Sydney Audio Tours

Port Jackson is one of the finest natural harbours in the world, and Sydney has been in an ongoing argument with itself about how to build a city around it ever since Arthur Phillip anchored the First Fleet at Sydney Cove on January 26, 1788. The Aboriginal Eora people had been here for at least 30,000 years before the British convict ships arrived. The sandstone geology that made building difficult is the same stone that gives The Rocks neighbourhood its texture and that the Harbour Bridge, completed in 1932, rests on. The Opera House, on the point of Bennelong where a traditional meeting place once stood, opened in 1973 after a construction saga that consumed the career of its architect, Jorn Utzon, who never returned to see the finished building.

Sydney has seventy surf beaches within the metropolitan area, of which Bondi is the most famous and Manly, reached by ferry from Circular Quay, is the one locals tend to prefer for escaping the crowds.

The city's postwar immigration waves, first from Europe, then from Asia and more recently from India and the Middle East, have made it one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world. More than forty percent of its five million residents were born overseas. The food culture this has produced, from the Vietnamese restaurants on Cabramatta's John Street to the Lebanese bakeries in Lakemba to the dim sum halls of Haymarket, is one of the city's genuine strengths.