Sydney: Harbour Icons — Circular Quay to Mrs Macquarie's Chair

The bridge took nine years to build, from nineteen twenty-three to nineteen thirty-two, held together by six million hand-driven rivets. Every single rivet was done by a team of four blokes — one to heat it in a forge, one to throw it, one to catch it in a bucket, and one to hammer it home. Sixteen workers died during construction, including two at the Moruya quarry itself. Sydneysiders call the bridge "the Coathanger," and once you see the silhouette from a distance, you'll understand why.

Now, the opening ceremony on the nineteenth of March, nineteen thirty-two — that's the real story. The New South Wales Premier, Jack Lang, was about to cut the ribbon when a bloke named Francis de Groot galloped out on horseback in full military uniform, drew a ceremonial sword, and slashed the ribbon himself, declaring the bridge open "in the name of the decent and respectable people of New South Wales." De Groot was a member of the New Guard, an ultra-right-wing paramilitary group furious that no member of the Royal Family had been invited to the ceremony. Police dragged him off his horse and arrested him. He was fined five pounds. The ribbon was hastily retied and Lang cut it properly. Only in Australia.

If you want the best view from up here without paying for BridgeClimb, the south-east pylon has a museum and lookout at the top — it's a fraction of the price and the panorama is three hundred and sixty degrees. But first, let's walk. Head east along the waterfront promenade towards Campbell's Cove. You'll see the old sandstone warehouses dead ahead.

Now look west, past the cove towards Walsh Bay. Those long finger wharves stretching into the harbour were built between nineteen twelve and nineteen twenty-two as an integrated port precinct — wharves, shore sheds, bond stores, bridges, and roads, all designed by H. D. Walsh. For decades, this was the beating heart of Sydney's wool trade. Ships from around the world docked here to load bales of merino fleece bound for the mills of Yorkshire and beyond.

By the nineteen eighties, the wharves had fallen quiet, and the area began one of Sydney's most remarkable transformations. In nineteen eighty-three, Sydney Theatre Company claimed Wharf Four Slash Five as its permanent home — a derelict cargo shed reborn as a theatre. Today Walsh Bay is a full-blown performing arts precinct housing the Sydney Theatre Company, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, Bell Shakespeare, and Sydney Dance Company. From whale blubber to Chekhov in about a hundred years. That's quite the career change.

The warehouses at Campbell's Cove are now home to restaurants and bars. If you fancy a flat white with a harbour view, grab one from any of the cafes along here — the setting is hard to beat. For something more substantial, the waterfront restaurants do excellent seafood platters with Sydney rock oysters. Sit outside and watch the ferries cut across the cove. It's one of Sydney's great pleasures.

Right, continue southeast along the waterfront. Follow the promenade past the Overseas Passenger Terminal — that massive cruise ship dock on your left — and you'll pick up the Writers Walk plaques set into the pavement.

Then there are the international visitors. Mark Twain came through Sydney in eighteen ninety-five on a lecture tour and wrote about the harbour with genuine awe. Charles Darwin stopped here in eighteen thirty-six aboard the Beagle and had rather less flattering things to say about the colonial society. And Clive James — the Sydneysider who became London's most quotable television critic — has a plaque here too. Look for his. The man could turn a phrase like a jeweller turns a stone.

Now, here's the thing most people miss. You're standing on entirely reclaimed land. The original shoreline of Sydney Cove was well behind where you are now. If you look carefully at the pavement, you'll spot cast bronze discs and a continuous band of white granite marking where the harbour's edge actually was in seventeen eighty-eight. Everything between those markers and the current waterfront was built up over decades — convicts in the eighteen forties constructed the semi-circular quay seawall, and the land was filled in behind it. The very ground beneath your feet is artificial. Circular Quay is literally named after the shape of that original seawall.

There's also a separate set of pavement markers nearby — created by artist Lynne Roberts-Goodwin in nineteen ninety-nine — tracing the path of the Tank Stream, the freshwater creek that was the entire reason the First Fleet chose this particular cove to settle. It ran from roughly where Hyde Park is today down to the harbour. Follow the markers and you're following the colony's first water supply.

Keep walking east along the promenade. When you reach the eastern end of Circular Quay, look for a lift — a glass elevator tucked near the train station. We're going up.

The Cahill Expressway itself is one of Sydney's more controversial pieces of infrastructure. It was opened in nineteen fifty-eight, named after Premier John Joseph Cahill, and the locals have been arguing about it ever since. The expressway cuts right across the face of Circular Quay, and many Sydneysiders consider it an eyesore — a brutalist concrete slab plonked in front of one of the world's great harbour views. There have been calls to tear it down for decades. But ironically, that same ugly expressway gives you this gorgeous elevated walkway, which is one of the most accessible panoramic viewpoints in the entire city. Life's complicated.

The walkway also connects directly to the Sydney Harbour Bridge pedestrian path, so if you wanted to walk across the bridge to Millers Point and back, this is your on-ramp. The bridge walk is free, takes about twenty minutes each way, and the views from the middle of the harbour are spectacular.

