Photograph: Classic Image/Alamy
In early 1924, when work began on arguably this country’s most defining built structure, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, Australia was torn between self-identifying as a loyal outpost of empire and one of the globe’s most innovative new democracies.
The bridge, for all its ambition, was always going to signify – in the political, cultural and (white) Australian social sensibility of the day – more than a mere “proud arch” linking the topographically close but practically remote north shore at Milsons Point to Dawes Point in the south.
In just 23 years of federation, Australia had become a template for global social progress, with women’s suffrage, workers’ protections, social security and high living standards – albeit at the expense of the dispossessed, near-eradicated First Nations peoples.
When it opened nine decades ago on Saturday, the bridge – with its distinctive bow constructed of 40,000 tonnes of steel and six million rivets – stood as a breathtaking sculptural testimony to Australian (and harbour city) exceptionalism.
“The bridge was an early and very powerful symbol of the modern Australian project,” says the Sydney-based urban historian Paul Ashton. “It ties in with the idea of ‘Australia unlimited’ – where there were no limits to what a young nation could aim to do if its natural and human resources were harnessed to the full capacity using the latest engineering technology.”
Great Britain, apparently, viewed it differently. The “coat hanger” was built under the direction of the visionary Australian public works engineer John Bradfield (responsible for much of Sydney’s urban transport infrastructure), but was designed by the British firm Dorman Long of Middlesbrough, and based on that company’s own Tyne Bridge in Newcastle upon Tyne. Most of the steel for the bridge was smelted in England and then shipped in pre-formed sections to Australia, though some was sourced from Newcastle in NSW.
Photograph: Chronicle/Alamy
When somewhere between 300,000 and a million people turned out for the opening, they did so under two giant flags – the Union Jack and the Australian ensign – snapping symbiotically atop construction cranes. The neophyte nation was finding its stride alright, but for Great Britain the bridge signified this was all still very much part of the colonial project.
“In the orgy of self-congratulation that accompanied the opening ... much was made of this bond [between Australia and empire], with most of the British press hailing the bridge as a triumph of British engineering’,” writes Peter Spearritt in his “biography” of the bridge, The Sydney Harbour Bridge – A Life, released for its 50th anniversary.
“That Australians had thought up the idea, raised the loan funds, [£6.25m, finally fully repaid through tolls in 1988] manufactured much of the materials and physically erected the structure was all too readily forgotten, though at that time many Australians still thought of themselves as British, even if they had been born here.”
Ashton points out the bridge also embodied a profound symbolism in still extant parochial tensions between Sydney and Melbourne, which, due to the political chicanery surrounding colonial federation negotiations, served as the interim national capital until 1927 when federal parliament opened in Canberra.
“Even then I think there was this sense in Sydney of, ‘Well, yes, you’ve got the Yarra and the federal parliament – but just look what we are going to have’,” Ashton says.
Modernity and growth
These intercity tensions highlight another truth about the new nation from early federation. Despite many of its early 20th-century writers and journalists – not least the “bush bards” Henry Lawson and AB “Banjo” Paterson – depicting a mythical Australia of rugged, egalitarian frontiersman, by the time the bridge was under construction Australia was already one of the most urbanised countries in the world. Sydney was its exemplar.
As the great steel arches inched towards closure, 134m over the harbour, the new bridge was celebrated as a monolithic testimony to that white urban modernity and growth.
Photograph: Clarence01/Getty Images/iStockphoto
Instructively, after the 1930 census when the city’s population reached 1.23 million, Sydney regarded itself as the “second white city of empire” after surpassing Glasgow.
As the unjoined spans stretched across the harbour, the emerging bridge was an everyday fascination for Sydney residents. The newspapers were captivated by its engineering intrigues, publishing daily articles during construction.
Spearritt writes how “the construction of the arches was so much more spectacular than anything that had gone before that press, amateur and professional photographers competed in an unceasing photographic orgy of attempting to shoot the bridge from a new angle or in a new light”.
The bridge, it was reported, “rises and falls and expands and contracts with the effects of the temperature, without, of course, impairing the stability or safety ... With an increase of degrees ... the crown, or centre, of the arch will rise or lift about seven inches, with a proportionate and, of course, lessening rise at the other portions of the arch towards either end of the bridge.”
