Skip to content

Sydney I · 2017

2017 Sydney I 2

Turquoise surf crashes against dark coastal cliffs with homes perched on the clifftop above.
A white cliff-edge house with a balcony juts out above turquoise surf. A white-railed cliff-edge house stands behind a weathered timber fence. Timber stairs wind down beside a towering, wave-battered cliff face. Churning grey seas break hard against a rugged cliff base. Stone crosses and mausoleums crowd a grassy hillside graveyard. Homes and greenery sit atop a sheer seaside cliff. A timber fence edges a green reserve high above a long coastline. A grassy cliff plunges sharply into the ocean far below. Brush-like orange banksia spikes rise out of dense green foliage. Gnarled grey wood carries golden banksia flower spikes. A winding seaside path runs behind a chain-link fence beside the ocean. A white lighthouse tower rises beside a park with a basketball court and scattered people. Striking sandstone cliffs drop to the ocean in horizontal banded layers. A white lighthouse stands at the edge of a steep sandstone headland above the sea. A long headland peninsula stretches across calm water on a hazy day. A hazy coastal town climbs a hillside with a white tower by the water. The city skyline towers behind a harbour dotted with sailboats and a sharp church spire. Palm trees and rooftops frame a harbour scattered with small sailboats. The city skyscrapers loom over a harbour where a ferry crosses the water. A broad harbour view unites the city skyline, a grand steel bridge, and sailboats under palm trees. White curved shells of the Opera House stand bright against a clear blue sky. A soaring steel arch bridge spans the water with a skyline behind it. The white-roofed opera house sits quietly beside the water. Skyscrapers rise in the distance above the harbour water. A wide stretch of sand meets the surf along the coast. Waves roll in and break white along the shoreline. Close view of the opera house roof shells and their openings. Rocky cliffs drop steeply into the dark blue ocean. Open harbour water stretches out beneath a wide blue sky. Beachgoers relax under umbrellas on the sand. A walking path follows the edge of the headland. Sailboats glide across the harbour water. The white opera house sails shine in the sunlight. Weathered rocks line the coast where the surf hits. The famous beach shows sand and blue ocean under the sun. Looking out over a headland and the open ocean. The skyline appears in the distance across the water. White foam swirls around rocks along the coast. A lookout spot below the bridge looks over the water. The sandy shore curves toward a far headland. Waves explode in white spray against a rugged rock cliff A leafy native shrub holds clusters of small pale buds Spring shoots and pale buds clustered on a grey-barked tree Pale star-shaped blooms dot a thin-leaved native bush Dangling pink and white bells hang from a spiky-leaved bush Sea churns into a cove while people stroll the clifftop path above Banded sandstone cliffs plunge into a churning ocean beneath green clifftop homes. The Sydney skyline with its landmark tower and bridge arch rises over a harbour dotted with sailboats. From a stone lookout above the sandstone cliff, white houses with red roofs and moored sailboats line a green bay. A tangled mat of low green shrubs with small round leaves fills the frame. A carpet of small round green and yellow leaves blankets the headland soil. Waves crash at the base of dark cliffs out toward a hazy coastal skyline. Red flower clusters rise from dry grass near a wire fence and palm fronds. Thick tree trunks rise through a mass of feathery green native shrubs. Curving grey trunks arc over a thicket of bright green feathery undergrowth. Tiny red berries dot a dense bush of needle-like green leaves. Clusters of pink blossoms nestle among broad green leaves and woody branches. Bright yellow flower spikes hang from long slender leaves against a blue sky. A spiky succulent rosette centers a patch of low green undergrowth. Round yellow flower balls hang along thin stems beside long green leaves. A towering succulent with long pointed grey-green blades grows amid coastal scrub and trees. Deep bushland undergrowth fringed with ferns and a young broad-leafed tree. A fresh green sapling with drooping leaves rises from dry coastal bushland. Blue surf crashes against weathered sandstone rock topped by a bright green shrub. People in formal dress gather on grass beside a massive Moreton Bay fig. A silver gull with red beak and legs rests on a boulder in a park. Towering buttressed roots of a Moreton Bay fig spread beside a harbourside path. A small sandy cove with palm trees and a seafront house beside calm water. A green-and-white ferry catamaran waits at the pier as passengers stream across the boarding walkway. Beside the Watsons Bay sign, a ferry waits as a park and fig tree stretch along the shore. The downtown Sydney skyline seen across the harbour from a ferry. Two passengers on deck watch a red speedboat zoom across the harbour. The city's high-rises line the horizon above the harbour water. A red flag waves at the stern as the ferry leaves a foamy wake. Houses climb a green hill above anchored boats on the harbour. A green Rose Bay sign stands on the wooden wharf below harbour houses. The white Catalina dining building sits by the water with tall bird sculptures. A red seaplane sits on the harbour with wooded hills behind.
Journal Notes

