Sydney Harbour: A History

In 1925 D.H. Lawrence described a ‘huge, restless, modern Sydney, whose million inhabitants seem to slip like fishes from one side of the harbour to the other’. What was true then had been the case for centuries before, and decades since. Sydney Harbour has been a defining element for the people who have lived around it since the time of the harbour clans – a means of communication, a barrier, a resource to be exploited, a place of beauty, spirit and meaning. Sydney Harbour explores the story of the waterway from the time of the Gameragal, Gadigal and others to contemporary debates about the future of the ‘working harbour’. A beautifully written, compelling book, it lays out the interaction between the glittering harbour and the people who inhabited and shaped it and attached meaning to it.