she's talking about. The reading is so much richer when you recognise the spaces and Berry is pointing out the little things you may have overlooked, that transform otherwise mundane areas into little magical kingdoms.
I've been critical of the string of Sydney biographies I've been reading this year for not capturing what it's like to live in Sydney. Berry certainly has moments where she identifies exactly what life is like as a Sydneysider but these are largely restricted to places she's lived herself. But this book will be read in the future not for it's depiction of what life was like in Sydney in the early twenty-first century but what the place was like.
I'm rambling.
Despite the above, Vanessa Berry actually suits the word flaneur. Her observations are insightful and her prose is easy to read. You can tell Berry is a bit of an odd bod, has a strong dose of alternative to her but Mirror Sydney is a neat book. Berry has preserved parts of Sydney in words for future generations to unearth.
‘What I hope for is that the places in Mirror Sydney, at the moments at which I encountered them, will remain in collective memory, as a record of late twentieth and early twenty-first-century Sydney. This version of the city, an uneven landscape of harmonious and discordant places, deserves this careful scrutiny, for it is a complex city that folds many times and memories within it.’
She rightly identifies that the built environment is relentlessly changing and that there are important features that need to be preserved in the cultural memory if nothing else.
Berry's alternative leanings guide a lot of what she finds interesting. You won't see a single sports field or stadium in here. Despite sport being embedded deep in the heart of Sydney, she only briefly mentions an abandoned velodrome, which is interesting to her as a space completely devoid of its sporting nature. There's also more of a focus on the built environment than the social fabric that fills that environment. There's definitely some interesting characters that crop up but the stars of the show are always the buildings, monuments, plants, walkways, parks, roads, creeks, and tracks. Berry imbues a lot of these inanimate objects with their own quirky characteristics, such that they often feel more real than the people who interact with them. It's understandable when so many of these objects outlast the people who first created them.
At times Mirror Sydney does feel a little bit like a collection of blogs turned into a book. That's probably because a lot of these pieces were originally blogs, and those that weren't come from a similar writing tradition. It does make the book feel a little bit piecemeal. The themes don't really create any structure. Which means that reading the book cover to cover is almost not necessary, better perhaps to dip in and out when you're looking for a little interesting piece about Sydney.
The drawings are cute but aren't really constructed in a way that actually helps you conceptualise things while reading, unless you already know what Berry is writing about. That is actually the key issue with the book. If you aren't a Sydneysider a lot of this book will feel almost nonsensical. Even for someone born and raised in Sydney there'll be moments you'll be completely incapable of imagining or picturing where she's talking about. The reading is so much richer when you recognise the spaces and Berry is pointing out the little things you may have overlooked, that transform otherwise mundane areas into little magical kingdoms.
I've been critical of the string of Sydney biographies I've been reading this year for not capturing what it's like to live in Sydney. Berry certainly has moments where she identifies exactly what life is like as a Sydneysider but these are largely restricted to places she's lived herself. But this book will be read in the future not for it's depiction of what life was like in Sydney in the early twenty-first century but what the place was like.
July 6, 2018
I used to read Vanessa Berry's zines, The sound of shattered teacups and I am a camera. I definitely had the one where she rated all the opshops in Sydney.
It's so weird to be immersed in someone else's version of your city, something that you think you know so thoroughly but don't because cities are, by definition, too big for that.
The Sydney in Mirror Sydney is untidy and messy but contained in a strange way too, because there are very few people. When there are, they're the benign sort of eccentric. Colourful characters. It's very different to the Sydney in Maxine Beneba Clarke's The Hate Race, which is about an entirely different sort of history, and the other sorts of legacies people leave behind.
Two books about my city. Two parallel universes, familiar ones, that will stay with me awhile.
(Also odd to see an old uni tutor and a handful of artworlders in the acknowledgments. It is a small, strange world.)
It's so weird to be immersed in someone else's version of your city, something that you think you know so thoroughly but don't because cities are, by definition, too big for that.
