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It seems Sydney – dismayed at being somewhat overshadowed during the past decade with the Melbourne Gangland warfare and subsequent Underbelly series is going out of its way to restore its rightful position as Australian Crime Central No.1. (The country as a whole has a crime rate comparable with that of other Western nations such as the US and UK).  Granted that there’s still some stiff opposition from increasingly violent major cities: Melbourne, Darwin and Perth (probably the most violent major city per capita), but I believe Sydney still is the place for crime in Australia – three major riots in the space of 20 months surely can’t hurt the claim! Plus, would you expect anything else from a city specifically set up to house criminals…

Today’s a perfect example of why no Australian city does crime like Sydney. In the last 24 hours we have coverage on the deadly bikie brawl at Sydney airport’s domestic terminal which resulted in one fatality and whole lot of bad PR, and overnight we have accounts of a possibly related shooting spree in the mid-western suburb of Auburn.

My mother grew up and I spent half my childhood summers in working-class Auburn as it was the home of my grandparents. My grandfather, Poppy, would be spinning in his grave right now. Auburn was always rough but in the last 15 years these kinds of accounts have become commonplace and barely raise an eyebrow anymore.

Sydney has seemingly become an increasingly insular, segregated and hostile city in the last 15 years, particularly after the 2000 Olympics and the resulting economic and social hangover that the city hasn’t seemed to have fully got over. There’s been term after term of bumbling, arrogant, incompetent, self-serving politicians, and an overall lack of leadership, focus, integration and intelligent infrastructure spending which has manifested into itself into an angrier, more marginalised and divided metropolis.

But, then again this is the city that has spawned the likes of Lenny McPherson, Abe Saffron and Neddy Smith. So, should I really be surprised that Sydney still is rough? It’s always been rough, this is the city on which Mark Twain allegedly once remarked:

“It is beautiful, of course it’s beautiful – the harbour; but that isn’t all of it, it’s only half of it; Sydney’s the other half, and it takes both of them to ring the supremacy-bell. God made the harbour and that’s all right; but Satan made Sydney.”

Maybe, we Sydneysiders have just become soft in the past few decades, need a cold, hard dose of reality and – as Chopper says – harden the fuck up!

Ah, Sydney … it may not feel as nice as it once was – or was imagined to be, but it still is home and I’ll most likely move back there before too long, drive-by shootings and all …