Sydney, Australia

Sydney was the last port of the first leg of our 2 leg cruise. We are only here long enough to let some passengers off and get new passengers. We arrived around 7 AM and set sail around 6 PM. We did have time to go into Sydney and do a tour of The Rocks. We were very fortunate to have a fabulous guide, Dave.

The day we were in Sydney was the end of their Christmas break. The schools are out from just before Christmas through January 26, which is Australia Day. We were lucky to spend that day at sea since almost everything would have been closed. We did celebrate our 57th anniversary on the 26th, with our stateroom staff decorating it for us and a special cake at dinner.

Australia Day is like our 4th of July celebrating the founding of the country. However, it is a controversial day with the First Nations people, as they feel it takes away their heritage.

Sydney has the largest financial district in the southern hemisphere. Only 18% of the world’s populations live in the southern hemisphere.

Many of the animals in Australia are marsupials, with 85% of them unique to Australia. These animals have no natural predators and are very tame and friendly.

Sydney was populated mainly by convicts. After the American Revolution, Great Britain needed some place to send their convicts. Previously they had been sending them to the United States. So they decided to send them to Australia. Lord Sydney was tasked to find somewhere else and looking at Captain Cook’s description of the area decided on Australia. The first fleet was 11 ships with 800 convicts and they arrived in January of 1788 after 9 months at sea. They arrived at Port Jackson, which is now Sydney Harbor.

When the convicts arrived they were put in the least favorable land and that was an area now known as The Rocks. It was a rocky bluff and they built their homes on it with rocks and in the rocks. The convicts were used to build homes, roads and government buildings by quarrying stone. Many of the stones have markings with the convicts “sign” on it.

One of the convicts we heard about was Mary Reibey, although a convict, married well, raised 7 children and started the oldest bank in Australia after her husband died. She is honored on the $20 bill. Another convict on their money is Francis Greenway who ended up being an architect for the city, his crime was bank note forgery 😉

We learned how some colloquial phrases came to be…”happy hour” in old times all bars had to close at 6PM, so the hour after you got off work at 5 PM until the bars closed was “happy hour”. “Hangover” came from the sailors wanting a place to sleep, and for 2 cents they could “hangover” a railing, it was better than 1 cent to sit in a chair. Our guide was full of fun stories that led to these phrases.

In 1970, the city council wanted to tear down The Rocks area, but the people protested and so the early heritage of the city was preserved.

We learned that during WWII, Reginald Evans who was living on an island in the Pacific was part of the people who rescued the survivors of the PT 109 ship. He was subsequently invited to the White House by then President Kennedy and shown a coconut that sat on the President’s desk as a reminder of his rescue. The oldest pub in Sydney, Hero of Waterloo, has memorabilia of Evans.

The city is also known as the Emerald City because of the color of the waters in the harbor. The locals nickname for the Opera House is “a scrum of nuns”. The Harbor Bridge was built between 1920 – 1932. It is an iconic symbol of the city.