David Williamson skewered greedy Sydney - and bought the Harbour view anyway

The Age

23-07-2025

Sydney features large in David Williamson's earliest memories. Aged three-and-a-half, the Melbourne-born-and-bred playwright was visiting an uncle with his family, and remembers 'sitting in a backyard on a very bright, sunny day, surrounded by bougainvilleas and subtropical flowers.'
'The fact my first memory was in Sydney obviously imprinted something on me about the exotic nature of the city: the colours, the brightness, the greenness of the grass,' he says.
He contrasts this with Melbourne's winter and summer brownness, while another early memory was gazing from a ferry at a harbour that 'seemed a deep translucent green, not blue'. Hence, the title of his iconic 1987 play Emerald City.
Although Williamson is eternally grateful to the Melbourne theatre companies that launched his career, he was less enamoured of that city's critical response.
'When the plays were done in Sydney, it was a totally different reaction,' he explains. 'John Bell did a terrific production of The Removalists, and John Clark did a great production of Don's Party, and I have to say that the talent at their disposal was probably greater, when you consider that I was playing the removalist in Melbourne, and Chris Haywood played him in Sydney.
'The critics were terrific, and they recognised the genre. The Melbourne critics thought The Removalists was an earnest play about police violence, that didn't succeed because the characters weren't three-dimensional. Whereas Sydney immediately saw it as a darkly satirical play about appalling Australian male behaviour.'
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Williamson also wearied of his left-wing Carlton circle dimly viewing financial success, whereas in Sydney, making money seemed 'a legitimate pursuit'.
He acknowledges Sydney's shady history of 'beleaguered convicts and corrupt prison guards, but,' he insists, 'it was a vibrant and very Australian city. So I thought to myself, 'Why do I have to put up with these Melbourne dinner parties where people start abusing me that I've sold out because my plays were being done in the state theatre companies, and because I might be making roughly as much money as a suburban GP?''