Sydney in Stone

Like every other city we visited on this trip, Sydney has its own peculiar architecture.

Downtown there is (as in Melbourne) a mix of modern skyscrapers and Victorian rockpiles:


Literally Victorian, in this case, as this closeup shows. (There are statues of her all over the city; Sydney appears to worship her even more than London.)


But Sydney was founded several decades earlier and shows it. These two buildings, facing each other at the entrance to Hyde Park, date from about 1819 and are among the oldest in the city:




They're not exactly architecturally distinguished, but they were lucky to be architected at all: Sydney was a penal colony at the time, so everyone there was either a convict or a soldier. When they decided they needed some public buildings, they had to search among the convicts for someone who had been an architect. Fortunately for them and posterity, they found one.

But perhaps the most typical architecture of Sydney, at least in the areas where we went, were these rowhouses with ornamental balconies. I don't know how old they are or what they are like inside, but they're everywhere, particularly in the gay neighborhood around Oxford St.