The Tank Stream

The entire city of Sydney exists because of a stream flowing under your feet right now. In seventeen-eighty-eight, Captain Arthur Phillip sailed the First Fleet into Sydney Cove and chose this exact spot for the colony because he saw a freshwater stream flowing into the harbour. No stream, no settlement, no Sydney. It really is that simple.

They called it the Tank Stream because the early colonists cut tanks -- rectangular reservoirs -- into the sandstone banks to collect and store the water. It was the colony's sole water supply. For the first few decades of European settlement, this little creek was the most important thing in Sydney.

Of course, humans being humans, they destroyed it almost immediately. Within thirty years, the stream was so polluted from washing, tanning hides, dumping waste, and general colonial filth that it had to be abandoned as a water source. By the eighteen-twenties, the freshwater stream that founded a city was a sewer. They eventually bricked it over and paved a street on top of it.

But here is the thing. It is still down there. The Tank Stream still flows beneath the CBD as a stormwater channel. You are standing above it right now. In nineteen ninety-nine, artist Lynne Roberts-Goodwin installed six pavement markers along Pitt Street so you can trace the stream's underground path from Pitt Street at Alfred Street heading south. Look for them.

Occasionally, Sydney Water runs tours that take you underground to actually walk through the stream's channel. They are announced by ballot, and they sell out almost immediately. Getting a spot is like winning a lottery to visit the ghost of a creek. But it is there, right under the shops and the traffic and the suits, still flowing, still the reason any of this exists.