Pyrmont Bay - Park & Growers' Market

Pyrmont Bay is double-headed. This might just be now, rather than natural, as the entire Pyrmont Peninsula has undergone extensive reclamation and remodelling. Whole swathes have been quarried to build structures all over the city itself. It was an extremely poor, working-class, industrialised area that has only come into its own for the last, say, 25 years. And this is because you can walk to a job in the city from nearly anywhere in Pyrmont, yet it is also serviced by ferries, lite-rail, and buses. My G-G-G-grandfather, Richard Puckeridge (1812-1881), would snap his braces, and cluck his tongue. He spent his life making bricks in Pyrmont, initially from premises in and around Harris Street, close to the "Hellhole" quarry, and eventually to "Puckeridge's Brickyards" in Quarry Street. However, much of the area now is given over to Gen-Y with their latte-sipping ways! A case in point is the Sydney Morning Herald Growers' Market, held in the park just above these bollards. It is a wonderful, eclectic mix of food fads, and earnest greenies, with nary a tea-party-nutter in sight. It is held the first Saturday of the month, save January. The building in the background of the second image is the Star City Casino.

Sydney from on high (7)

And around I swing, looking westward again. This image pretty much tacks on to the RHS of image #5. Along the bottom of the image, on the LHS, is the replica of Captain James Cook's "Endeavour" moored at the National Maritime Museum, just out of the picture. The water the "Endeavour" is moored in is Cockle Bay. The water further up the image is Johnson's Bay, and also White Bay (where the small destroyer is moored). In between, is the Pyrmont peninsula, with its many fingers of wharves. Much of the area that is now heavily infested with rising-high apartment blocks, spent the second half of the 19th century as sandstone quarries nick-named "Paradise, Hell-hole, and Purgatory". In 1799, John MacArthur - landed gentry or self-serving free-marketeer, take your choice - bought the entire peninsula for a gallon of rum. See that red-brick building with the open space which is Metcalf Park? All through that area are historic markers which are engrossing ... perhaps just to such as I. Just go and sit on a bench in the sun, and listen to the hum of the muffled city. Taken from the observation deck of Sydney Tower in Pitt Street. There are two more posts in this series, culminating with Theme Day, which in February is "Entry".