PORT JACKSON, SYDNEY’S NATURAL HARBOUR, appears in all of the tourist brochures and Lonely Planet guides as the centre of the city, and its spiritual heart: but they are all wrong. The harbour has a rather good-looking Bridge (though the Gladesville Bridge, the Cinderella stepsister arch of the city, is always overlooked). It’s got a freaky egg-shaped warehouse for elitist affairs. I admit, the ferries are good fun, but what’s left? A Navy base or two, the Casino, a few bits of National Park, and the rest is pure pleasure garden for fund-manager multimillionnaires and shiny stockbrokers gorging on derivatives.

For my money, it’s an overvalued bit of waterway. It, and the river which feeds it, divide the city into at least four: the North from the South, and the West and Inner West from the East. To my mind there’s one major unifying artery which feeds life to the city, one that appears only fleetingly in the most comprehensive guidebooks, and it pumps pure diesel-ethanol. It’s Parramatta Road, also known as the Great Western Highway.

Parramatta Road forms the major axis of my mental geography of my city. Every single day of my high school education, I travelled on it twice: either by bus, on foot, or slipstreaming behind semitrailers on my bicycle.¹ As a university student I crossed it twice a day, and learned in Fisher Library that apart from the famous Moratoriums, the demonstration of the Vietnam War era which was best attended by Sydney University students was one to demand a footbridge be built at the top of the hill between Glebe Point Road and Ross Street. The woman I love lived in her parents’ house in a suburb you get to by driving down Parramatta Road, counting traffic lights—and turning right.

When I die, embalm my body in carbon monoxide and take me to Rookwood in a second-hand four-cylinder Japanese car.

It has a culture and an architecture of its own. Starting at the intersection of City Road and Broadway where Parramatta Road proper starts, there is a rather lovely park with a purely kitschy boat in the middle of it. It’s a commemoration of an Olympics sailing victory put there, with public funds, by a conservative alderman who himself was captain of the yacht. If there’s a better physical illustration of Sydney’s political economy I’m yet to see it.

Heading West you enter the Inner West, a dangerous land of guitar and music shops, bridal warehouses, and brothels. A radical feminist or Friedrich Engels would probably describe them as all different market sectors distributing variations of the same industrialised product, and they’d be confirmed in their opinions by the existence of the pole dancing studio, advertising fitness stripping to hen’s nights. Don’t stop here.

Consider, as you drive, two of Sydney’s most expensive public provisions. The Redfern-Parramatta train line, an 1850s duplication of the road west, meant to stop the new suburban bourgeoisie having to share the highway with bullock drays, which was one of the first railway lines in the world to be nationalised by a Government. It’s the oldest story in the world of public sector finance: the floated company (subsidised by the Colony) went bust shortly after the line was started, and the taxpayers of NSW gleefully took the bill in the name of progress. The M4 motorway was designed to do a similar job of letting commuters bypass Parramatta Road in exchange for money—an honest and sustainable road pricing mechanism, once again, nationalised in the name of marginal Western Sydney seats.

Don’t stop at all before you get to the M4 intersection at Concord/Strathfield. Get out into the blue-water Parramatta Road, land of car yards, small businesses in cheap rental accommodation, and prepare your tastebuds for the fast food of a nation moving about in hatchbacks. This is the four- to six-lane open range, country of freedom and opportunity, where liberty and internationalism come in a mixed grill with hommous, or as a doner kebab, or perhaps a slice of pizza, a side of chips with chicken salt or a bacon and egg roll with barbecue sauce.

Be saluted by the famous dancing silhouette of Laziko’s, where you can get all of those together, at any time of day, in a combo meal, and welcome yourself to my spiritual home.

My personal [ahem] Mecca of Parramatta Road food is El-Jannah Charcoal Chicken And Lebanese Cuisine (note, the words “and Lebanese Cuisine” is pronounced silently, much as is “Bankstown” in “Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs”. It’s right beside Granville Station, itself barely two blocks south of the Great Western Highway. The AWU, the AMWU, and the NUW, amongst other trade unions, all have major offices nearby—which goes to show that the basis of Australian unions is grounded firmly in the interests and values of the working class. (As I left, this morning, the police Public Order and Riot Squad were just arriving in their Darth Vader Car, which suggests a rather different moral).

$10.20 will get you a small bottle of drink and a chicken roll: that’s loads of charcoal chicken, Lebanese pickled vegetables, onion, tomato, lettuce, and the best kind of garlic sauce, the pulsing-yellow-white kind that has a half-life and an exposure risk for vulnerable groups, all in rolled Lebanese bread.

Who’d live in a mansion in Rose Bay? Not me.

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¹ Don’t try to slipstream behind a bus. They’re too quick up hills and brake too fast, you’ll end up left behind or worse, impacted in the back. Best are slow accelerating heavily loaded container trucks, excavators’ trucks full of rubble, concrete mixers, cranes and other implements. Worst of all are garbage trucks—don’t make me explain why.

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