Mosman in the 1930s

A child rides an elephant past a weatherboard building at Taronga, a keeper in uniform sitting up front. The zoo had opened in 1916 — its first elephant, Jessie, walked from Moore Park through the city and stood still on a vehicular ferry at Bennelong Point to get there — and the rides ran for sixty years, until 1976, carrying up to ten people at a time.

Getting to the zoo is the other half of that story. A tramway reached it from Mosman post office on 9 October 1916, within days of the gates opening, and was pushed down to Athol Wharf the following year on a grade steep enough to be notorious: trams ran off the end of it into the harbour in 1942, in 1952, and finally in 1958, the year the line closed. What happened on 8 September 1939 was not that. A Chatswood tram ran into the back of a Taronga Park one near the bottom of the hill and telescoped its rear cabin, injuring more than twenty people and killing nobody — which is what the torn-open roof in that photograph is, the cabin still carrying its destination.

Away from the zoo the decade is water. Launches and rowing boats lie at moorings off Balmoral Beach, shot from a tree-screened foreshore with a long jetty and low pavilion buildings along the shore, houses covering the hill behind. Ted Hood photographed Mosman Bay in 1930 with yachts at anchor and a boatshed standing on piles. And from a garden terrace in 1936 the completed Harbour Bridge sits across the water, a motor boat crossing mid-harbour — the view a great many Mosman houses were built to have, four years after there was anything to look at.