12. Australia - Sydney

covering 7 to 9 November 2019

The Opera House and the business area from the Harbour Bridge

I really do like Australia and Australians but one thing I find particularly irritating is the regular Australian adoption in their speech of what I call infantilisations, although I daresay there is an official word for it.  I mean the sort of oral tic beloved of sport commentators who can’t say Giggs or Brown but feel compelled to say Giggsy or Brownie.  Here in Oz the shortening of words often requires some knowledge or context to understand.  Barbie is easy to decipher as Barbeque but how would you work out that relos mean relatives, freo is the town of Fremantle and so on.  I prefer to call a spade a spade rather than a spo.  We even had to ask what ‘pokies’ were which seem to be available in some places but not others.  It turns out they’re slot machines, short for Poker Machines.  We were caught out in the Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney or perhaps it’s Syddo when we went into a tourist information office (a touro info offie) and were warned that the coming weekend would be very busy, packed even, in one of the local towns because of what I heard was their annual ‘roadie’ show.  Ah cars, I thought.  Heather had heard ‘Rodeo’.  Ah, horses, she thought.  We only found out later that we had heard different things and later still we found out that the word was Rhodie and it was their annual Rhododendron Show.

Jacaranda in full bloom 

Sydney was a break from motor homing because we were in a hotel for four or five days.  Big city and big prices.  So our on-board travel consultant found a good central hotel which was more than we were used to but we booked it anyway.  Just after the booking was confirmed Heather had one of those ‘I wonder’ moments, checked and found that the price she had been looking at on the booking site was in US$ not AUS$ so it was about 30% more than we had thought was expensive.  Still it was a lovely hotel, understated sophisticated rather than that garishly bling style beloved of so many hotels at the higher end of being designed in Las Vegas Vernacular.  It was in a good position about ten minutes walk from the waterfront and it did a great buffet breakfast.  What you might call a ‘no need for lunch’ breakfast.  According to a display board inside it had been built by the Grace Bros. retail empire.  Shades of “Are You Being Served” for those old enough to remember it. 

the business area from near the Opera House

Well Sydney is a big city and with the time we had we were only ever going to see the centre, which is high rise with a few older remnants of the Sydney of the 1900s or 1930s.  An interesting area called The Rocks down near the water is a few blocks which were due for development but saved by local protests.  There are of course two big sights and sites here which I think do justify the word iconic but I absolutely refuse to say awesome.  The Sydney Harbour Bridge and the unbelievably wonderful Opera House.  Well OK, awesome for The Opera House.

the Giant Coathanger

It is possible to climb right to the top of the bridge which I wasn’t going to do even before I saw the price of between AUS$268 and AUS$403  a ticket.  We went up one of the towers for AUS$25 each and got just as good a view without the wind and terror.  The towers by

from the north,
looking towards the city centre

the way are not part of the bridge supports, they’re decorative.  The pictures of the construction really are eye opening.  Workers wore ordinary jackets and shoes, there were no safety lines or protective clothing and it’s reported that only two workers were killed by falling off the bridge.  The finished article is reported as having taken six years at a cost £10,057,170. 7 shillings and 9 pence.  In contrast, the Opera House (did I say I liked it ?) was projected to take three years and cost AUS$7M but it actually took sixteen years and cost AUS$102M to complete.  Well worth somebody else’s money, I’d say.

walkers on the summit attempt

from the Harbour Bridge.  the Pacific Ocean is in that direction

well, guess what this is

a more classic view

Now you will all have seen pictures of the Opera House and seen for real it is the very opposite of a disappointment but it was smaller than I‘d thought.  It stands on a promontory with no other buildings near it and so is clearly visible from many angles.  It is one of the most photogenic buildings I’ve ever seen and had I still been using colour slides it would have cost me a fortune.  Ah, the joys of digital.  People interpret the shapes as sails or shells and I thought they looked more like the bows of boats stood on end.  During the guided tour we took we were told that one schoolboy suggested Nuns in a Scrum which is as good a description as any and we were told that there are over a thousand rooms in the entire struture.  Years later the Danish designer of the building, Jorn Utson was asked what it represented and he said nothing, the shapes are segments of a sphere.  The tiles on the outside which make the building so obvious are specially made to be cleaned by rain and despite what they look like from a distance are not all white.  Utson never saw it finished, he stopped work when the payments for his company were stopped.  He was then sacked under the excuse that by stopping work he had resigned.  He never returned to Australia.

inside The Opera House

and a couple of night shots

I'd like to dig a leaning one up,
turn it around and
monitor future growth

Behind the Opera House is the very good Botanical Garden and I’ll only mention one thing which I think even those of you who are not interested in plants will find interesting.    It concerns the Hoop or New Caledonia Pine, a tree which is only found growing in the wild in New Caledonia and is one of the members of the Monkey Puzzle Tree family.  Specimens growing in the Sydney botanic garden lean to one side and it had been noticed that this was true of others of the same species growing elsewhere.  So scientists measured the angle of inclination of 256 of them growing on five different continents and found that they do lean, at an average angle of 8.55 degrees.  That’s more than twice that of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.  Those growing in the northern hemisphere lean south and those growing in the southern hemisphere lean to the north.  Additionally, the further they are from the equator, the further they lean.  Why ?  Nobody knows.  I find that a fascinating oddity.  Incidentally, the old chestnut about bathwater emptying clockwise in the northern hemisphere and anti-clockwise in the southern (or the other way round) is a myth.

these are Australian Swans.  If Swan Lake is staged at
The Opera House (and yes, they do ballet too)
what colour is the swan ?