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and elegant and famously unstable. It was a working boat, with mast and sail and nets and fishing lines all lying open in the dark damp air.
    Jack pulled the skiff in to the jetty and I got aboard. He threw me the handlines and squid then passed me the long oars and soon he was rowing through the pearly water in the direction of the pale dawn sky. Pittwater is a kind of paradise with its little coves, inlets, mangroves and the forests of glistening silver-trunked eucalyptus which come right down to the water. You could not look into this bush without imagining the past.
    Men caught fish from the rocks, wrote Vincent Keith Smith, using long fishing spears with four or more hardwood prongs tipped and barbed with sharp fish and animal bones. Lying across their canoes with their faces below the water, they waited patiently . . . Women sat in canoes, fishing by hand with lines made of twisted strands of bark . . . the women talked, sang, laughed together as they fished, chewing mussels and cockles which they spat in to the water as a berley to attract fish.
    Five minutes later, ten yards off the sandstone shore, Jack spilled tuna oil on to the water and, while we waited for those three green glistening kingfish which were presently nosing their way around the promontory towards their death, I finally produced my tape recorder, only to discover that the back panel had fallen off and one of the two batteries was missing.
    Don't laugh, you bastard.
    There was nothing malicious about Jack's laughter but as he threaded a squid on to the hook of his handline it was obvious just how relieved he was.
    Anyway, he said, we'll get a kingfish.
    He stood, balancing easily, and cast out a good fifteen yards to where the slick of tuna oil had not yet reached.
    You could talk to Kelvin and Sheridan. Those fellows are always getting into strife. They'll tell you stories.
    It's not the strife I'm interested in. The strife is just a way to show how the city is elemental.
    Earth is an element, he said, seating himself on the aft thwart.
    I know.
    A friend of mine, Peter Myers, an architect, has written a wonderful paper called The Three Cities of Sydney. In fact he's going to deliver it this week at the university, and you really must hear him. He'll be happy to talk to you, I know he will.
    I listened glumly. A university lecture was no replacement for a life-or-death struggle with the elements.
    You knew the first settlers could find no limestone in Sydney, Jack said (and I was reminded, not for the first time, that he had been a famous teacher of architecture). And they needed lime if they were to make mortar.
    They burned shells, I said resignedly. I know.
    Yes, the first settlers extracted the lime for the mortar from shells. But what you might not know is that in 1788, when white people arrived, there were middens of shells twelve metres tall on Bennelong Point.
    Where the opera house is.
    Where the opera house is, exactly. Where Fort Macquarie was before that. So Bennelong Point was obviously the site of the first city of Sydney, and what an ancient city it was, do you see? There was a complex, very religious civilisation here when there were still Neanderthals alive in Europe, before the ice age ended and the oceans rose. This is the site of the most ancient civilisation on earth, but of course no one could see that in 1788. The convicts cannibalised the ancient city to make the colonial city. So the ancient city is still there, sandwiched between the bricks -baked earth - which contain, in turn, the thumbprints of the men who made them. Twelve metres tall, Peter, can you imagine how many hundreds of thousands of wonderful feasts there were?

CHAPTER SIX
    AT ABOUT THE TIME I hooked into my first ever kingfish, the English editor of Granta magazine was putting his 'Australia' edition to bed. In Hanover Yard, London, he wrote: Colonial history has nothing to be proud of here, but, considering Aborigines as a demographic statistic, the prominence