Sydney

The harbour is the country of the Gadigal, one of the clans of the Eora, whose shell middens, fishing grounds and rock engravings ring its bays. In January 1788 the First Fleet, sent to establish a penal colony, found Botany Bay unsuitable and moved north to a cove with a stream of fresh water; Arthur Phillip named the settlement after Thomas Townshend, Lord Sydney, the British home secretary who had authorised the expedition. A smallpox epidemic in 1789 killed a large part of the harbour's Aboriginal population, and armed resistance continued for years on the colony's fringes.

Convict labour built the town, and under Governor Lachlan Macquarie, from 1810, the convict architect Francis Greenway gave it barracks, churches and public buildings of local sandstone. Wool, whaling and the gold rushes of the 1850s turned Sydney into a port and trading city; trams and railways spread its suburbs outwards, and an outbreak of plague at the wharves in 1900 was followed by the clearance of much of The Rocks. The Harbour Bridge, opened in 1932, was built through the Depression, and Japanese submarines entered the harbour in 1942.

Post-war migration arrived by ship at Circular Quay, first from Britain, Italy and Greece and later from Lebanon, Vietnam, China and India, remaking whole districts. The Opera House, begun in 1959 to Jørn Utzon's design, opened in 1973 after he had resigned from the project. In the 1970s building workers' green bans saved The Rocks and parts of Woolloomooloo from demolition. The 2000 Olympic Games, held on reclaimed industrial land at Homebush Bay, left the city a second sports and events precinct.

Sydney's culture turns on water. Surf lifesaving grew out of clubs formed at the beaches in the first years of the 20th century, and volunteers in red and yellow caps still patrol the sand; ocean pools cut into the rocks let people swim when the surf is too rough; and the ferry is both commuter transport and the way residents show off their city. Summer belongs to the beach, cricket and backyard barbecues, and the Test match at the Sydney Cricket Ground in the new year is a fixture of the calendar.

Rugby league is the city's game — the competition that became the National Rugby League began in Sydney in 1908, and nine of the competition's seventeen clubs are based in the city — though rugby union, football and Australian rules all have a following. The arts run from the Opera House and the state gallery to the pubs and theatres of Newtown and Enmore, where much of the country's live music is heard; licensing restrictions imposed in 2014 emptied parts of the nightlife district around Kings Cross before most were wound back.

More than forty per cent of residents were born overseas, and Mandarin, Cantonese, Arabic and Vietnamese are widely spoken at home, which shows in the shopfronts of Hurstville, Lakemba, Cabramatta and Strathfield. Redfern, just south of the centre, has been a focus of Aboriginal political life since the late 1960s, when a black power movement there set up health, legal and housing services, and activists from Redfern helped create the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra. Sydney also holds one of the world's best-known LGBTQ+ celebrations in the Mardi Gras parade, whose first march in 1978 ended in arrests.

About five and a half million people live in Greater Sydney, which stretches some eighty kilometres from the coast to the foot of the Blue Mountains, though the inner council area holds only a few hundred thousand of them. Most residents live in detached houses or low-rise flats in suburbs organised around a railway station and a shopping strip, and the centre of population has moved steadily west: Parramatta is close to the geographic middle of the metropolis, and the outer west and south-west are where most new housing is built.

The economy is service-based. Banks, insurers, law firms and media companies fill the towers of the central business district and Barangaroo, technology and design work clusters in Surry Hills and Pyrmont, and the universities, hospitals, Port Botany and the airport are all major employers. Housing costs dominate household budgets, with prices among the highest in the world relative to income, and long commutes, rental shortages and the expansion of the metro and motorway networks are constant subjects of public argument.

The daily rhythm starts early, with swimmers and runners out before work and coffee taken standing up; weekends go to children's sport, markets and the beach. Summers bring water restrictions in dry years, smoke from distant bushfires in the worst seasons, and days over 40°C in the western suburbs, which are markedly hotter than the coast. Winter is mild enough that outdoor life barely pauses.

Sydney eats seafood. The Sydney rock oyster, farmed in estuaries up and down the coast, is the local delicacy; prawns are bought by the kilogram for Christmas; and the fish market, now at Glebe, sells snapper, kingfish, Balmain bugs and cooked fish to restaurants and the public alike. Fish and chips eaten out of paper at a harbour or ocean beach is close to a civic ritual.

Migration built the rest of the city's food. The blocks around Dixon Street in Haymarket hold Cantonese roast meat shops, yum cha halls and Sichuan and Thai kitchens; Cabramatta in the south-west is known for Vietnamese pho and bánh mì; Lakemba's Haldon Street fills with Lebanese and South Asian food stalls through the nights of Ramadan; and Strathfield and Eastwood are centres of Korean and Chinese cooking. In the inner suburbs, small restaurants and wine bars multiplied after licensing rules were eased to allow very small venues.

The pub counter meal — chicken schnitzel or parmigiana, steak, salt-and-pepper squid — is the everyday standard, and the meat pie remains the standard snack, served at the Woolloomooloo pie cart with mushy peas, mashed potato and gravy. Café culture is taken seriously, built on espresso brought by Italian and Greek migrants and now on flat whites and long brunches of eggs, smashed avocado and ricotta hotcakes. The halal snack pack, chips topped with kebab meat, cheese and sauces, is a kebab-shop staple, and Marrickville's breweries and the wines of the Hunter and Orange fill the drinks lists.