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Within an hour of the CBD, Sydney is enclosed by virgin bush. Nobody who saw the fires of January 1994 will forget the fierce orange glow of the night sky, all roads out of the city closed where they crossed the blazing forests, houses claimed by flames racing down the fingers of vegetation that probe the city's suburbs. To the west, the national parkland of the Blue Mountains, named for the eucalyptus oils that evaporate from the gum trees and tint the air, is a 10,000-sq.-km wilderness of heavily wooded gullies and forbidding cliffs, home to well over a thousand species of plants. Only six years ago the Wollemi pine was added to the list. These prehistoric trees, previously unknown, were found in one of the region's remote canyons, where they were thought to have grown undisturbed for five million years. To the city's north, the Ku-ring-gai Chase, Marramarra and Brisbane Water national parks preserve the country as it would have appeared to early settlers in all its intimidating vastness; and even closer in, much of the harbor's 250 km of foreshore is blessedly protected, so that at North and Middle Heads, at Bradleys Head, in the valleys of Lane Cove, along the mangrove swamps of the river near Parramatta or in the upper reaches of Middle Harbour, you can fancy yourself back in the time before European settlement.
More moving are the engraved records of that time, when Sydney's original inhabitants fished, hunted and gathered their fruit and witchety grubs. Over 2,000 Aboriginal carvings--of kangaroos, fish, platypus, hunting scenes--have been found in Sydney's sandstone outcrops, mute reminders, some of them 5,000 years old, that progress comes at a price. Modern estimates put as many as 750,000 Aborigines on the Australian continent in 1788; the first governor of New South Wales, Arthur Phillip, thought some 1,500 lived between Botany Bay to the south and the mouth of the Hawkesbury River to the north. He knew them all as Eora, although they were several distinct tribes: Gayimai, Cadigal, Wangal, Walumeda. Within a year of making contact with the British arrivals, half of them were dead of smallpox.
So began two centuries of suffering, though a new spirit of reconciliation is finally acknowledging and addressing this legacy, albeit painfully slowly. Aborigines were granted the right to be counted in the national census only in 1967--for many years they had been classed as fauna. The life of a hunter-gatherer requires patience and endurance; that may be the only respect in which the life style of many Aboriginal people is unchanged.
The changes came in 11 ships, carrying 778 convicts, overspill from British prisons, and their guards. Eight kilometers within the Heads, past pale harbor beaches, rocky promontories with colonies of fairy penguins, tiny islands and sweeping bays, they anchored in a semicircular cove Phillip named for the British Home Secretary. It was January 26, 1788. The day is celebrated each year as Australia Day; the Aborigines, with some justification, call it Invasion Day.
All cities have their dark side, but few, like Sydney, had their darkest moments at birth. The scenes of debauchery and brutality recorded by most of the early chroniclers of the infant colony would have scandalized the Marquis de Sade; down the years, that tradition has been maintained. The last convicts arrived in New South Wales in 1840, and many were absorbed into gangs, or pushes, of "larrikins"--hooligans. The Forty Thieves of the Rocks and the Iron House Mob of Woolloomooloo segued neatly last century into fearsome razor gangs; the North Shore, nowadays so sedate, was terrorized by the Gore Hill Tigers and the Blues Point Mob.
The gangs are less visible now, so visitors enjoying Vietnamese food in Cabramatta may never be aware that Sydney's heroin trade has its capital here; few diners in Chinatown could identify a member of Hong Kong's ruthless triads; unless they're very unlucky--or foolish--revelers can blithely blow their spending money in the strip clubs and girlie bars of Kings Cross without encountering the standover men and drug dealers who haunt the shadows.
The slum clearances that restored some order to the dangerous streets of Sydney were the first of many modifications to the city's fabric. Old Sydney was a stone town. The softly glowing Hawkesbury sandstone, seemingly designed on some primeval color wheel to complement the Australian sun, sea and sky, was hewn from quarries in the suburbs of Bondi, Maroubra, Neutral Bay and Pyrmont. It built some of the city's greatest landmarks: the Town Hall, the Queen Victoria Building, St. Mary's and St. Andrew's cathedrals. Granite came from as far away as Scotland, sitting as ballast in passenger and cargo ships; later it was quarried at Goulburn outside Sydney, and on the southern New South Wales coast at Moruya, which provided the stone for the pylons of the Harbour Bridge.
The city center has been so zealously made over by each generation that little remains of the early buildings of Sydney Cove. Traces linger--Argyle Place in Millers Point and Susannah Place in The Rocks date from the early 19th century; further west, toward Parramatta, now the demographic center of Greater Sydney, stand Australia's only 18th century buildings, Elizabeth Farm and Experiment Farm Cottage. It seems miraculous that any of them have survived so many waves of reinvention.