Sydney - The History
One tip for traveling to Australia, and I mean this seriously, if there is anyway at all to go first class do it. I have never recommended that before as I know some people have a hard time finding that kind of money, but I highly recommend it. I know the tickets are thousands of dollars more, but when you are going to be confined to the same space for an entire day, you want to have room to move, and whatever amenities you can get. Save money by booking early, and traveling during their off-season, which ironically is our summer. If you are like us, you save your sky miles for a special trip. Well I recommend again you use them for a trip like this, even if it doesn't cover the whole flight your miles can remove a large portion of the cost. For most people traveling to Australia, the first place you will land is Sydney. You can connect from there to Melbourne, Perth, or any of the other cities along the coast you may be visiting. Like any major city, Sydney is divided into distinct neighborhoods. I can't say enough about Sydney and how clean, safe, and walkable it is. We divided up our time between two neighborhoods, the first being Wynyard, and the second being Hyde Park. They are both great locations for seeing a majority of the sites in the city. Getting into Sydney from the airport is easy, take the train. They have an extensive subway and train network. As of 2017, the cost of a ticket from the airport to the city center is $17.50 Australian dollars. While that is not cheap, it's convenient. Another suggestion, when you are going back to the airport take Uber. The city has put a $5 fee on Uber pickups at the airport, trying to force more people to take the train. There is nothing they can do to increase the cost of a drop off though, so an Uber ride back will actually save you $5-$10.
For those of you who don't know a lot about Australia, the continent was "discovered" by Europeans in the 17th Century when explorers from The Netherlands began mapping the coast. While they once called it New Holland, after a century they had done nothing with the land, and in 1770 the famed English explorer James Cook landed on the eastern shores and claimed it in the name of King George III. Following the Revolutionary War, the British crown was looking for a place to send their increasing number of convicts so they gave them an option, waste away in a British prison ship, or sail for an uncharted land and try to make it on your own. Australia stopped taking in prisoners into the country by the 1830's, but their story as a prison colony was set. Since they are such a relatively young nation, and sparsely populated, less than 25 million people in a country as big as the United States, the country is not filled with historic sites like other older or more populated nations, but there are plenty worth visiting. The first one to check out is the Hyde Park Barracks. Located on the edge of the city's most well-known park, the barracks were once home to hundreds of prisoners at a time. Built by prisoners, it was not really a prison since the whole country was a prison, it was more of a boarding home to give them somewhere to stay when they arrived. In the barracks you will see a building that has lasted through the entire history of the country. Over the last two centuries the building has been used as a home for prisoners, for immigrant women, and over the last century has served as a home for many government agencies. As you walk around check out the writing on the walls left by carpenters and painters over the last century. They thought it would be funny to make fun of their buddies, and let someone find it 75 years later. You can also look through the spy holes the guards used to check in on the prisoners with, and take a load off in one of the hammocks. I now realize being an 18th Century prisoner would not have been good for my sleep cycle. One of the unique exhibits, and one I will be fine to never see again, is a room dedicated to all of the items that fell between the floor boards. While fascinating as an example of the changing times, all of the items were collected in the 1990's during a renovation of the building, and were items mice and rats had collected. They literally have an entire room in the museum of items rats had collected.
If you decide to visit the barracks, which you should, the benefit is there are several other historic buildings all within several hundred yards of the barracks. The next one to visit is the State Library. A stunning Romanesque building, they host a free walking tour daily at 10:30am. Not knowing what to expect from the free walking tour since we only found out about it by a sign sitting on the sidewalk, we could not be more pleased with the tour. This is not one of those guided tours where they expect you to tip them at the end, this is just a caring Australian citizen who volunteers her time telling you about the history of the country. The library has some interesting stories of its own. During the mid-1800's, the territory of Australia began to reform its image from that of a prison colony to a sophisticated land. In an effort to do that some of the gentlemen of the area started a private library, for men only of course. After the memberships did not come rolling in, they held on for a few years before turning their collection of books over to the state in 1869. A tour of this library will show you some magnificent features. In the entrance is a tiled recreation of Tasman's Map, a 1644 map by an explorer in his attempt to circle the island. A group of early 20th Century patrons loved Shakespeare so much they paid to have a wonderful reading room installed in the library with hundreds of copies of his works for anyone to read. The room is covered with ornate carvings of the coat of arms for the Shakespeare family, and other prominent families of his time. The library is also home to the works of some of the great explorers of the 18th Century. The library houses the papers of Matthew Flinders, the first man to sail completely around the nation and map it. Flinders is such a hero to the Australian people they have a statue of him on the outside, and oddly enough a statue of his cat following behind him. The library houses the papers of William Bligh, the famed captain of the Bounty whose mutiny became the stuff of legends. The oddest thing in the library though is the Cervantes Collection. Over the course of half a century one patron made it his mission to buy every copy of Don Quixote he could find in any language. When he died you will be shocked to hear there was not a rush to buy this collection, so he donated his 1100 copies of the same novel to the library, who made a single reading room out of it.
Across the street from the State Library is the Royal Botanic Garden. A public park that is completely free to tour, the massive park has one of the best landscapes I have ever seen in any park in the world. Founded in 1816 by the most famous governor of the Australian colony, Lachlan Macquarie, the park as grown to be a jewel for the people of Sydney. Different sections of the park are designed to look like different regions of the world. As you walk around you can sit and relax with the locals, who were shockingly high in number considering we were there on a workday in the winter, but it was sunny and reasonably warm so I can forgive them. You could also ride your bikes along the miles of paths in the park. One of the main attractions for visitors to Sydney is a walk out to Mrs. Macquarie's Chair, a carving in the rock that faces out to the water where the governor's wife, Elizabeth, used to walk to watch the ships pass during the day. While that story sounds sad to me, it is a wonderful view of the Sydney harbor, the Opera House, and the famous Sydney Harbour Bridge.
All of these sites are in a straight line with one another down Macquarie Street, and are no more than a half a mile from one another. All of these sites can be seen on the same day, but I wouldn't rush yourself. The gardens alone are worth a half day walk. There are other sites on this road including the former Royal Mint, and the New South Wales Parliament Building, the oldest building in Sydney.
If we had it to do all over again we would stay in a neighborhood called The Rocks. One of the oldest neighborhoods in the city, The Rocks is a neighborhood located near the shoreline where ship workers would have lived in the 19th Century. They have kept the old homes up amazingly well, and the neighborhood has an awesome feel like somewhere you want to call home. One of our favorite days was wandering around there and finding The Lord Nelson Brewery Hotel. You read it right, a two hundred year old brewery with a hotel attached. I'm glad we didn't find this place when we were searching for a hotel or I may have never left the hotel. We stopped in for an hour and had a pint with the locals. Another quick suggestion is to check out the Sydney Observatory. The clear Australian sky, and the need to measure stars in the southern hemisphere made Sydney an excellent location for this task in the 18th & 19th Centuries. This museum is completely free, and well worth an hour of your time. While this is not all of the historic sites in the city, I want to emphasize again, if you are a history traveler like myself then you are going to run out of things to do quickly in Australia as there just isn't much to visit. If you are going to view a modern nation on the other side of the world with very nice people then you cannot pick a better place to start touring Australia than Sydney.
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