Friday 20 September 2024 – Acting on a suggestion from the friends we met last night, we decided that Watsons Bay would be a good destination for an excursion, particularly since the weather outlook was so good – sunshine and temperatures in the mid-20s.

So we headed for the ferry and queued up

to get on to F9 on the B side of Wharf 2. I’ve been pretty impressed with the way the public transport available around Sydney is organised. There’s no need to buy tickets; one can simply “tap on” and “tap off” using a credit card or, in my case, my phone. The trains are double-decker, the ferries seem to be very competently operated and the services have suited us very well on our short stay here. The ferry ride out of Circular Quay offers, unsurprisingly, some great views of the Sydney skyline

and, of course, its iconic structures.

Jane noticed that there were people climbing the bridge,

something that she and I did when we were here last, in 2001. Nice to see it’s still going; and they’ve added the aboriginal flag at the top of the bridge since our last visit, unless I’m mistaken.
Many ships leaving Circular Quay will pass a Martello Tower built on a small island:

Fort Denison, a former military site which is the most complete Martello Tower in the world and has been a museum, tourist attraction, restaurant, and popular location for wedding receptions and corporate events. It’s now closed for conservation work, apparently.
Watsons Bay is an attractive place

with a great view back of the Sydney skyline.

One of Sydney’s great attractions is a restaurant, Doyles, known for its seafood generally and its fish’n’chips specifically. The Watsons Bay location

is the original one, dating from 1885. Another attraction is the heritage trail which starts at Camp Cove (a place, not an over-theatrical chap) and leads up to South Head, the southern jaw of the mouth of Sydney Harbour. It’s a walk. So we went for it. Obviously. It takes you past some of the nice houses there,

and behind a cannon, which is pointing, for some reason, back at Sydney.

The furthest point of the trail, about a kilometre from the start, is Hornby Lighthouse

with the old lighthouse keeper’s cottages beside it.

One can also see how narrow the gap is that leads into Sydney Harbour. North Head – the upper jaw – is really quite close.

The lighthouse is a good, photogenic location. It’s therefore catnip for today’s generations of phone camera wielders (mainly, today, from the far east),

who seem to find it intolerable should a photo not include themselves. In many cases, quite an inordinate amount of time is spent organising poses (e.g. staring (nautically? pretentiously?) into the distance or pointing at the top of the lighthouse as if surprised to see that it has one). This specific posing seems to be a cultural thing among oriental tourists, and I wonder what will become of all of these images. Instagram, I suppose; the idea is that other people should see the photos. I doubt that, once posted online, the images will ever be seen again by their originators.

Grumpy? Me? Bloody right.

We had wanted to continue our walk down the other side of South Head rather than just completing the heritage trail loop. Trouble is, there’s a fucking great military establishment in the way, HMAS Watson,

and they clearly take a dim view of people wandering past their buildings. So, back towards Camp Cove it was,

which at least gave us the chance to take a coffee stop. From there, we cut across to the other side of the head. There’s clearly a military link here, since (as well as the naval base there) the road passed an armoury, an “Officers Quarters” building

and what we think were once gun emplacements.

There was some wildlife action along the way: Jane spotted a kookaburra

which really was sitting in an old gum tree; a couple of remarkable ants nests;

an engaging pair of blue wrens (male and female)

and a bunch of sulphur-crested cockatoos,

who were pretending to be sea birds perching on the cliffs and

inspecting tourists for food value.

We also spotted this dove

which, coincidentally, is a Spotted Dove.

The wrens and the cockatoos were at Gap Bluff, which has a small National Park area and also provides a couple of great cliff views.

There’s a historical memorial there, too;

the anchor belonged to a ship, the Dunbar which was wrecked on nearby rocks

in August 1857. Only one of the 122 aboard survived and the anchor was recovered some 50 years later and placed as a memorial to the others. The wreck was the catalyst for the creation of the Hornby Lighthouse and its survivor, one John James, went on to become the lighthouse keeper there.

Further along from Gap Bluff is the Watsons Bay Signal Station,

first established in1790; a permanent guard would watch out for arriving ships, raising a flag both to give them a sign of the new location of the settlement, and to notify the colony of the imminent arrival of the long awaited ships. Amazingly, the station has remained in permanent use from that date and has thus maintained its role for over two centuries, and from the same building for most of that time.

Near it is a lighthouse, the South Head Upper Light, also called the Macquarie Lighthouse.

Its site is the longest serving lighthouse site in Australia, with some kind of navigational aid in place since 1791 (sadly not sufficiently effective to save the Dunbar, though). The lighthouse shown above was completed in 1883 and is still fully operational. Next to it is the lighthouse keeper’s cottage

and in front of it, complementing the formal informational plaque on the lawns, is a much more informal tribute.

One could have carried on walking the cliff path, but we turned back to the bay to catch the ferry

back to Circular Quay, whence we walked towards the Sydney Royal Botanic Garden. On Circular Quay there are some plaques in the ground celebrating well-known Australians; we recognised a couple

and I suppose this one

must be the one originally dedicated to Rolf Harris.

The Botanic Garden is a large, pleasant park

with some remarkable trees

and a few quirky sculptures.

My main objective was to get Mrs. Macquarie point and something called Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair. This Macquarie name keeps cropping up. Major General Lachlan Macquarie (born on the island of Ulva off the coast of the Isle of Mull in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides) was a British Army officer and colonial administrator. Macquarie served as the fifth Governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821, and had a leading role in the social, economic, and architectural development of the colony. He is considered by historians to have had a crucial influence on the transition of New South Wales from a penal colony to a free settlement and therefore to have played a major role in the shaping of Australian society in the early nineteenth century, hence the ubiquity of the Macquarie name.

He was married, as we can infer from the naming of Mrs Macquarie’s Chair,

an exposed sandstone rock cut (by convicts in 1810) into the shape of a bench. Folklore has it that Elizabeth Macquarie used to sit on the rock and watch for ships from Great Britain sailing into the harbour. She was known to visit the area and sit enjoying the panoramic views of the harbour. Above the chair is a stone inscription referring to Mrs Macquarie’s Road. That road was built, on the instruction of Governor Macquarie, between 1813 and 1818, and ran from the original Government House to Mrs Macquarie’s Point.

By this stage we were getting a trifle foot- and back-sore, so decided to return to the hotel. We diverted for a quick look into The Calyx,

to see if it would sell us some beer. Sadly, the café is just a café, and coffee wasn’t going to cut it for us, so I took a couple of valedictory photos

and we headed back to the hotel, past the Conservatorium of Music, which has the least music-related architecture I think I’ve ever seen.

Thus ended a very pleasant day’s outing; ample justification for a glass of something cold and a bite to eat. Before we retired for the night, for amusement, I set a timelapse going to cover the comings and goings of the ferries at Circular Quay, which we can see from our hotel room. I hope you find it as engaging as I do.

Tomorrow we leave the city proper to spend a few days with friends who live to the north of Sydney. I have no idea what this means in terms of photos and verbiage on these pages; you’ll just have to keep an eye out to see for yourself, won’t you?