ON YOUR BIKE

Originally published in The Age, Brisbane Courier Mail and The Sydney Morning Herald, April 2004.

Leaving was the worst decision we never made. It was our town and we loved it. For five years - from September 1998 until October 2003 - my wife and I lived and worked in Amsterdam.

The magazine she worked for relocated from Melbourne and things went badly wrong almost as soon as we arrived in Europe; we were plagued by innumerable troubles and disasters both major and minor right up until the time we left the country; and we were very, very happy there.

It was our town and, in a strange way, we felt as though no one had ever been there before, that it was coming into existence as we discovered it, and we couldn't wait to share with the world everything that we were seeing.

We saw amazing things: a teenager cycling through the sleet with a double bass strapped to her back, talking on a cellphone; Quentin Tarantino sitting in the window of the bar at the American Hotel writing a stack of postcards half a bible thick; infants crowded into large wooden boxes attached to the fronts of bicycles; snow cresting in the wood-crossed windows of a building older than the city I'd just left; clouds that loomed so low and dark they were like invaders from above; damp diff
used afternoon light that was like stepping out of (or into) a misty Vermeer; very tall, very good-looking locals; very few Dutch doors.

We found our favourite bar early, introduced to us by a Dutch friend, Harrie the ex-Cop. It was a tiny place called Wynand-Fockink, established in 1685, in the Pijlsteeg just behind the Krasnopolsky Hotel, which served only beer and jenever (Dutch gin). The wooden bar was worn smooth by over three hundred years of spilled drinks and steadying hands. There was no television and no music. You could barely move if there were 15 people inside.

We made many friends: editors, writers, painters, musicians, a nightclub singer, dj's, barmen, admen, gallerists, film-makers, layabouts, graphic designers, salesmen, actors, theatre producers, students, toilers in acronymical fields: IT, HR, MSF, a lawyer at the ICJ in the Hague. A few were fellow Australians, some were Dutch, some were French, some were American.

The Dutch and American people we knew were terrible cooks; my wife is a very good cook, so we had people over to our apartment often. Sometimes the groups were so large that we had to buy extra plates from the Blokker store below, extra glasses to replace those that were broken last time. Our friends arrived by bicycle, bringing flowers and French wine, grateful for a good meal that didn't cost a small fortune.

We lived a few kilometres - 10 minutes by bike - from the canal belt, among endless rows of orange/brown brick apartment blocks in the plain, utilitarian style exemplified by Holland's premier modern architecht HP Berlage. This is the "real" or at least predominant architectural Amsterdam, where most of the ordinary Amsterdammers live.

The skinny three-storey canal houses many people associate with the city are more likely to be the homes of what we called super-expats, Brits or Americans there to earn bloated salaries and make vital contributions to the financial life of the country by working at Shell, Unilever, Philips, ING bank, ABN-Amro or Weiden + Kennedy.

I applied for temporary residency because I had a contract with a publisher to write a book about life in Amsterdam; the Ministry of Culture declined my request saying that such a book was "of no cultural value to the country". Their assessment, premature as it was, may or may not have been correct, but I nevertheless felt unwelcome. We applied for residency on the basis that my wife's father was Dutch but were told that his birthplace was "of no consequence". We were nervous and unhappy; we did not want to leave.

We loved the city; it is, I still believe, the most beautiful city in Europe, perhaps the world. It is small without being cloistered and claustrophobic; people are friendly and rarely insincere; nowhere else is quite so gezellig (cozy).

A while after the collapse of the company that had brought us there, my wife eventually found editing work on a magazine and was given a work and residency permit. I continued with my book, trying my best to capture the queasy thrill of an uncertain life in a foreign city.

In the summer months, however dismal, the hofje (garden) behind Wynand-Fockink was opened and you could sit in the shade under trees but mostly we preferred to stay around the front, spilling from the bar out into the alley, among the bicycle tangles
and laughter. Out there in the alley we were more likely to see something interesting or make a sudden new friend.

In May 2002 the politician Pim Fortuyn was shot dead and the Dutch people's latent urge toward the right was allowed to reveal itself. In January last year my wife, then editor of an international magazine and asked to become its editor-in-chief, was refused another work permit. We were told to leave within 30 days.

In February this year the Dutch Parliament voted to expel 26,000 asylum-seekers and illegal immigrants: had my wife and I still been there I am certain we would have been among that number. The famous Dutch tolerance is exposed for the historical notion it has become. I feel an awful sympathy for those people, the great majority of whom must return to places far less agreeable than Australia.

Almost endlessly we explained that that we didn't want to leave; that we had no choice in the matter, that my work was of no cultural value, that my wife's direct lineage of no consequence. Our Dutch friends were aghast; but they, of course, envied us our Australian passports and couldn't quite comprehend our abiding attachment to Holland. "What is it you like so much about Amsterdam?" they wanted to know, and we did our best to explain.