Brash & beautiful

“Everyone has their own Sydney,’ writes the author of a500-page bio of the famous city.

- ANN PACKER

SYDNEY: A biography, by Louis Nowra NewSouth, 44.99)

About five years ago, on a visit to catch up with our Sydney family, we spent a few hours at Barangaroo Reserve, a reconstructed headland based on the pre-1836 shoreline. It was cut away for docklands made redundant with the advent of supertankers.

On a glorious blue-sky day in 2018, it was not the nearby high-rise commercial buildings, including James Packer’s Crown casino, the slowly surfacing metro station or the barely established planting 75,000 natives) that caught my attention. It was the sandstone riprap edging the waterside path massive quarried blocks of the stuff, a sparkling stone jigsaw puzzle in ochres through to the occasional purple, which fitted together with no space for foliage to take root.

Already part of the landscape, nearly all of these 10,000 blocks have come from the area itself, having been extracted to make way for a cool underground cultural space” with parking for 300 cars.