Nice Things Around Sydney

This is an urban bush-walk, with some sections being less negotiable than others.  Catching a ferry to Manly puts you at the start of a long track, running all the way to the Spit bridge.  The whole walk will take you about three hours, and it is now fairly well marked with  signs and arrows. Keep your eyes open for all sorts of wonders, like the extreme jointing in the sandstone near Fairlight (left) and various sorts of wildlife. Much of the area on this walk is total no-take, aside from photos. As you come off the wharf, turn left along the water front, go past the toilets (or use them) and follow the steps that lead up onto the headland beyond.  You now have more than a kilometre of concrete path open to you, running along above Delwood beach (right) and Fairlight pool (seen below in a storm). That is a tidally-fed rock pool, that is occasionally closed and pumped out for cleaning. There are toilets  and change rooms. Near several boatsheds, you will come to...

This is largely covered in the Manly to Spit walk , because you walk over and through the Dobroyd area.    Under construction.

Once known as Manly-Warringah, the Northern Beaches is a place where you could easily send a lifetime: in fact, that is exactly what I have done! The Northern Beaches begin at Manly, although Dobroyd Head , part of the Spit to Manly Walk and North Head are even further to the south, and they end at Palm Beach.   I am still working on this! Here is a nice view of Curl Curl Beach.  

This is an expensive place to shop, because all the high-fashion bling shops are lined up here. That aside, the QVB as we call it also has nice places to eat, and it lies between Sydney's biggest bookshop (Kinokuniya, across George Street) and Sydney's best bookshop (Abbeys). Blast, now I will need entries for them as well... It is also a major transport hub, with trams (light rail) in George Street, buses arriving and starting in York Street and trains running underneath and accessible through Town Hall station, right next door. You can catch trains from there to Bondi Junction  in the east, Kiama in the south and Honsby in the north, where you can catch a train to the Hunter region. Being done: place marker to set up links. Be patient...

Being done: place marker to set up links. Be patient... My mate Peter Chubb says:  Get there before 11am to feed the fish!

 Being done: place marker to set up links. Be patient...

   Work in progress: needs a good edit and update, and I am busy. Sydney's Opera House is, to say the least, unusual. It is certainly one of the items which most overseas people know about, even if they know little of the saga behind it. It is built on a magnificent harbour promontory, and is worth visiting, just for the views of the harbour. Winter or summer, there is always something happening on the harbour, most of it quite close to where you are. The wind can be bitterly cold sometimes, but there is always somewhere, out of the wind, where you can stand and look. On sunny days, of course, it can be quite hot, but there is shade to be had, as well, just by walking on the lower concourse. How to get there Any train, ferry or bus that takes you to Circular Quay will bring you close to the Opera House. If you can't see the Opera House, walk along the water's edge, under the covered walkway, with the water on your left. You'll see the Opera House soon enough! If you don...

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For Sydney scholars, the SLNSW is a gem. To non-scholars, it is often 'the Mitchell Library', but that is just a small part of it, with all of the historical Australian material. The entrance to the Mitchell is on the northern side, just over a busy road from the Botanic Gardens , but unless you are a scholarly visitor, the entry off Macquarie Street is a better starting point. Walk north along Macquarie Street, past the hospital, past the State Parliament, and swing right when you see the library. Entry is free, and hours are Monday to Thursday, 9 am to 8 pm; Friday, 9 am to 5 pm; Weekends, 10 am to 5 pm. The staff are delightful. There is good wifi, there are galleries with great exhibitions, and there is a very pleasant indoor/outdoor eatery that you will pass. The Library Bar is a rooftop outdoor bar with brilliant views, and it is open (roughly) from 4 pm to 11 pm. I have yet to make it up there...    Being done: place marker to set up links. Be patient...