Stand here for a moment and just take it in. To the south, the CBD skyline rises behind the old sandstone customs buildings. To the north, the harbour opens up towards the Heads — the narrow gap between North Head and South Head where the Pacific Ocean enters the harbour. On a clear day you can see Fort Denison, the tiny island fortress in the middle of the harbour that was originally used as a place to dump convicts who misbehaved. They'd leave them there with bread and water. The convicts called it Pinchgut, for obvious reasons.

Right, take the lift or stairs back down to ground level. We're heading east along the waterfront to the big one — those white sails catching the sun.

Then Saarinen arrived late. He'd missed the first round of judging, and when he looked at the shortlisted entries, he was underwhelmed. He started rummaging through the rejects, pulled out Utzon's sketches, and reportedly declared it was easily the winning design. On the twenty-ninth of January, nineteen fifty-seven, Premier Cahill announced that the unknown Dane had won.

What followed was one of the great architectural sagas of the twentieth century. The original budget was seven million dollars. The final cost? One hundred and two million. A fourteen hundred percent overrun. Construction began in nineteen fifty-nine, and for years the engineers couldn't figure out how to actually build the roof shells that Utzon had drawn. The breakthrough came when Utzon realised every shell could be derived from sections of a single sphere — a stroke of geometric genius that made the seemingly impossible buildable.

But the politics were brutal. Cost blowouts, government interference, and a new state minister who clashed constantly with Utzon over creative control. On the twenty-eighth of February, nineteen sixty-six, Utzon resigned. He closed his Sydney office, packed up his family, and flew back to Denmark, vowing never to return. He never did. He never saw his completed building in person.

The Opera House was finally opened by Queen Elizabeth the Second on the twentieth of October, nineteen seventy-three. Those roof shells are clad in one million, fifty-six thousand, and six tiles — manufactured by the Swedish company Hoganas. They're a mix of glossy white and matte cream arranged in a subtle chevron pattern, and they're self-cleaning. Rain and wind do the work. Nobody scrubs these things.

For food and drink, you're spoiled here. Opera Bar, right on the lower concourse at the water's edge, is one of Sydney's great outdoor bars — cold drinks, Sydney rock oysters, live music most afternoons, and the Harbour Bridge filling your entire sightline. If you want to go upscale, Bennelong restaurant sits inside the building itself, under those soaring concrete ribs. Chef Peter Gilmore runs the kitchen, and the signature dessert is a pavlova shaped like the Opera House sails. It's about two hundred and twenty-five dollars for three courses, but you're eating inside a UNESCO World Heritage Site, so the ambience is included.

Walk around to the eastern side of the Opera House and follow the harbourside path south. You'll pass the Tarpeian Steps and loop back towards the shoreline markers.

Captain Arthur Phillip chose this specific cove for one reason: the Tank Stream. A freshwater creek ran from roughly where Hyde Park is now, down through what became the town centre, and emptied into the harbour right about here. Fresh water meant survival. Without it, the colony would have died in its first summer. The stream was quickly dammed and channelled, then polluted, then covered over. Today it flows through a brick tunnel deep underground, and most Sydneysiders have no idea it's there.

The reclamation happened in stages. First the mudflats were filled with rubble and ballast from arriving ships. Then, in the eighteen forties, convict labour built the semi-circular seawall that gave the quay its name and shape. By the eighteen sixties, the original crescent of sand and rock had been pushed back by about a hundred metres. Where you're standing now — solid ground, busy with commuters and tourists — was open water when Governor Phillip waded ashore.

There's something quietly powerful about these markers. In a city that moves fast and builds faster, someone decided to draw a line in the pavement and say: here. This is where it started. This is where the water used to be.

Walk south from here and cross into the Royal Botanic Garden. You'll see the gates just ahead — there's no ticket, it's free. Follow the main path and keep the harbour on your left.

Now, keep your eyes peeled as you walk through, because somewhere in this garden is one of the rarest plants on Earth. The Wollemi Pine — Wollemia nobilis — was thought to be extinct for millions of years, known only from the fossil record. Scientists believed it had died out alongside the dinosaurs. Then, in September nineteen ninety-four, a parks officer named David Noble was bushwalking in a remote gorge in Wollemi National Park, about a hundred and fifty kilometres northwest of Sydney. He abseiled into a deep rainforest canyon and stumbled upon a grove of strange-looking trees he'd never seen before. He took a sample back to botanists, and the world lost its collective mind. A living fossil. A tree from the age of dinosaurs, quietly surviving in a hidden gorge for over a hundred million years.

Here's the wildest part: the exact location of those wild trees is classified. Literally classified — the New South Wales government keeps it secret to protect the trees from disease and poaching. Only a handful of scientists know where they are. But propagated specimens were planted in botanic gardens around the world, and the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney has one right here. Ask a ranger if you can't spot it.

The gardens are free to enter and open every day from sunrise. Look up as you walk and you might spot grey-headed flying foxes roosting in the tall trees — enormous fruit bats with wingspans of over a metre. A colony once numbered over twenty thousand here, though they've largely relocated to Centennial Park. Still, stragglers hang around.

