Sydney

• 1. Introduction

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  Sydney had an estimated 5,638,830 residents in June 2025, which is about two thirds of everyone living in New South Wales. They are spread across 658 suburbs and 33 local government areas on Australia's east coast. Locals call themselves Sydneysiders, and the city answers to nicknames such as the Emerald City and the Harbour City.

  At the centre of it all is a stretch of water that Captain Arthur Phillip, the first governor of New South Wales, described in glowing terms. He called it "the finest Harbour in the World... Here a Thousand Sail of the Line may ride in the most perfect Security".

  This documentary asks how that harbour came to exist, and who lived beside it long before any ship arrived. It asks how a settlement designed to keep prisoners isolated turned into one of the busiest cities in the Asia-Pacific. And it asks why people from so many places keep choosing to live there.

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• 2. Drowned Valleys

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  Between 360 and 200 million years ago, a braided river system laid down the sand that would harden into Sydney's sandstone. Geologists compare that ancient river to the modern Brahmaputra in Bangladesh. The Sydney Basin took shape in the early Triassic period, and the rock holds shale lenses and fossil riverbeds.

  During the Triassic, deep river valleys known as rias were carved into the Hawkesbury sandstone. Between 18,000 and 6,000 years ago, rising seas flooded them, producing estuaries and deep harbours. Port Jackson, better known as Sydney Harbour, is one of those flooded valleys. Only 25.9 kilometres offshore, the continental shelf ends and the Tasman Abyssal Plain begins.

  The land around the harbour has a basin shape, with the Tasman Sea to the east and the Blue Mountains to the west. The Hawkesbury River marks the north and the Woronora Plateau the south. South and west of the harbour lies the flat Cumberland Plain. North of it, the Hornsby Plateau is cut by steep valleys. Settlers built on the flat southern ground first, and the northern reaches filled up mainly after the Harbour Bridge arrived. Seventy surf beaches line the coast, and Bondi is the most famous.

  The Cumberland Plain Woodland is the most widespread plant community in Sydney. It is critically endangered, as are the Sydney Turpentine-Ironbark Forest, the Eastern Suburbs Banksia Scrub and the Blue Gum High Forest. Among the animals, the grey-headed flying fox and the Sydney funnel-web spider are two of the best known.

  At Observatory Hill, the city's main weather station, the temperature reached 45.8 degrees Celsius on the 18th of January 2013. It fell to 2.1 degrees on the 22nd of June 1932. Penrith, in the western suburbs, topped the hot record with 48.9 degrees on the 4th of January 2020. Dry heat often ends with a southerly buster, a powerful wind that brings gales and a rapid fall in temperature. Snow was last alleged in 1836, and historians think it was probably graupel, a kind of soft hail. In 2009, dry conditions even sent a severe dust storm toward the city.

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• 3. First Peoples

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  Flaked pebbles found in the gravel of Western Sydney may point to human presence 45,000 to 50,000 years ago. Radiocarbon dating firmly shows activity around 30,000 years ago. The first people had migrated from southeast Asia by way of northern Australia. Before the British arrived, between 4,000 and 8,000 Aboriginal people lived in the region. Coastal clans relied more on seafood, while hinterland clans ate more forest animals and plants.

  The Gadigal clan held the southern shore of Port Jackson, from South Head to Darling Harbour, and called their country Gadi. Clan names across the region were often built by adding the suffix gal to a word for a territory, a particular place, a food source or a totem. Greater Sydney covers the lands of 28 known clans. The cove where the British would settle was known to its people as Warrane.

  Clans had distinctive tools and weapons of stone, wood, plant fibre, bone and shell. They also differed in body decoration, hairstyles, songs and dances. People from different clans and language groups gathered for initiation and other ceremonies, which fostered trade, marriages and alliances. Early British settlers wrote down the word Eora as meaning either people or from this place. Scholars still debate which nation each clan belonged to. The major groups were the coastal Eora, the Dharug inland from Parramatta to the Blue Mountains, and the Dharawal south of Botany Bay.

