![]() The newspapers were captivated by its engineering intrigues, publishing daily articles during construction. Instructively, after the 1930 census when the city’s population reached 1.23 million, Sydney regarded itself as the “second white city of empire” after surpassing Glasgow.Īs the unjoined spans stretched across the harbour, the emerging bridge was an everyday fascination for Sydney residents. Photograph: Clarence01/Getty Images/iStockphoto Sydney Harbour Bridge under construction in 1929. Sydney was its exemplar.Īs the great steel arches inched towards closure, 134m over the harbour, the new bridge was celebrated as a monolithic testimony to that white urban modernity and growth. Despite many of its early 20th-century writers and journalists – not least the “bush bards” Henry Lawson and AB “Banjo” Paterson – depicting a mythical Australia of rugged, egalitarian frontiersman, by the time the bridge was under construction Australia was already one of the most urbanised countries in the world. These intercity tensions highlight another truth about the new nation from early federation. “Even then I think there was this sense in Sydney of, ‘Well, yes, you’ve got the Yarra and the federal parliament – but just look what we are going to have’,” Ashton says. ![]() “That Australians had thought up the idea, raised the loan funds, manufactured much of the materials and physically erected the structure was all too readily forgotten, though at that time many Australians still thought of themselves as British, even if they had been born here.”Īshton points out the bridge also embodied a profound symbolism in still extant parochial tensions between Sydney and Melbourne, which, due to the political chicanery surrounding colonial federation negotiations, served as the interim national capital until 1927 when federal parliament opened in Canberra. Cranes positioned at both sides of the unfinished Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1929.
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