The Sydney in Mirror Sydney is untidy and messy but contained in a strange way too, because there are very few people. When there are, they're the benign sort of eccentric. Colourful characters. It's very different to the Sydney in Maxine Beneba Clarke's The Hate Race, which is about an entirely different sort of history, and the other sorts of legacies people leave behind.
Two books about my city. Two parallel universes, familiar ones, that will stay with me awhile.
(Also odd to see an old uni tutor and a handful of artworlders in the acknowledgments. It is a small, strange world.)
June 22, 2018
Vanessa Berry's Mirror Sydney is simply a joy to read. This is a book for anyone who has ever fallen in love with a city, wondered about the history of public clocks, thought about abandoned theme parks or enjoyed cruising suburban arcades. Even though she has extraordinary historical skills, ferreting out information about the most unlikely byways and corners of Sydney's past, you never feel like you are being lectured to. It's a magical mystery tour and Berry is the perfect quirky guide. The romance of musty opshops, the encroaching wild as it moves across abandoned suburban lots, the idiosyncrasies of suburban fountains all come together to create a city both familiar and strange. Berry's hand-drawn maps add to the sense of home stitched adventure. My favourite book of the past year - don't wander without it.
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December 17, 2025** Some thoughts: 4:02PM (GMT+11) | Sydney, Australia (seat reclined in the car, waiting for the girlfriend to finish work, and taking the opportunity to comment on books I decided to put down [pt. 2]) **
In theory, I love the idea of a book about Sydney, exploring all its wonderful quirks - some hidden, others in plain sight. There's a truly admirable dedication to exploring these rich pockets of Sydney that Vanessa Berry proudly showcases in Mirror Sydney; however, I feel in the absence of pictures, I struggled to focus and maintain interest in the various places that Berry describes with such care and affection. Nonetheless, I'm glad, thanks to exploring Berry's blog of the same name, that the song 'Darlinghurst Nights' from The Go-Betweens was revealed to me - it's now in the Spotify playlist.
In theory, I love the idea of a book about Sydney, exploring all its wonderful quirks - some hidden, others in plain sight. There's a truly admirable dedication to exploring these rich pockets of Sydney that Vanessa Berry proudly showcases in Mirror Sydney; however, I feel in the absence of pictures, I struggled to focus and maintain interest in the various places that Berry describes with such care and affection. Nonetheless, I'm glad, thanks to exploring Berry's blog of the same name, that the song 'Darlinghurst Nights' from The Go-Betweens was revealed to me - it's now in the Spotify playlist.
November 2, 2018
This is a whimsical, episodic exploration of Sydney, exploring canals, arcades and past attractions. This is a key local studies publications, and yet it is not clear on Trove Australia if anyone has actually put it in their local studies section.
This is a book to read in short burst, and then ponder. It would be interesting using it as a map of vanished and vanishing Sydney, going out and exploring the areas which are written about. It is suggested that it is added to local studies collections, adding information to the catalogue record in each location to explain the connection.
This is a book to read in short burst, and then ponder. It would be interesting using it as a map of vanished and vanishing Sydney, going out and exploring the areas which are written about. It is suggested that it is added to local studies collections, adding information to the catalogue record in each location to explain the connection.
July 15, 2018
Sydney’s building, roads, lanes, signs, blimpish promotions, deserted constructions, and waterways provide the backdrop for some of Vanessa Berry’s fascinations and reflections. I’ve lived in Sydney most of 58 years and was delighted by her choice of sites, icons, and those mysterious shopfronts. Loved it!
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May 25, 2020Massively helpful in learning curios of sydney that are now part of my anecdotal or experiential repertoire. Written from a place of love and curiosity, Vanessa is an incredibly entertaining socio-geographical historian.
October 24, 2018
An absolute gem of a book for anyone who has loved or lived in Sydney. So many beautiful details and "aha!" moments, reminders of the city past and present.
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