Both books use eyewitness accounts to build a living picture of Sydney’s formative years. In The Birth of Sydney, Flannery has netted a wide range of impressions spanning more than a hundred years, from James Cook in 1770 to Nat Gould in 1896. Flannery prefaces each extract by introducing its writer with such familiarity and affection that you just know these are old friends of his. Many of the writers – diarists of the early settlement – make repeat appearances, and Flannery’s introductory narratives help the reader see how the writer has moved on from one instalment to the next. Ralph Clark of the First Fleet kisses his wife’s portrait less often – daily to begin with, then only on Sundays – and eventually succumbs to the ‘whoredome’ of the female convicts’ camp.

As an editor, Flannery spurns neutrality, frankly deriding the curmudgeons, crooks and whingers among his contributors. Lieutenant-Governor Robert Ross was ‘a cantankerous and duplicitous old fogey’, and while the Reverend Richard Johnson bemoaned the godlessness of his charges, his own ‘admitted preference for long sermons’ was, says Flannery, at least partly to blame.

Many of the pieces selected by Flannery take the reader deep under the skin of early Sydney. He presents us, for instance, with excerpts from a notebook kept by Lieutenant William Dawes. An amateur astronomer and ‘perhaps the most morally upright man in the colony’, Dawes set himself and his observatory apart from the main settlement. He was at least as interested in getting to know the Eora – the Sydney Aboriginal people – as he was in the southern constellations. His notebook records fragments of his conversations in the Eora tongue with a young woman named Patyegarang. No mere linguistic exercise, this. Accompanied by Dawes’ English translations, the pair’s exchanges are tinged with unmistakeable tenderness:

Matigarbargun naigaba We shall sleep separate
Metcoarsmadyemnga You winked at me
Putuwa To warm one’s hand by the fire and then to squeeze gently the fingers of another person.

Less tender are Alexandro Malaspina’s impressions of the fledgling settlement. Malaspina’s caustically anti-British report to the Spanish Government in 1793 is new to Australian readers, having been translated just a decade ago. By including voices like Malaspina’s and Patyegarang’s, Flannery gives his readers a fresh take on early Sydney, a glimpse, a whisper, of alternative histories.

Probably the best thing about The Birth of Sydney, though, is Flannery’s own contribution, a forty-page essay entitled ‘The Sandstone City’. It’s not just his erudition: it’s his enthusiasm and (again) his affection for his subject that sweeps the reader up and along with him. Flannery gives us a flying tour up the harbour, with connections drawn between the particles of the Sydney sandstone and the native vegetation and wildlife it supported, between Aboriginal firestick-farming practices and the survival of the British settlement, between Sydney as it is and Werrong as it was.

Compared to Flannery’s broad, sweeping survey of early Sydney, Jack Egan’s is the approach of a miniaturist. Buried Alive is autopsic in its examination of Sydney’s first five years. Egan presents us with almost daily dispatches from his cast of diarists and letter-writers, giving Buried Alive the feel of an almanac. The combination of short extracts and a multitude of writers, interspersed with Egan’s connecting narrative, makes for a jolting read at first. Nor is the book helped by a clunky, inelegant page design. It was June 1788 (sixty pages into the book) before I got my eye in and could easily distinguish Egan’s words from those of his contributors.

Buried Alive’s introduction is literally that. Egan introduces the reader, in alphabetical order, to his cast of eyewitnesses. As early as this, it becomes clear that Jack Egan has a thing about numbers: dates, ages, numbers of children, of guns, and of lashes – all kinds of numbers. No doubt numbers impart a great deal of meaning to some readers. I’m not one of them, and yet I found Egan’s quirk – confined as it is to fairly small doses – bearable, almost endearing, as well as being a sure-fire way of distinguishing his voice from the others’.

Once I hit my stride with Buried Alive, I enjoyed this book immensely. The cluttered denseness of the text, the babble of voices, draws the reader into a sense of ‘being there’. Through meeting them, via their words, almost daily for five years, we come to know David Collins and Governor Arthur Phillip rather well, and to like them pretty well too. Even the Reverend Johnson, while still plainly a querulous git, gets a chance to show his more agreeable side when he announces the birth of ‘a sweet babe’, his daughter.

Buried Alive draws the reader into the rhythm of life in the settlement: the anxious waiting for the next supply ship, the day-to-day dealings between settlers and the Eora people; the cycle of crime and punishment; the crumbling of the distinction between convict and free. And somehow, through the minutiae, the story of early Sydney emerges with a real clarity. Witnessing the relentless daily grind, it dawned on me the awful magnitude of the task that Phillip and the First Fleeters had been set. With that realisation comes the key to the story that makes Sydney special: a triumph, an achievement, the conquering of adversity and all that. (After all – let’s be cynical for a moment – don’t both these books celebrate Sydney’s origins apropos the Olympic spirit?)

Speaking of conquering, what we don’t see in either book is any concerted aggro towards Sydney’s Aboriginal inhabitants. Rather, we see incomprehension on both sides. Try as they might, they just don’t get it. The settlement’s judge­advocate, David Collins, comes close, acknowledging in 1791 that, ‘While they entertained the idea of our having dispos­sessed them of their residences, they must always consider us their enemies.’ But even grasping that – then what? The reader of Buried Alive, in particular, feels the frustrating gulf between dispossessors and dispossessed, the goodwill yet implacability on both sides. In Egan’s rather simplistic summing-up of the situation (‘it would have helped if the Aboriginal people had been as willing to communicate as the British and if they had been able to accept that the British might have had something to offer them’) he fails, I think, to do justice to the experience of his own eyewitnesses.

Buried Alive, at five years long, succeeds in powerfully building a sense of that particular time and place. In contrast, The Birth of Sydney, in seeking to capture Sydney’s first century, rather loses its punch after the first thirty years. Flannery’s is the more stylish of the two, Egan’s the more curious. Broad brush, fine comb: they work as companion pieces. Buy a bigger case and pack both.