  In what is now Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, the Garigal people left around 1,500 pieces of rock art. It is the largest cluster of Indigenous sites in Australia, and some of its sites are dated to around 5,000 years ago. Most other rock art sites in the region are kept off public maps to protect them, since they are still regarded as sacred.

  On the 29th of April 1770, Lieutenant James Cook landed at Botany Bay, called Kamay by its people, and met the Gweagal clan. Two Gweagal men opposed the landing party, and one was shot and wounded. Cook's crew stayed about a week, gathering water, timber, fodder and botanical specimens. Cook tried to establish relations with the local people and did not succeed.

  A smallpox epidemic in April 1789 killed about half of the region's Indigenous population. In November 1790, a man named Bennelong led a group of survivors from the Sydney clans into the British settlement. That decision created a continuous Aboriginal presence in settled Sydney.

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• 4. Hunger and Rum

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  The year 1783 closed one door for Britain, since the loss of its American colonies ended the practice of sending convicts across the Atlantic. Supporters of a new colony at Botany Bay also pointed to the strategic value of a base in the Asia-Pacific. They argued that it could supply timber and flax for the navy.

  The First Fleet of 11 ships arrived at Botany Bay in January 1788. It carried more than a thousand settlers, including 736 convicts. The fleet soon moved to Port Jackson, and the settlement was established at Sydney Cove on the 26th of January 1788. Phillip named the cove after Home Secretary Thomas Townshend, 1st Viscount Sydney. He had considered calling the place Albion, but that name was never officially used. By 1790, officials were regularly calling the township Sydney. The colony of New South Wales was formally proclaimed on the 7th of February 1788.

  The plan was a self-sufficient penal colony living on subsistence farming. Trade and shipbuilding were banned to keep the convicts isolated. The soil turned out to be poor, and the first crops failed, bringing several years of hunger and strict rationing. The Second Fleet in mid-1790 and the Third Fleet in 1791 eased the crisis. Former convicts received small land grants, and farms spread to Parramatta, Windsor and Camden on the Cumberland Plain. By 1804 the colony could feed itself.

  In July 1788, Phillip submitted a plan for the town with a wide central avenue, a permanent Government House, law courts and a hospital. It had no place for warehouses, shops or any other commercial buildings. Phillip promptly ignored his own plan, and unplanned growth became part of Sydney's character. After he left in December 1792, military officers began acquiring land and importing goods from visiting ships. Former convicts opened small businesses. Soldiers and ex-convicts built houses on Crown land, with or without permission.

  Governor William Bligh, who served from 1806 to 1808, tried to restrict commerce and ordered the demolition of buildings on Crown land. Some of those buildings belonged to current and former military officers. The conflict ended in the Rum Rebellion of 1808, when the New South Wales Corps deposed him.

  Governor Lachlan Macquarie, in office from 1810 to 1821, played a leading role in shaping the town. He founded a hospital, hired a planner to design the street layout, and commissioned roads, wharves, churches and public buildings. Parramatta Road opened in 1811, and a road across the Blue Mountains was finished in 1815. The population had been under 1,000 in 1788 and nearly tripled in ten years to 2,953. After Macquarie left, official policy encouraged free British settlers. Their numbers rose from 900 in 1826-30 to 29,000 in 1836-40. Transportation to New South Wales ceased in 1840, and in 1842 Sydney was declared a city with a governing council elected on a restrictive property franchise.

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• 5. Resistance and Mourning

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  In 1804, Irish convicts led around 300 rebels in the Castle Hill Rebellion. They planned to march on Sydney, seize a ship and sail to freedom. The rebels were poorly armed, and their leader Philip Cunningham was captured. About 100 troops and volunteers routed the main body at Rouse Hill. At least 39 convicts died in the uprising and the executions that followed.

