Why I like Sydney: poetry busking on George Street

It is late on a Saturday night on George Street near Bathurst Street and people are pouring down the pavement, pushing into eateries, draining out of the cavernous cinema, milling around the bus stops at the kerb. At a small table with an old, mechanical typewriter perched on top of it a woman is seated at the edge of the pavement right against the cinema wall. She has an A4 pad of lined paper on her knees and she is writing. Next to her, on another seat on the pavement, sits a young man waiting while the woman works on the poem he has ordered. A yellow cardboard sign stuck to the edge of the table says that you can ask the woman to write a poem for you on any topic.

The woman will work on the poem on the A4 pad for a while and then eventually get around to bashing it out on the mechanical typewriter that is placed centrally on the table. I don't know how much she gets paid for each poem but I recently read about a similar setup in New York. That story was in an online magazine. In the story the man who busked his poetry had set up his table in a subway tunnel. I thought the woman on George Street had found the ideal place to ply her trade.

Tens of thousands of people course along George Street on a Saturday night, making this surely the best place possible in Sydney to be selling poems to passersby. We saw the woman with a single customer but I imagine she had had many others during the evening. This is what I love about Sydney: the unexpected event that makes everything make sense. The casual encounter with the unusual. The strange. The out-of-the-ordinary. This is one of the reasons I came back, because I wanted to see this kind of thing again.