A steel arch to climb, an opera house lit gold from the water, a valley of vineyards two hours west.

Sydney’s British history begins on 26 January 1788, when Captain Arthur Phillip landed the First Fleet’s eleven ships at Sydney Cove — chosen over the initial landing at Botany Bay for its fresh water and deep anchorage — and founded a penal colony on the traditional land of the Gadigal people, one of the Eora nations who had lived around the harbour for tens of thousands of years before European contact. What began as a place of exile grew, through the nineteenth century’s gold rushes and wool trade, into the busiest port in the southern hemisphere; Port Jackson’s harbour, with some 240 kilometres of shoreline, remains one of the largest natural harbours in the world, and the same headlands and coves that sheltered Phillip’s fleet still shape the city’s ferries, beaches and skyline today.

The city’s two most recognisable structures both arrived in the twentieth century, in each case after years of contested construction. The Sydney Harbour Bridge, an arch nicknamed “the Coathanger” and completed in 1932 by the British firm Dorman Long, was for decades the widest long-span bridge in the world and still carries eight traffic lanes, two rail tracks, a cycleway and a footpath across the harbour it joined for the first time. The Sydney Opera House took even longer to become inevitable: Danish architect Jørn Utzon won a blind international competition in 1957 with a design so difficult to engineer that it eventually cost more than ten times its original budget, drove Utzon to resign and leave Australia in 1966 without ever seeing it finished, and was completed in 1973 by a different team entirely — only for UNESCO to name it a World Heritage Site in 2007, one of the few made within its architect’s own lifetime. Together the two structures give Sydney Harbour a skyline built four decades apart yet inseparable in every photograph of it since.