  Along the Hawkesbury River, north-west of Sydney, settlers took up farms on fertile land and met resistance from the Darug people. The conflict peaked between 1794 and 1810. Bands led first by Pemulwuy and later by his son Tedbury burned crops, killed livestock and raided settler stores. A military garrison was set up on the Hawkesbury in 1795. From 1794 to 1800-26 settlers and up to 200 Darug people died.

  Fighting flared again from 1814 to 1816 as the colony pushed into Dharawal country in the Nepean region. After several settlers were killed, Governor Macquarie sent three military detachments into Dharawal lands. The campaign ended with the Appin massacre of April 1816, in which at least 14 Aboriginal people were killed.

  In January 1938, a congress of the "Aborigines of Australia" declared the 26th of January "A Day of Mourning" for "the whiteman's seizure of our country." The date they chose was the same one on which the settlement at Sydney Cove had begun.

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• 6. Sandstone and Gardens

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  The convict Francis Greenway was called on in 1814 to design Macquarie Lighthouse. Its Classical design won him a pardon from Macquarie in 1818. Greenway went on to design the Hyde Park Barracks in 1819 and the Georgian St James's Church in 1824. The earliest buildings in the colony had been put up to bare minimum standards, and Greenway's work began a culture of refined architecture.

  From the 1830s, Gothic-inspired design gained favour. John Verge designed Elizabeth Bay House, and Edward Blore's Government House dates to 1845. Kirribilli House was completed in 1858, and St Andrew's Cathedral is the oldest cathedral in Australia. Mortimer Lewis designed the Australian Museum in 1857 as taste shifted back to the Classical. James Barnet designed the General Post Office, finished in 1891. The Queen Victoria Building, a Romanesque Revival design by George McRae, was completed in 1898. It holds 200 shops over three storeys.

  Culwulla Chambers, Sydney's first tower, topped out at 50 metres and 12 floors. The Commercial Traveller's Club of 1908 had 10 floors and was demolished in 1972. Height restrictions were lifted in the 1960s, and a surge of high-rise building followed. Sydney Tower, designed by Donald Crone and completed in 1981, is the tallest structure. Because of the nearby airport, a cap of 330 metres applies to new buildings.

  The Great Depression left its mark in plainer buildings with far less ornament. John Bradfield designed the steel arch of the Harbour Bridge, completed in 1932. It uses 39,000 tonnes of structural steel across 503 metres between Milsons Point and Dawes Point.

  The Sydney Opera House, which opened in 1973, was controversial for its cost and for disputes between its architect Jørn Utzon and government officials. Soon after opening it became a major attraction and a symbol of the city. It is now a World Heritage Site, and Utzon was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2003. Sydney also holds the first Australian building by Frank Gehry, the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building of 2015.

  Hyde Park is the oldest public parkland in Australia. Macquarie dedicated it in 1810 for the "recreation and amusement of the inhabitants of the town" and named it after the London park. Phillip had set aside The Domain in 1788 as his private reserve, and the land just north of it became the Royal Botanic Garden in 1816. The garden holds 8,900 plant species and receives over 3.5 million visits a year. The Royal National Park was proclaimed in 1879 and is the second oldest national park in the world. Ku-ring-gai Chase, established in 1894, is the largest park in the metropolitan area. Further west, Western Sydney Parklands is one of the largest urban parks in the world.

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• 7. Money and Prices

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  In 1817, Macquarie granted a charter for the Bank of New South Wales, the first bank in Australia. It still exists today as Westpac. Macquarie also tackled the shortage of money by creating two coins from every Spanish silver dollar in circulation. The colonial economy followed mercantilism at first and struggled because farming was difficult. By the 1840s it had become capitalist, as free settlers multiplied and the wool and maritime trades flourished.

  The discovery of gold in New South Wales and Victoria in 1851 first disrupted the economy, as men left for the goldfields. Melbourne overtook Sydney as the largest city, which began a rivalry that endures. Immigration and gold exports then raised demand for housing and services, and the population of Sydney and its suburbs grew from 95,600 in 1861 to 386,900 in 1891. Banks failed often, and in 1893 twelve of them collapsed.

