Sydney Harbour Sunset

This week, our travel pics theme has been A for Australia.

The final pic in this series is, of course, of Sydney Harbour – but not the usual angle.

You can see the Harbour Bridge, and  the Opera House to the left .. but the sun flare over the CBD should tell you that it is coming up on sunset.

We were on a cruise ship – the Carnival Spirit – heading for New Zealand when I grabbed this pic, from the stern of the ship.

Sydney Harbour is one of the world’s great safewater harbours – but when Europeans first arrived here, they missed it.

James Cook, who was the first European to map the coast, suggested Botany Bay to the south as a site for settlement.

But when Arthur Phillip arrived in 1788, he spotted Port Jackson, and decided this would be a better spot.

Of course, the Eora, Daruk and Tharawal people had been there long before, but that didn’t count, as far as the Europeans were concerned.

The Harbour Bridge is one of those iconic structures – it is the tallest steel arch bridge in the world, and even though there’s a tunnel below the harbour, it still carries 160-thousand vehicles every day along with 200 trains. It’s also legally designated a stock route – so you could drove cattle across it, if you wanted .. provided its between midnight and dawn, and you have police approval.

Mind you, there are no abattoirs left anywhere near the CBD, so there’s probably not much point 🙂

It’s possible to climb the South-east pylon – but you couldn’t have done that in World War Two – then, the army took it over to put in anti-aircraft guns!