Its capacity for climatically-responsive contraction and expansion was tested on the very day – 19 August 1930 – the arches met. As the evening cooled there was a slight contraction and reopening. The gap was finally, permanently, closed at 10pm.
The ideology of progress
There was every sense that this landmark would stand for an effective eternity – like the Pyramids or the Colosseum or the oldest English bridges.
“Those designing and building the bridge have had to have regard for the most minute details, and for the fact that they are responsible for a structure, not of a day, but for all time.”
It is a global landmark – an architectural/engineering wonder that crowns the harbour. Every New Year’s Eve it lights up with a firework display that is televised globally – a first talisman of the new year for many in the northern hemisphere.
Novelists, poets, journalists, photographers and visual artists – notably Grace Cossington Smith – were similarly inspired and captivated by what they embraced as an iconic testimony to 20th century Australian progress (the use of “iconic” is cautioned against in the Guardian style guide, except in the most exceptional circumstances – of which this is surely one).
Perhaps the most extraordinary literary testimony to the bridge was the self-published, decidedly esoteric 534-page Parables of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, written in 1930 by the Rev Frank Cash, rector of Christ church in Lavender Bay. He was fascinated with every element of the demolition works and subsequent construction taking place outside his windows.
However, he seemed barely cognisant of the human cost (16 lives were lost in construction) and the countless businesses closed and many poor rendered homeless for the leviathan. This attitude, Ashton says, was pervasive, as “the bridge profoundly demonstrated how naturalised the ideology of progress had become in Australian society”.
He says: “A delegation of workers made a case [to government] for the working-class families whose homes were going to be demolished to make way for the ‘coat hanger’ ... their petition said that they knew that they could not stand ‘in the way of progress’ and simply wanted to be re-housed.”
But, Spearritt points out, there was no state housing authority to help and politics impeded any effective rehousing assistance – Jack Lang’s Labor government lost power in 1927, and after reelection in 1930 the New South Wales governor sacked his administration soon after the bridge opened in 1932.
As Delia Falconer writes in her seminal book, Sydney, great swathes of Millers Point and The Rocks were levelled.
“So intent was the city on achieving this feat of engineering that it used a strong arm to evict struggling residents from their many terraces and shops; few received compensation or support, and some heartbreaking letters remain in the archives from people pleading for a few pounds’ assistance.”
Eternity
It should also be acknowledged that the bridge and the harbour city it and its twin, the Opera House, architecturally define are imposed on the lands and waters of the Eora custodians, who, by the time the demolitions began, had been thoroughly dispossessed and decimated by violence and disease.
When the First Fleet anchored in the harbour in 1788, the shore was dotted with towers of shell, some 12m high – monumental middens proudly bolstered over countless generations, testimony to 60-plus millennia of Indigenous continental civilisation. The colonists quickly burnt them all for building lime.
So, not everyone will celebrate the 90th anniversary of the bridge’s eventful opening – when the antique dealer, former soldier, staunch royalist and member of the proto-fascist New Guard Francis De Groot inveigled his way into the vice regal party on horseback and cut the ribbon with his sabre, ahead of Lang, thereby guaranteeing himself an eccentric posterity.
Suburban streets emptied as Sydneysiders poured into the city to traverse the bridge, which would not be open solely to pedestrians again until the 50th anniversary in 1982.
In 2000, the bridge was once again closed to traffic as 250,000 people took part in the people’s walk for Aboriginal reconciliation. It was an optimistic moment on a stunning clear morning, in the most photogenic city of a modern nation at the beginning of a new millennium. Twenty-two years later, reconciliation’s progress is slow; the Aboriginal flag has been permanently flown from the bridge’s apex since last month.
“Eternity”, the fireworks on the bridge spelled out at midnight on 1 January 2000 – a tribute to another Sydney eccentric, Arthur Stace, taken to chalking the evocative forevermore word on footpaths across the burgeoning city.
An eternity for a modern marvel forever reaching across the harbour, perhaps – but always steeped in the bedrock of a land with a timeless human past.
