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Horse Drawn: John Rae and ‘The Turning of the First Turf’
John Rae is, perhaps, my favourite dead white male. On the surface, he’s really rather ordinary. An administrator who was meticulous and ambitious, he was a career public servant. He woke up, got dressed, went to work and came home again. He married and had six...
Sydney’s Lady Footballers
Last week Australia and New Zealand won their joint bid to host the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup on Friday, prompting us to think across codes about some other legendary women football players in Sydney who played their first game almost 100 years ago. As the first...
Sprucing up Sydney Town Hall
You know, we often take Sydney Town Hall for granted. It's undeniably a city landmark - we sit on its steps and watch the world go by, use it as a meeting place, and it has given its name to a train station - but it is also a very special building. City of Sydney...
Putty Road
With Sydney surrounded by mountains on three out of four sides, getting out of the city area has, until fairly recently, been tricky. This was particularly the case in the colonial period. In the west the Blue Mountains were viewed as an almost impenetrable barrier by...
Order in the Court! The Trial of Two Murderers
In the mid-eighteenth century, the famous London magazine Punch published a short piece on the ever-increasing popularity of true crime stories: We are a trading community—a commercial people. Murder is, doubtless, a very shocking offence; nevertheless, as what is...
Barney’s on Broadway
St Barnabas' Anglican Church on Broadway, affectionately known as Barney's, has catered to congregations of all sorts since it was established in the mid-nineteenth century. ...
Carangarang
Today is the start of National Reconciliation Week, so I thought we’d take a look at someone who was part of Sydney’s early history: Carangarang. Now I must confess that I didn’t know much about Carangarang before today. But that’s one of the great things about the...
The camels at Government House
The State Library of New South Wales holds a very lovely painting of the first Government House in Sydney. The oil painting, by George Edwards Peacock, was done in 1845, just before the building (where the Museum of Sydney now stands) was demolished. The scene is of a...
A venerable old bird
Here at the Dictionary of Sydney we like to give you insight into those seminal moments in the city’s history, the patterns and forces that shaped our city, influential people and events… or in the case of today a foul-mouthed pet cockatoo, Cocky Bennett. [button...
A Drama of Llamas
These days we’re all talking about social distancing, or, more accurately, physical distancing but how far should we be staying away from each other? Some advice is 1.5 meters, some is 2 meters. People working in the old scale are saying 6 feet. What does it all mean?...
