Darling Harbour

For most of its life Darling Harbour was not somewhere you went. It was where the wool went out and the coal came in, and these photographs are of that harbour — a working port photographed from the heights above it, when the skyline was masts.

Early in 1871 the camera came back within the month, close enough that the two readings sit together. In February the wharves are lined with steam and sailing ships behind the foreshore sheds and the two-storey Royal Standard Hotel, its name painted straight across the gable and a horse-drawn cart standing in the yard. In March the camera has turned to look across the timber and tile rooftops of the wharf sheds at a warehouse entrance lettered for the Hunter River New Steam Navigation Company — the Sydney-to-Newcastle trade, which ran until the company merged into the Newcastle and Hunter River Steamship Company in 1891.

The industry is on the far shore. The Australian Gas Light Company's works had been alight at Darling Harbour since 1841, and in N. J. Caire's 1878 view from near Tower Hill the gasholders stand over the wharves while sailing ships and coasting steamers crowd the water in front of them. Look for the same head of the harbour from the heights of Pyrmont, taken from above the terrace roofs, and from Balmain in 1879 with two rowboats pulled up on the sand.

Cargo is not the last word on the place. In 1940 the men of the 2/4th Infantry file aboard in slouch hats with their kit bags while an A.B.C. announcer holds a microphone out toward the line, recording the sound of them going.