Parramatta Road

Parramatta Road was a toll road before it was anything else. It opened as a turnpike on 10 April 1811, running between the colony's two towns along a route Aboriginal people had walked long before anyone needed a cart on it, and it is the oldest road in Sydney and the first intercity highway in Australia. From 1814 you could ride it by stage cart for ten shillings, or send a letter along it for threepence.

The tolls are worth holding on to. For most of the nineteenth century the road was paid for at two gates: one where the University of Sydney now stands, the other out at Duck River, near Granville. Between them ran the stretch that anyone heading west had to buy their way along.

Then there is what the road stopped being. Widening began in 1906 and produced Broadway at the city end, but the work was abandoned at Camperdown as too expensive to carry further. The road at Camperdown still runs narrow — two and three storeys of shopfront pressed close to a carriageway laced with tram track and roofed over in wire, with the Richmond Hotel along it. A flat-bed truck and a short line of cars have the whole width to themselves, which is the last thing anyone would say about it now.

At the western end it runs out to Granville, where a hotel stands on the corner with a curved brick front, a colonnade and a cantilevered awning over the footpath.