There was a scheme in the 1930s to replace the Macquarie Street precinct in Sydney with a modern building that would loom high over the city. Popular legend says that the razing and rebuilding was repeatedly delayed by an unnamed civil servant, who used standard bureaucratic delaying tactics such as ‘losing’ the file. Later, World War II made such an ambitious project impossible, and in the peace that followed, old buildings came to be valued more highly. So, luckily, we can still admire the beautiful lines of the Hyde Park Barracks, the New South Wales Parliament, the old ‘Rum Hospital’, and the Mint. Macquarie Street has always been a street of fine buildings, and is well worth a quiet stroll. Take in the pig outside Sydney Hospital, opposite the top of Martin Place, rub it for luck, and wander on down to the State Library of NSW, or up to the Hyde Park Barracks. D'Arcy Wentworth, Garnham Blaxcell and Alexander Riley paid for the construction of the hospital that stretched from t...

This part of the Great Dividing Range to Sydney's west is probably best visited by car, but the area can also be accessed by train . It is about a two-hour trip. Katoomba has the best views, including the Three Sisters, but Leura is pleasant. There is also a pleasant walk from Wentworth Falls, known as Darwins Walk because Charles Darwin walked along it in 1836. Tradition has it that the mountains are named because of their colour alone, but it helps to recall that the authorities in early Sydney were naval officers who would have served in the West Indies, where Jamaica also has Blue Mountains. The early authorities were also the people in charge of the early exploring parties, and guess who got to write the names on the map! Whatever the origin, the mountains get their name from their appearance, as seen from Sydney on a clear day. These days, you need a strong wind for the best part of a day, and even then they are not seen clearly. It is commonly claimed that the blue colour...

 Being done: place marker to set up links. Be patient... QUESTION : Where was the settlement made? ANSWER : At the head of Sydney Cove on the Tank Stream, where the semi-Circular Quay now stands. —Questions and answers from Miss Johnson’s Geography with Useful Facts for the Junior Classes in Schools , 1859. If you like dramatic cityscapes, the approach to and departure from Circular Quay will be for you. The first shot is more recent, the second one is earlier, but the name 'Circular Quay' a contraction of Miss Johnson's correct name, was around as early as 1836, in a newspaper called The Australian . Very few Sydneysiders can explain now where the name came from, so you can bedazzle them. The design was the work of one Captain Barney. Once the place where passenger and cargo ships were loaded and unloaded, it has long been the place where harbour ferries loaded and unloaded local passengers. If you go away from the harbour, under the Cahill Expressway and the rail l...

We now call this area Barangaroo, but when this first shot was taken, it was still called Walsh Bay. Brisbane, Perth, Hobart and Sydney were all built around bodies of water. In each case, that created problems as the small settlements became large cities. Sydney had the worst problems because the harbour, a drowned river valley, is shaped like a fern leaf. At the end of the last ice age, the glaciers in the Northern Hemisphere melted, the melt-water ran into the oceans and sea levels rose by about 60 metres. The ocean pushed up along river valleys and flooded across coastal plains, but it did not rise high enough to cover the tough sandstone ridges of today’s Sydney. To cross the drowned river valleys, Sydneysiders needed lots of bridges—even more than the other state capitals. In 1815, Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s architect, Francis Greenway, suggested building a bridge from the south shore to the north shore of Sydney Harbour, but there was no real need for one then. Later, when all...

This covers one of the northern limits of Sydney, the tip of the Northern Beaches .  In this repeat from that page, Manly lies somewhere below the base of the photo. Barrenjoey is a tough piece of sandstone at the mouth of Dee-rab-bin , named 'the Hawkesbury' by the invaders to honour a dishonourable and useless politician. Barrenjoey is what geographers call a land-tied island, just like North Head . Here, you can see Barrenjoey as it can be viewed from the lookout at West Head in  Ku-Ring-Gai Chase National Park . In this shot, Palm Beach lies out to the right, because the beach is, in fact, the tying sand. As surf beaches go, 'Palmie' is fairly ordinary, but if you stay between the flags or swim in the pool at the southern end, you should be fairly safe. Then again, you could choose to wander up to the lighthouse on top of Barrenjoey. If you do, walk along the sand on the western (Pittwater) side, and stay on the cleared track because there are paralysis ticks up the...

