Mrs Macquarie's Chair

You are sitting on -- or standing next to -- a sandstone bench that convicts carved by hand in eighteen-ten for the governor's wife. Elizabeth Macquarie used to come here to watch for ships arriving from Britain. Imagine the loneliness of that. Sitting on a rock at the edge of the world, watching an empty horizon for months, waiting for a sail that might carry a letter from home. The inscription on the rock dates the bench's completion to the thirteenth of June, eighteen-sixteen.

But this place is much older than the British. The peninsula was known to the Gadigal people as Yurong Point. Aboriginal communities lived around here and fished these waters for thousands of years. At least two Aboriginal archaeological sites survive nearby, found by an amateur archaeologist as recently as the nineteen-nineties. The oldest continuous culture on Earth was using this headland long before anyone carved a bench into it.

Here is where the story turns. In January nineteen eighty-eight, as Australia celebrated the bicentennial of European settlement with fireworks and tall ships, Aboriginal protesters established a Tent Embassy right here at Mrs Macquarie's Chair. Two hundred years after the First Fleet arrived, First Nations people chose this exact spot -- a colonial wife's lookout -- to protest two centuries of dispossession. Both groups watching the same harbour from the same stone, for completely different reasons.

The view from here is probably the most photographed angle in Sydney -- the Opera House on one side, the Harbour Bridge on the other, water in between. But what makes this spot genuinely powerful is the layering. Sixty thousand years of Aboriginal habitation, a homesick colonial wife, and a bicentennial protest, all on the same piece of sandstone.