Sydney

The first sight of Sydney, whether from the sea or the air, is always spectacular. Built on low hills surrounding a huge harbour with innumerable bays and inlets, the city is dominated by the bulk of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, one of the longest steel-arch bridges in the world, and the Opera House, with its glittering white shell-shaped roofs that seem to echo the sails of the many yachts in the adjacent harbour. The intricate confusion of water and buildings makes a striking impression either by day or by night.

When the English admiral Arthur Phillip arrived off the coast of southeastern Australia with the First Fleet in 1788, he sailed first to Botany Bay, which had been discovered by Captain James Cook in 1770 and to which he had been directed by the British government. Finding the bay too exposed for safe anchorage and the surrounding country unsuitable for settlement, he looked farther north and soon discovered the entrance to Port Jackson only a few miles away. Phillip’s first impressions of Port Jackson, which had been named but not explored by Cook, are recorded in a famous dispatch to Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney (the city is named after British politician Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney, then the British home secretary, dated May 15, 1788.
Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney
HISTORY. EARLY SETTLEMENT

The early history of Sydney was grimly dominated by its existence as a British penal colony. Convicts, dumped on this alien shore, found the environment a harsh one. The soil was poor, and the land was rough and had to be cleared by hand. The little settlement was often short of food until the settlers were able to cross the Blue Mountains and find the richer land to the west of the Great Dividing Range. There were also constant troubles between the governors, the free settlers, and the convicts.
With the exploration and settlement of New South Wales, Sydney grew quickly; the British government provided free land, free convict labour, free capital works, and guaranteed markets for the produce of the new colony. Trading links with the rest of the world were quickly established. Under the enlightened governorship of Lachlan Macquarie (1810–21), Sydney developed from a precarious penal settlement into a thriving, respectable town. Macquarie also began a program of public works, including the building of churches, hospitals, barracks, schools, and courthouses, and laid out several parks in and around the city. In this work he was aided by a convict-architect, Francis Greenway, who had been banished for forgery in England. Greenway built several fine buildings in the Georgian style.

The most astoundingly rapid growth of Sydney—from 60,000 to 400,000 population—took place in the years between 1850 and 1890, as suburbs of tightly packed terrace houses were built. These houses, with their balconies and decorative cast-iron railings, are now Sydney’s most attractive heritage from the past. The first railway, from Sydney to Parramatta, began as early as 1855.

By 1911 Sydney had become Australia’s largest city, and after World War II it benefited from a shift in Australia’s trade toward North America and Asia and away from Britain. Sydney has remained slightly more populous than Melbourne and has equaled or surpassed the other city in importance as a centre of finance, commerce, and manufacturing. In its growth it has not escaped the ills that have afflicted so many other large cities of the world, including environmental pollution, traffic congestion, and crime. Nevertheless, Sydney has become the most international and most sophisticated of Australian cities. The most striking example of this was its role as host of the 2000 Summer Olympics.