30 Days in Sydney: a wildly distorted account by Peter Carey

Poms looking to have their prejudices about Australians confirmed will both love and hate Peter Carey's brilliant, eccentric book. They will love it for Sydney stories such as this. Luigi Coluzzi, owner of a famous Darlinghurst coffee bar, hit an aggressive dog over the head with a baseball bat, killing it. Over the next four years, the artist Max Droga, a Coluzzi customer, took to calling Coluzzi "dog killer" and "psychopath" every time they met.

One day, Coluzzi snapped, and in front of his astonished customers he punched Droga, who fell and hit his head on the pavement. Droga was rushed to nearby St Vincent's Hospital, where he underwent a partial lobotomy. After a three-week trial at which local coffee-bar owners, their customers, an Olympic boxer and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation boss, David Hill, gave evidence, the judge said Coluzzi deserved to go to jail but because he had "a very vulnerable personality" and had been harassed by Droga, he would sentence him to only periodic detention.

Non-Australian readers will love this little snapshot because it confirms a commonly held view that, despite its beauty, wealth and sophistication, Sydney is at heart still a vulgar, crooked convict town unable to shake off its violent origins.

Carey, who clearly loves the place, nevertheless feels he has to tell us this story to illustrate his despair at being unable to explain it to anyone not from Sydney – maybe to anyone at all. But then he decides to balance it with something positive. This is why others will hate the book, because what emerges in the end is a hymn to all those characteristics that make Australians who they are: collectivism, mateship, courage, disdain for authority and love of life, a people forever on holiday.

30 Days in Sydney is the second in a series the publishers call "The Writer and the City". The idea is to ask some of the finest writers of our time to reveal the secrets of the cities they know best, and let them tackle the task in any way they want.

The New York-based Carey, a Booker Prize winner with Oscar and Lucinda and recipient of rave reviews for his latest novel, True History of the Kelly Gang, here tries to define Sydney by the elements: earth, air, fire and water. So he spent 30 days wandering around the city catching up with all his old mates, drinking with them to excess (in Sydney, there is no middle way) and trying to prise from them stories to fit the four elements.

He keeps being distracted. A woman tow-truck driver who takes up with one of Carey's mates turns out to be an Aboriginal: "We are everywhere amongst you... Reading books, driving tow trucks."

Then, in the Tropicana coffee bar, on Anzac Day, she cuts up her adoptive father's war medals and throws them in the rubbish bin. She could not bear to hear the Prime Minister, John Howard, say on television during a visit to Gallipoli that we were now comrades with the Turks.

Peter Carey understands. "Our Prime Minister could embrace and forgive the people who had killed our beloved sons and fathers, and so he should, but he could not, would not, apologise to the Aboriginal people for 200 years of murder and abuse. The battle against the Turks, he said in Gallipoli, was our history, our tradition. The war against the Aboriginals, he had already said at home, had happened long ago."

In life as skilfully as in fiction, Carey eventually finds the mates to tell him the stories about earth, air, fire and water. Since Sydney is a city of water ("Anybody who doesn't have a boat in Sydney is not a citizen of Sydney"), I found Carey's water story the most moving.

His mate Jack has a beautiful boat, which he loves. Caught in a storm on the Hawkesbury River, Jack is nearly drowned when his boat is swamped. Both Jack and the boat are saved, but the rudder is missing, and so Jack gets his mate Fisho to put an advertisement in the local newspaper, further up the coast.

The rudder is found by a woodworker who marvels at the beauty and the craftsmanship. "My lucky day, he thought. He took it home and put it on his mantelpiece. Then the poor bugger read Fisho's ad in the local newspaper. That was a cruel test of character, which he passed with flying colours. Just the same he was not delighted to hear from me."

Jack asked the poor bugger what he could bring him when he came to pick up the rudder, and he said, "A bottle of Inner Circle rum." So, appropriately, Jack paid him off in Sydney's oldest currency of all.

Phillip Knightley's most recent book is 'Australia: a biography of a nation' (Cape)