Harbour Bridge from The Rocks, Sydney

The following day I started my exploration at the magnificent Sydney Central station.  Sydney has varied transport opportunities, most of which I didn’t use:  the rail-system appears to be comparable with services out of London Waterloo or Victoria, running double-deck carriages that were developed to avoid lengthening station platforms; there is a single LRT tram route which trundles through the station forecourt and disappears off the top-left-hand corner of the street map;  there is even a monorail, similar to the one I remember in Butlin’s Camp, Skegness, in the 1960s.  There is also the waterborne alternative of the Sydney Ferries, crossing the harbour to outlying districts.

I used the open-top sightseeing tour operated by the same company that runs the tours in London, Edinburgh, Bath and Stratford-upon-Avon (and Malaga, Marrakech and Tallinin for that matter) www.city-sightseeing.com.  As might be expected, their tour is comprehensive and the commentary informative.  The open top deck is, of course, a major advantage for photography.  The disadvantage is that the bus exhaust is at upper-deck level, and having wondered about the black discolouring of the seat cushions when I sat right at the back I found after a while that my eyes stung so much I had to sit downstairs.

There is a competing tour company which runs single-deck coaches on a longer route including crossing and recrossing the Harbour Bridge:  in this case, the opportunities for photography are relatively limited by the roof.

The major snag about either tour is that they run only one way:  I did the entire open-top circuit to get my bearings, and then wasted considerable time riding round to get to places that I later realised were within walking distance.  For speed I could, if I’d had presence of mind and read the map carefully, have got around more quickly on the inner-city free circular bus, route 555.  The result was that in the time available I saw a little of a great deal, and my quality experiences were rationed.

One of these was the Queen Victoria Building [http://www.qvb.com.au/About-QVB], an extremely grand former produce market that after many years of neglect is now a lively shopping centre.  The story goes that its demolition was stalled because of trade-union objections to the vandalism of destroying such a magnificent part of Sydney’s heritage.  It fills an entire block but is actually quite narrow:  on the central axis are two entrances with swooping staircases which give close-up views of stained-glass windows that run through two storeys.  It reminded me a little of the Midland Grand Hotel at London St Pancras.

I dawdled productively at the Powerhouse Museum [http://www.powerhousemuseum.com] built, like the Kelham Island Industrial Museum in Sheffield, into the former tramway power station.  The original industrial buildings, with overhead cranes and other paraphernalia left in place, are huge enough to lose an entire steam-locomotive, a governor’s saloon, a signal box and the destination board from Sidney Central Station in one corner.  The place is on the scale of Tate Modern on London’s Bankside.  For me, the greatest delight in this superb museum was the Strasbourg Centennial Clock, which tells more time than you’d ever want to know, reproduces exactly the locations of the planets in the solar system, and features on the hour the Twelve Disciples receiving benediction from Christ, with the cock crowing at Peter and Satan keeping a baleful eye on Judas.

Having wasted precious time misusing the bus tour, I was privileged, after meeting some colleagues from the Australian Association of Decorative & Fine Arts Societies, for whom I’m returning to Australia to lecture next year, to be taken from the Opera House across the Botanical Gardens, by Lawrence West, a retired architect who pointed out all manner of interesting buildings on McQuarie Street and Park Street.  Of these, the highlight for me was the interior of St Mary’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, a scholarly Gothic design of 1868-1882 by William Wardell, equal in length and grandeur to many of the European originals on which it is modelled.  In comparison, the Anglican cathedral, St Andrew’s, is a more modest building of parish-church proportions on a cramped site next to the Town Hall.

I should have taken the opportunity to ride on the Sydney Monorail in 2010 or 2011.  It closed in 2013 and has been entirely demolished.  I didn’t return to Sydney until 2017.

Bondi Surf Bathers Life Saving Club, Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia

People make a great fuss about the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne, but as an interested visitor I can’t see what’s not to like about either.  It’s like knowing two very different siblings, appreciating their qualities and tolerating their differences.

Sydney has the unrivalled advantage among world cities of its commodious and varied harbour, more intriguing than San Francisco, more complex than Hong Kong.  It also has organic growth, having been improvised from the original First Fleet settlement: there are axial streets in the centre, but the place doesn’t have the rigidity of the gridiron plans of Melbourne and Adelaide.

On my first morning in the city, venturing from my hotel downhill towards the station, looking for a laundrette, I felt I could easily be in a British city, negotiating streets that crossed at angles and investigating side-roads with obviously ancient names like “Reservoir Street”.  I was staying on the neighbourly Surry Hills (spelt as Jane Austen did), only a short walk from the Central Business District.  It’s a borderline backpacker’s district, and in due course I found somewhere within walking distance and entirely acceptable to have breakfast, Strawberry X [1a/23 Mary Street, Surry Hills, NSW 2010 – now closed], and somewhere to have an evening meal, Good Morning Saigon [127 Liverpool Street, Sydney, NSW 2000], and returned to both each day rather than eat my way round Sydney.

A harbour cruise is surely the way first to see Sydney, just as the ferry across the Mersey is the best introduction to Liverpool.  With the blue sky reflected in the water it’s idyllic.

I’d made careful advance plans through my travel agent, having missed the Vatican on my first visit to Rome and Alcatraz on my only visit so far to San Francisco:  I was determined not to miss the Sydney highlights.

Locating the Magistic Cruises [http://www.magisticcruises.com.au] vessel on King’s Street Wharf in good time gave me the opportunity to ride the vessel round to the Circular Quay and back, taking photos from an empty deck and being almost first in the queue for the buffet lunch.

When I went back on deck I found a lady with a head-microphone and a Russian accent setting up stall to guide her group.  Gradually the place filled with Russians with beer bottles and loud voices, who spent much of the time photographing each other standing in front of the sites.  When things quietened down I asked her if they were working her hard and she smiled ruefully.  I said it looked like herding cats, and she thanked me for the phrase.

At the end of the cruise I joined an APT city-tour [http://www.aptouring.com.au/content.asp?Document_ID=80563#nsw] in a coach driven by Scott:  I wish I could guide as sharply and precisely as Scott did while driving a bus in heavy traffic.  He took us through the city-centre out to Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, carved for a governor’s wife on a promontory overlooking the harbour, to Watson’s Bay and The Gap overlooking much of the outer harbour, and then to Bondi Beach which is as splendid as you’d expect from any surfing movie.  The tanned and bleached jeunesse d’orée were impressive, but what impressed me most was the history behind them:  standing proudly on the foreshore is the Bondi Surf Bathers Life Saving Club (1907) [http://bondisurfclub.com], the founding association of technical beach lifesaving.

I’d booked a bridge-climb tour, but I took one look at the Harbour Bridge and decided that there was no way I would climb that thing in such heat.  There is a constant procession up and down the outer girder, and I imagine it’s a tremendous buzz to stand at the top, but the tour takes three and a half hours and involves a lot of exposure to the sun.  The breathalyser test and the long climb I would willingly have dealt with, but for me the clincher was that cameras are understandably not allowed, in case they drop on the traffic, trains and pedestrians below.

The Bridge is of course magnificent:  curiously, the steel structure – the so-called “coathanger” – isn’t actually supported by the stone piers;  it’s free-standing, and the piers, while supporting the carriageway, provide visual balance to the whole design.  It was designed by Dorman Long, Middlesborough, and much of it was fabricated in Britain:  construction took from 1923 to 1932.  It’s interesting to compare it with the Tyne Bridge in Newcastle (1925-1928):  spans – Sydney 503m/Newcastle 161.8m;  height – Sydney 139m/Newcastle 59m;  length – Sydney 1,149m/Newcastle 389m.