Walking tour of Sydney
After a quick brekkie, Cynthia and I walk out David and Gaye’s back yard door, cross a small dog park and get on the light rail for downtown Sydney, about 40 minutes distant. We go to City Hall next to St. Andrews Cathedral to join a “free” walking tour of the city (pay the guide what you think his or her performance is worth at the end of the tour). About 75 people are milling about, waiting for two “free” tour guides to divide us and conquer the city’s monuments and history. We get Matt.
Matt has a great baritone speaking voice and makes sure he’s always facing his audience. He begins right at the cathedral by telling us it was built on a cemetery whose bodies were shifted west to another site because the homeowners nearby complained of the stink. Then he takes us down George Street — think Connecticut Avenue in the early 70s when its center was completely excavated and surrounded by fences as the metro tunnels were erected — to the Queen Victoria Building: Statue of her on the right, statue of her dog on the left.
Her statue was a gift to Oz from the Irish Parliament, which decided they didn’t want it any more about 50-plus years ago. The building was going to be torn down as a derelict structure until a Malaysian firm bought the building about 15 years ago and renovated it to the nines. It’s home to international boutiques and has two large clocks in towers that depict scenes from British history. Like the glockenspiel in Munich’s city hall, one clock tower moves: King Charles head is lopped off every hour on the hour.
We walk past the Hilton Hotel where world leaders met in 1978 when a bomb exploded under the building, killing a policeman and two hotel employees. Perpetrators and motive unknown to this day. We move on to Hyde Park where so many Australian Ibis peck at trash on the lawns and in the garbage cans that they are called “bin chickens.” (And we were so proud of ourselves when we saw our first one on our Griffith’s Island walk!)
We stand in front of the Archibald fountain with St. James Church and St. Mary’s cathedral nearby — a beautiful part of a much larger and beautiful park — and get some Oz history, which we will spare you, and move on to the “rum hospital.” It’s construction was paid for when Governor Laughlin MacQuarie, who named a nearby avenue after himself but couldn’t get permission from England to pay for the hospital’s construction (totally independent factoids for you logicians), gave three rum dealers the local monopoly if they would pay to have a hospital built.
As we walk to the old General Post Office, Matt tells us the Oz coat of arms has a kangaroo and emu on it because neither is capable of walking backwards. The GPO, a massive stone structure about the size of the NY Stock Exchange, was totally dismantled in 1942 for fear the Japanese would bomb it. When it was rebuilt in the 50s, its large bell was found to have the word “Eternity” chalked in large white letters inside. Evidently, a man named Arthur Stace, an alky and miscreant of high order, had attended church and been struck by the preacher’s invocation of eternity as both reward and punishment, so he got straight and roamed the city every sunrise, chalking the word on 40 or so places.
After about two hours, Matt gives us a break in a food plaza where a bronze statue by John Seward Johnson, Jr., distaff-side son of the drug king, sits “Waiting,” reading a newspaper dated exactly 200 years to the day since HMS Sirius arrived in Botany Bay from the Isle of Wight (the ship’s anchor is a few blocks away).
On our way to “The Rocks,” a cute section of the city with small red brick buildings beneath the Sydney bridge’s access ramp, we stop in a park where a Wolleini pine tree is protected by a tall circular metal fence. This pine species was thought to be extinct for the past two million years until one was found in the Blue Mountains north of Sydney. The stand of these trees in the mountains can be reached by helicopter but everyone except the pilot must be blindfolded ever since a park ranger searched for the stand, found it on his own, but infected some of the trees with a fungus.
Of course, we finally get to a point where we see the Opera House on one side of Circular Quay and the bridge — called the “Ugly Coathanger” by residents of The Rocks, which its access highways divided when it was built — on the other. We liked the story about the inaugural ceremony for the bridge when Colonel Francis DeGroot swept in on his horse, sword raised, and slashed the ceremonial ribbon that the Prime Minister was about to cut. He was fined five pounds, the ribbon was retied, and the ceremony completed.
We do not like the story about Jorn Utzon, architect of the Opera House, who was basically kicked out of his job supervising its construction due to budget problems (not of his making), was rehired later but quit when plans for its interior were changed without his input or consent, and died in 2008, never having attended its opening or ever even seeing it finished.
We pay Matt handsomely and Cynthia finds a nice artisan crafts store where she also finds some nice artisan earrings. Knackered and foot-sore, we wander all over the city hunting for a decent bottle store as we make our way back to the light rail train, which we take to the wrong station and …
… have a lovely dinner with terrific wines and collapse into bed.
Another truly fascinating day in Oz.
Two Tramps 