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 T his is rough material: you are in a building site. More to come. Kuringai, Kuring-Gai, Ku-ring-Gai or whatever, it is a name often given for the aboriginal tribe who lived in the area. These people were either wiped out by disease or drink, or moved out before they could be taught our form of writing, so they have never had a say in how their name was spelt. The Daruk and Eora peoples lived in the area for thousands of years, and there are plentiful reminders of their prior presence to be observed. And to be preserved: once these are gone, they cannot be replaced. We need to care for these relics from the past. You wouldn't walk on the Mona Lisa, so why walk on rock art? And yet, every time you go near rock engravings in the Chase, you can see people walking all over the engravings, heedless of the harm they do. Even rock wears away, if enough people walk on it. Go around the engravings instead. And you wouldn't take away a piece of the Parthenon, so don't take away a pi...

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First : note that it is Botanic , not Botanical . I have a degree in botany, and evenb I don't know why that matters, but it does. It goes back to the foundation of the gardens in 1816 (though they only got the 'Royal' in 1959.  It began as a farm in 1788, but was a complete wipe-out, because the soil around the harbour's edge is too sandy. Next : there are three of them. The Original RBG. No, not the lovely US judge, the gardens, open from 7 am to sunset. Entry is free. Get to Circular Quay , face away from the water, go left, go past the Opera House , keeping it on your left and head along the path beside the water. Or, come out of the Art Gallery of NSW , cross the road, turn right, walk downhill, and take the entrance on your left. Just wander, but make sure you see the Calyx, if it is open. Find the Wildflower Meadow, the Palace Rose Garden and the Fernery. Wave at the bin chickens, but it is best not to feed them. There is one here on the left, and they are offici...

Please keep in mind that my first degree was in botany and zoology. I have never seen a koala in the wild as clearly as I saw this one. Usually, they are way up in the sky, just dark lumps in a tree. We booked an overnight stay in Taronga Zoo , and it was well worth the price, because in the early morning, we spotted a koala just below the window. Look, it cost quite a bit, but if you want to mix it with the wildlife, minus the crowds, this is the way to go! Taronga Zoo is on the northern side of Sydney Harbour, and you can get there by bus or ferry. The ferry ride is more pleasant, and there is an entrance gate at the bottom. but the hill is quite steep, and a lot of people catch a bus up from the ferry wharf to the top, and make their way down. The number of the wharf at the Quay can vary, so check the signs or your Tripview travel app , which you need to have on your phone. The 100 bus leaves from the Queen Victoria Building, every ten minutes, but the ferry ride is nicer. The zoo i...

Sydney has fairly good public transport. Finding times and routes. You really can't go past a clever app called Tripview . It even does coaches! With the buses and ferries, which are my main modes, you can get the time when the next service runs. With the buses, you will normally get a map which shows exactly where your bus is. With the ferries, if you look at the Manly ferry , the traditional ferries are the ones that show a travel time of around 31 minutes. Ferries. You can spend a whole day riding ferries around the harbour, using your Opal card . Definitely recommended: the Parramatta run: this will take about three hours, or four if you try food and drink in Parramatta; The Manly ferry of course; Cockatoo Island (well worth a wander around) and Taronga Zoo . Buses. The buses go almost everywhere. I have covered the 191 bus to Palm  Beach  from Manly Wharf, and later I will deal with the B1 express bus from Wynyard to Mona Vale and the 333 bus from Circular Quay to Bond...

Sydney is a sandstone city. We have cappings of shale here and there, and if you dig deep enough, you will find coal under the sandstone, but looking at the surface, looking at the hills and the headlands, Sydney is undoubtedly a quartz-rich sandstone city. Quartz is silica, silicon dioxide to the chemists. Silica is a very common mineral, dirt common, even. By itself or in combination, silica makes up more than 50% of the planet earth. Sand is silica, flint is silica, even granite is mainly silica or silicates. Sandstone makes delightful cliffs, for those knowing a bit of geology. Sandstone has shaped Sydney Harbour to be the way it is. Yet quartz is also a most uncommon mineral. You can scratch the toughest steel with a piece of ordinary glass, you can scratch the toughest glass with quartz, but very few things will scratch quartz. Quartz is uncommonly hard. This combination of the common and the uncommon explains why sandstone is so easy to find, all over the world. As sun, wind, fr...