For a pit stop, the garden has a few cafes dotted through it. Grab a cold drink and sit on one of the harbour-facing benches. You've earned it. When you're ready, follow the main path northwest towards the Gothic Revival towers peeking above the tree line. That's Government House.

Construction ran from eighteen thirty-seven to eighteen forty-five, supervised locally by Colonial Architect Mortimer Lewis. The style is Gothic Revival — pointed arches, medieval-inspired towers, decorative battlements — all rendered in locally quarried Sydney sandstone. Blore's original plans were actually reversed to better suit the site's orientation, and later modifications added a porte-cochere in eighteen seventy-three and an eastern arcade in eighteen seventy-nine to protect the State Rooms from Sydney's fierce summer sun. You can see how the building evolved to cope with a climate that no English Gothic architect had ever designed for.

The house is surrounded by fourteen hectares of landscaped grounds that blend seamlessly into the Botanic Garden. The gardens were designed in the Victorian picturesque style — rolling lawns, specimen trees, and carefully framed views of the harbour. If the gates are open — and they usually are during daytime — you can walk through the grounds for free.

Guided tours of the interior run on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, and they're free too. Inside you'll find an impressive collection of nineteenth-century furniture, portraits of every governor since seventeen eighty-eight, and sweeping harbour views from the upper rooms. The grand staircase is particularly striking — cantilevered sandstone with an ornate iron balustrade.

One more thing. This isn't some dusty museum. The Governor of New South Wales still lives and works here. State dinners, investitures, and official receptions happen in the rooms you're touring. It's a working house of government that happens to be gorgeous.

Continue south through the gardens. You'll pass a peculiar building with turrets that looks like it belongs in a fairy tale. That's our next stop, and its origin story is gloriously ridiculous.

Greenway did not design modest stables. What he built between eighteen seventeen and eighteen twenty-one was a Gothic Picturesque fantasy — turrets, castellated walls, pointed windows — the works. Contemporaries described it as a "palace for horses." It is the only surviving Gothic building designed by Greenway, and it looks like something from a Grimm brothers illustration. You can see why Macquarie loved it. You can also see why London had a problem with it.

The cost and apparent extravagance of Greenway's buildings — the stables included — became one of the key reasons Governor Macquarie was recalled to Britain in eighteen twenty-one. The Colonial Office essentially said: you've been spending too much money making a penal colony look like a postcard. Macquarie was replaced, and Greenway's career never fully recovered.

But here's the beautiful irony. Francis Greenway, convicted forger, went on to become so celebrated that his face appeared on the Australian ten-dollar note from nineteen sixty-six to nineteen ninety-three. He is the only known convicted forger in the world to have been featured on a banknote. The universe has a sense of humour.

The building was converted into the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in nineteen sixteen and has been the core music education institution in New South Wales ever since. If you visit during semester, you might hear a piano drifting out of those turret windows — Chopin floating through a building originally designed for saddle racks and hay bales.

Right, we're on the home stretch. Follow Mrs Macquarie's Road east through the Domain. It's a beautiful tree-lined path that hugs the harbour. The road itself has a story — and so does the woman who gave it her name. You'll find her chair at the tip of the point.

But Lachlan Macquarie didn't just carve her a bench. He built her a road. Mrs Macquarie's Road — the path you just walked — was constructed by convict labour between eighteen thirteen and eighteen sixteen. Above the chair, there's a stone inscription that reads: "Be it thus Recorded that the Road Round the inside of the Government Domain Called Mrs Macquaries Road So named by the Governor on account of her having Originally Planned it Measuring Three Miles and Three Hundred and Seventy-Seven Yards Was finally Completed on the Thirteenth Day of June Eighteen Sixteen." Three miles and three hundred and seventy-seven yards of road, built by convicts, so one woman could reach her favourite view. That's either wildly romantic or an outrageous use of forced labour. Probably both.

The peninsula itself was known to the Gadigal people as Yurong Point, and it's now part of The Domain, the large public parkland that connects to the Botanic Garden. This was always a significant place — a point of land where the harbour bends and the whole waterscape opens up.

Sit down on the bench — or as close to it as the other tourists will let you — and take in the view. If you time it right, the late afternoon light turns the Opera House tiles golden and the bridge becomes a dark silhouette against the western sky. It's one of those views that earns every cliche thrown at it.

For your post-walk reward, you've got a few options. Walk back through the Botanic Garden to Circular Quay and grab a drink at Opera Bar — sun, harbour, cold beer, done. If you're after proper food, the restaurants along Campbell's Cove do excellent seafood, or duck into The Rocks for a pie from Bourke Street Bakery — their beef and burgundy is a Sydney classic. For something special, book a table at Bennelong inside the Opera House itself and eat under those soaring concrete ribs while the harbour twinkles through the glass.

You've just walked one of the great urban routes in the world — from the Coathanger to the sails, past convict stables and classified fossils, along a road built for love and lined with literature. Not a bad afternoon.