GPO Clock Tower (Martin Place)

From eighteen ninety-one to nineteen thirty-nine, the clock tower on the General Post Office was the tallest point in Sydney at eighty-three metres. Every worker in the city could glance up and check the time. They called it the working man's watch.

Then in nineteen forty-two, they tore it down. Japan had entered the war, Japanese submarines had attacked Sydney Harbour, and the military decided the tallest structure in the city centre was too visible a target for aerial bombing. So they dismantled the clock tower -- the single most recognisable feature of the Sydney skyline for fifty years -- and the city went without it for twenty-two years. Twenty-two years. They did not rebuild it until nineteen sixty-four.

The tower also had a second function most people did not know about. Mechanically operated colour-coded flags were displayed from the tower to telegraph weather messages from the South Coast. So if you were in the city and wanted to know the weather, you looked up at the flags on the post office. The great tenor bell inside weighed almost five tonnes.

Martin Place itself is worth knowing about. It was originally called Moore Street and was a narrow, muddy road. The transformation into a wide civic plaza happened gradually over a century. The Cenotaph war memorial, which you can see in the middle of the plaza, was unveiled in nineteen twenty-nine. An ANZAC Day dawn service has been held here every year since.

The GPO building is now a hotel and retail space, but the clock tower is back where it belongs, rebuilt to the original design. Look up at it and remember: for two decades during and after the war, this tower simply was not there. Sydney cut the top off its most beloved building because it was afraid of what might come from the sky.