There are cities that know how to have a good time, and there are cities that require a committee, three permits and a police operation before anybody is allowed to enjoy themselves.
Sydney, for a considerable stretch of its recent history, belonged firmly in the latter.
The lockout years were a remarkable experiment in how to take a living culture, surround it with regulations, frighten away its inhabitants and then act surprised when the place went dead.
Young people trying to find music, friendship, passion, identity and a reason to stay in the city found themselves navigating a landscape of raids, sniffer dogs and police who seemed determined to turn a night out into an audition for the criminal justice system.
But culture is a stubborn animal. When the official doors closed, it found other entrances.
In the warehouse parties scattered around Marrickville and the inner west, a generation improvised its own escape route. The spaces were makeshift, the arrangements precarious, and the threat of a police raid never entirely absent. Yet something extraordinary happened in those rooms. People found each other.
They discovered music, community and the exhilarating possibility of being themselves without asking permission from the respectable world outside.
Olly Arkins was among them.
Today, Arkins is Sydney’s Deputy Lord Mayor, the first openly trans woman to hold the position.
That fact matters. But it tells you very little about the woman unless you understand what came before the council chamber: a Sydneysider who experienced the underground not as an abstract political constituency but as a place where she could explore her identity, build friendships and find a sense of belonging.
Nor does her story require her to become a standard-bearer for every argument about gender. Her experience is particular, personal and real. What she took from it was something much broader: the understanding that people need places where they can express themselves, meet others and have a bloody good time without being treated as a problem to be managed.
While Arkins and others found their freedom in those warehouses, they also saw the shadow that accompanied it. For Arkins, that experience helped shape her desire for a different world for the people she now represents.
Back then, you could find your people, but you might also find the police at the door. You could build a community, but you could never be entirely certain the space would survive the night. There was solidarity in the struggle, certainly, but nobody should have to spend their lives looking over their shoulder to experience it.
That is the distinction at the heart of Arkins’s work, and the opportunity her position now presents. She isn’t trying to preserve the danger along with the freedom. She wants the next generation to inherit the second without being forced to endure the first.
As Deputy Lord Mayor, she is working with the council on special entertainment precincts, creative spaces, support for emerging artists and a permanent home for FBi Radio. These might sound like the ordinary machinery of municipal government. In practice, they concern something fundamental: whether a city can afford to let its people create a culture of their own, or reclaim a cultural life that has been stifled by years of restrictions.
Naturally, there are those who want to see Sydney return to its former cultural peak. The eighties, the pub bands, the late nights, the unruly electricity of the Cross.
But nostalgia can be a stale biscuit.
Arkins knows that, for her generation and those that follow, the economic landscape has fundamentally changed.
On an ordinary wage, finding a place to live in inner Sydney is difficult enough, let alone securing a studio in which to make art. Even if you can afford to live there, the venues where you might have performed music or theatre, or exhibited your artwork, have disappeared. The city has been remade around property values. You cannot simply put the old furniture back and expect the same party to start.
So, when I speak to Arkins and hear about her ambitions, I am reminded of the Japanese art of kintsugi. A broken vessel is repaired with gold, its fractures acknowledged rather than concealed. The repaired object is not an imitation of its former self. It carries its damage into a different future.
Arkins’s approach draws on the lessons of those underground years: the ingenuity of young people who created their own cultural spaces, and the need to protect such spaces from heavy-handed enforcement.
Her response, shaped by those experiences and borne out in her career, has been to help piece together something different: not merely to remove the barriers, but to create the conditions in which artistic life can flourish in new forms.
As CEO of the Australian Festival Association, she worked to bring the people holding the keys to those cultural handcuffs into direct contact with the festivals and communities they were regulating. By taking decision-makers to events and showing them what was actually happening, she helped challenge the assumptions underpinning excessive regulation, making room for a more practical approach to cultural life.
Removing those barriers was only the first step. Her work has also contributed to greater cooperation between the City of Sydney and the NSW Government. As Arkins has observed, the alignment of their priorities on cultural and nightlife policy presents an opportunity not seen since the Sydney Olympics in 2000.
With that kind of cooperation, new possibilities begin to unfold. The proposed special entertainment precincts across Sydney aim to support nightlife through more flexible planning arrangements, longer trading hours and a more workable approach to sound management. The ambition is to give venues and operators greater scope to adapt their programming to local audiences, rather than having cultural life dictated from the top down.
It is a different philosophy from the sort of bureaucratic gatekeeping that can leave even a busker in Melbourne’s CBD needing a licence approved by a committee whose members must first decide whether the performance meets their personal tastes.
It’s not that regulation has no place, but it should enable cultural life rather than suffocate it.
Sydney’s nightlife needs that kind of kintsugi treatment. The gold is the work of people like Arkins and the communities, artists, venue operators and advocates alongside her: making space, changing laws, protecting independent voices and rebuilding the conditions for cultural life. The result won’t look exactly like the old scene. It shouldn’t have to.
Because the point was never really the pub, the warehouse or the particular decade. It was what happened inside: the discovery that you belonged somewhere, that you could be different, that music could bring strangers together and that a city might offer more than somewhere to sleep between shifts.
Arkins knows what that freedom felt like. She also knows what it cost when authorities made it precarious.
The kids are alright. They always were. The question is whether the city will give them somewhere to prove it.
And whether, this time, they can dance without looking over their shoulders.