  The Commonwealth Bank of Australia was formed in Sydney in 1911. The Reserve Bank of Australia, also in Sydney, replaced it as the note-issuing bank in 1959. The Australian Securities Exchange began operating in 1987. In 1985 the federal government granted 16 banking licences to foreign banks, and 40 of the 43 foreign banks in Australia are now based in Sydney. Global companies like the city's time zone, which spans the closing of business in North America and the opening of Europe. The Globalization and World Cities Research Network classes Sydney as an Alpha+ city.

  Manufacturing employed 39% of Sydney's workers by 1961. By 1970 over 30% of all Australian manufacturing jobs were in the city. Between 1970 and 1985 it lost 180,000 of those jobs, and by 2011 the share of employment had dropped to 8.5%. Even so, Sydney overtook Melbourne as the country's largest manufacturing centre in the 2010s, with output of $21.7 billion in 2013. The Smithfield-Wetherill Park Industrial Estate in Western Sydney is the largest industrial estate in the Southern Hemisphere.

  In 2013, Sydney hosted over 2.8 million international visitors, nearly half of all international visits to Australia. They spent $5.9 billion. The city also ranks first in the world for international students, with more than 50,000 studying at its universities. The University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales are ranked 18th and 19th in the world.

  The median house price reached $1,751,728 as of October 2025. In 2023, Sydney was ranked the second least affordable city in the world for buying a house, after Hong Kong. The average house then cost A$1.59 million and the average unit A$795,000. In 2014, Wolseley Road in Point Piper had a top price of $20,900 per square metre, making it the ninth-most expensive street in the world. Terrace houses in The Rocks, once homes to miners and labourers, now rank among the city's most valuable properties. Each day about 200,000 commuters travel from Western Sydney to the CBD and the suburbs in the east and north.

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• 8. Depression to Diversity

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  On the 1st of January 1901, the six colonies federated and Sydney became the capital of the State of New South Wales. Bubonic plague arrived in 1900 and pushed the state government to modernise the wharves and demolish inner-city slums. When the First World War began in 1914, more Sydney men volunteered than the Commonwealth authorities could process. Returning soldiers were promised "homes fit for heroes" in new suburbs such as Daceyville and Matraville. The population reached one million in 1926.

  By 1933, unemployment among male workers had reached 28 per cent, and it topped 40 per cent in working-class areas such as Alexandria and Redfern. Many evicted families built shanty towns, the largest of which was called Happy Valley at La Perouse. In March 1932, the populist Labor premier Jack Lang tried to open the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Francis de Groot of the far-right New Guard upstaged him by slashing the ribbon with a sabre.

  During the Empire Games of 1938, one journalist wrote of "Golden beaches. Sun tanned men and maidens" and declared that even Melbourne seemed "some grey and stately city of Northern Europe" next to Sydney's "sub-tropical splendours." Four years later the war arrived directly. Japanese submarines attacked in May and June 1942, and 21 people were killed. Households dug air raid shelters, and the Garden Island Tunnel System was built as part of the harbour's defences.

  Immigrants and their children, mostly from Britain and continental Europe, accounted for over three-quarters of population growth between 1947 and 1971. An estimated one million onlookers watched Queen Elizabeth II land at Farm Cove in 1954, the first time a reigning monarch had stepped onto Australian soil. In the early 1970s, trade unions and resident action groups imposed green bans on development in historic areas such as The Rocks. Tariff protection began to fall in 1974, and the city started shifting from factories toward a role as a world city.

  From the 1980s, immigration grew rapidly, with Asia, the Middle East and Africa becoming major sources. At the 2021 census, 40.5% of residents were born overseas, and China and India had overtaken England as the biggest source countries. In 42% of households a language other than English is used, led by Mandarin at 5% and Arabic at 4.2%. The neighbourhoods carry that mix in their nicknames: Cabramatta is Little Saigon, Fairfield is Little Assyria and Harris Park is Little India. The Australian Treasury expects the population to reach 6.5 million in 2033-34.

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