North Sydney! This bus is North Sydney!

I have, on occasion, commented in the past about my adventures on buses and have ruminated on the process of catching a bus and buying tickets for a bus in Sydney.

I am, once again, able to interact daily with the Sydney bus service and I must say that I have noticed that the bus drivers seem more willing to converse with their passengers. I suspect they have had some sort of civility training or perhaps they have been sued. Who can tell.


Just in the last month, on at least two different occasions, a bus driver has said "good morning" to me, so I feel that things are looking up. In both cases I had already said good morning to the bus driver, but as this is my usual habit, it is barely worth mentioning.

My trip to the office each morning is a relatively short one, complicated only by the fact that there are two categories of bus that arrive at my bus stop. One category goes into the city and avoids all the northern suburbs by way of the freeway. The other travels to North Sydney and thereby manages to find its way through Gore Hill, St Leonards, Crows Nest and other such places. This is the bus that I want in the morning when I am travelling to work.

I have accidentally caught the wrong category of bus in the past and there is something incredibly dispiriting about sitting on a bus for an extended period, knowing full well that you are now on the way to the city and there is not a damn thing you can do about it. A slightly mournful glance toward your intended destination as it leans mockingly over the freeway is about the best you can do.

Since then, I have always been careful to watch for the 286, 287 or 291 bus when boarding.

There is a strange ritual at the bus stop in the mornings, worthy of a David Bellamy commentary. Passengers arrive at the bus stop in dribs and drabs, wandering across roads and down laneways to congregate at the waiting place. Once they have arrived, they make an enormous effort at nonchalance and believe that this is best achieved by staring at their smart phone. Everybody has one.

Businessmen in suits try to give the impression that they are reading vital emails that have been sent to them, beseeching them for help on difficulties that have thwarted lesser men. In general though they are reading an online newspaper or (more often) playing Candy Crush. Youngsters swipe through their facebook pages (or whatever social media thing is fashionable - I can't keep up but I think it's snapagram or something similar) and older women stare intently at something. I haven't yet been able to determine what it is that they are looking at on their phones, but I suspect it is instructions from their teenage sons on how to download solitaire.

While all this is going on, buses will draw near in the distance and those that are not completely engrossed in their phone will move it away from their face and lean forward, peering intently into the distance to determine whether the approaching bus is a suitable one for their journey.

There are yellow buses that don’t stop at my stop and are easily dismissed as my buses are blue, but then there is a 288 bus (that goes to the city) and a 286 bus (that goes to North Sydney). This causes a great deal of concern and as the bus draws closer you can judge the long-sightedness of those waiting by the point at which they go back to their iPhones or, alternatively, start fumbling for their opal cards.

Occasionally there will be a blue bus that is marked “Not in Service” and this too is easily dismissed and this morning, it was a “Not in Service” bus that first approached me after I had made my way to the stop. I went back to my iPhone, as etiquette apparently demands, and was a little startled when a middle aged female bus driver yelled at an astonishing volume, “NORTH SYDNEY, THIS BUS IS NORTH SYDNEY!”

Startled, I looked more carefully at the bus and assured myself that it was indeed a bus and not at all like North Sydney. Peering into the bus I was greeted by a peroxide blonde bus driver that looked disconcertingly like my vision of Micky’s barmaid in ‘Spider Dunstan’s Teeth’. [1]

“Are you going to North Sydney?” she asked at a volume only slightly lower than her initial cry.

“Well I’m going to St Leonards.” I replied.

“Get on!” she yelled. More of an order than a suggestion and I felt that if I was not planning to go to St Leonards after all, I would still feel compelled to board the bus.

We made our way to St Leonards in this fashion, stopping at every stop with Micky’s barmaid leaning out of her seat each time and yelling “NORTH SYDNEY! THIS BUS IS NORTH SYDNEY!” to slightly unsettled prospective passengers waiting at the bus stop. A surprising number of them boarded and I began to wonder whether, like me, they felt obliged to board irrespective of their intentions.

I arrived in St Leonards in due course, my ears slightly more worn than they were before and my iPhone in my pocket unglanced at. It had not even occurred to me to look at it for the entire trip as I was engrossed in the goings on at the front of the bus.

If ever Town Criers come back into vogue, there is a Sydney bus driver that would fit the bill admirably.

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[1] If you are not familiar with the book "Spider Dunstan's Teeth", I commend it to you most highly. It is a rollicking and slightly hysterical romp through the Australia of the early 1980s and I am hopeful that it will one day become a blockbuster movie. Buy it now so that you can brag to your friends later that you had a copy before it was even famous.

Photo courtesy Simon Clancy https://www.flickr.com/photos/39551170@N02/16008047019