Sydney [antikvár]

I think it's the centre of the world, but I'm biased. I was born there, spent my formative years there. I would support any 'I Love Sydney' club. This birthplace of mine is a city of great physical attraction. A iittle brassy in somé ways, but vitai. There's always somethlng happening, something to do. Kind and sympathetic in that it looks first to its own but is warmly welcoming to strangers. By any standard it is cosmopolitan. The post World War II years have seen a mustering and melding of people from mostparts of the world into a sprawling metropolis. There are restaurants serving Italian food which would wring acclaim from the cormoisseurs of Napoli. Chinese restaurants serve better food than I've eaten in Hong Kong or Peking. Greeks, Vietnamese, Chinese, Europeans and British in their thousands have changed the structure of Australianlife, and in natural consequence this has changed Sydney because this city is the gateway to Australia. Sydney was where it all began, in an Australian sense. Captain Cook, the English sailor, sailed to Tahiti to study the skies. He went on to circumnavigate New Zealand, then headed west. On April 20,1770, Cooksighted the east coast of Australia. He charted this and, on the basis of his reports to the English, Captain Arthur Phillip headed for Australia with a fleet (11 ships) to establish a penal settlement. He entered Sydney Harbour on the now Australia Day, January 26. Thank goodness he did. Sydney these days still reílects the impact of the first settlers. They were a mixed lot, the outcasts of English society, but they had their impact. There was no precise planning of Sydney in the way that Melbourne and Adelaide were laid out - none of the carefully planned grids. Sydney was developed around the port and the roads tended to meander. Modern Pitt Street still follows the path of the bullock wagons. It is narrow and it wanders a Iittle. The 1,030 people who endured the first fleet have, through their own productivity, and aided by migratory influences, forefathered a flourishing population of somé 3.33 millión, about 22 percent of the totál population of Australia. In the early 1880s the settlement's population was only about 200,000 and the town occupied an area of somé few square miles. But the harbour was described by the colony's first Governor, Captain Arthur Phillip, as 'one of the finest in the world', and the city developed as a major seaport. That it would become the centre of an extensive road and rail network and of industrial manufacturing was inevitable. Today, Sydney's suburbs, municipalities, sprawl across an area of about 1,575 square miles. Extraordinary! The Sydney Statistical Division (defined by the Bureau of Statistics as extending to Gosford and Wyong in the north and the Blue Mountains in the west) has an area of 4,790 square miles. But let's forget the figures and talk about the Sydney I have known for more than half a century. When I was old enough to work I had the daily delight of travelling to my newspaper office across the harbour. I was fortunate. I could stand at the verandah of my parent's harbour-side fiat and look down to Mosman Bay. Wonderful! As I tied my shoelaces, brashed my hair, I could see the ferry moving in and I knew that, given a minute or so, I had time to walk a tree-lined pathway to the wharf and the ferry. Then there was the trip across the harbour, always changing. Freighters at the dolphins, tankers moving under the Bridge to their berths in the upper harbour, ferries scudding about, the occasional yacht sailing towards the Heads, with the obviously well-heeled skipper looking with indifference at the workslaves. And in the afternoon, particularly in summer when the city of Sydney can become a minor inferno, you would find a pub, drink somé of the city's great beer, sometimes too much, but never so much that you didn't climb aboard the ferry and head off home across the water. It could have been impossibly hot in the city, but sitting on the outside of a ferry brought those cool wisps of breeze that make a Sydney evening something of exceptional delight. But this does not necessarily apply to all of the great city, which spreads like the path of treacle pouring from a can out towards the Blue Mountains to the west It flows to the south towards Wollongong and creeps steadily northwards stopped only by the Pittwater, before it becomes Gosford. I've travelled from Australia often. Always my point of retum has been Sydney, and always there's been this feeling of coming home. The sight of the city emerging never ceases to excite me. Introductions, first impressions, are important. Ultimately there may be change, but the first glimpse is implanted. Coming by air, Sydney either creeps up on you genüy, insidiously, or, from a trans-Pacific flight, it hits with a bang. Most of the flights from Europe head down from Singapore, Bangkok, Jakarta or somé other staging point in the South East Asian area, track across the Australian coast to the south of Darwin, then across the reddish-brown emptiness of the Centre. It's usually at night and there's Iittle to see but the odd light of an outback homestead. You wouldn't see much more in daylight, just miles of nothingness. A hundred miles outside Sydney the scene begins to change. There is more greenery, scattered hamlets.The flatness of the interiorgives way to the mountains of the Great Dividing Rangé and the