General

The second day took the bus to the eastern end of the harbour and spent the whole of it on the cliffs. Watsons Bay is the last suburb before the ocean, a small settlement of houses, a park, a few restaurants and a wharf, and from the wharf the land rises to a ridge of sandstone above the water with houses perched on the edges of it. The walk along the clifftop path runs from the bay to the cemetery and on to the beaches, and it is the best introduction to the coast that the city has.

The cliffs are the feature of the day. Sandstone drops vertically into turquoise water, the surf churns against the base of it, and timber stairs wind down beside one of the faces to a ledge where fishermen stand in the spray. Houses with balconies hang over the edge, a chain fence runs along the path, and the wind off the ocean is strong enough to make a hat a liability. From the top the coastline runs south in a series of coves and headlands, each with its own beach and its own rocks.

The most striking place on the walk, and the one that produces the longest pause, is the cemetery on the cliff above Bronte. Stone crosses, obelisks and mausoleums stand in rows on a grassy hillside that falls away to the sea, with the waves visible between the headstones, and the whole arrangement is unlike any other burial ground in the country. Beyond it the beaches begin, and beyond them the lighthouse at the tip of the headland closes the circle of the day.

The weather on the cliff walk was the kind that the coast produces on a summer day. Sun, cloud and wind arrived in shifts: the morning was bright and still, the middle of the day brought a sea wind strong enough to move the surf up the beach, and by the afternoon the cloud had come in from the south with the swells behind it. The path was full of walkers, runners and people with dogs, and the parks beside it were busy with families and cricket sets.

History

Watsons Bay has been the maritime front door of Sydney since the colony began. The deep water of the harbour entrance made it the natural place for a signal station, and the flagstaff on South Head was used to pass messages between the ships arriving from Europe and the settlement inside the heads. The pilots, the lighthouse keepers and the fishermen who worked from the bay are the reason it grew, and the pilot station and the sailing club are still on the waterfront today.

The lighthouse on the point is a monument to a disaster. The wreck of the Dunbar in 1857, in which almost everyone on board died within sight of the harbour, and the loss of another ship in the same year, led the colonial government to build the light at South Head. Hornby Lighthouse, also known as the South Head Lower Light, has been operating since 1858, it is heritage listed, and it still works. The walk to it passes the signal station and a pair of gun emplacements from the century of wars that followed the first one.

The cemetery on the cliffs is the other history of the place. Waverley Cemetery opened in 1877 on land above the sea at Bronte, and it has been in use ever since, which makes it one of the oldest continuously operating cemeteries in the country and one of the most visited. Its graves include writers, artists, politicians and soldiers, and the section given to the victims of shipwrecks and of the influenza epidemic of 1919 is a reminder of how dangerous life on this coast was. The view from the cemetery, with the ocean on three sides, is the reason people ask to be buried there.

Rose Bay, at the end of the day’s ferry ride, has a history of its own. It was used to train sailors during the First World War, and from 1938 the seaplane flights between Britain and Australia began and ended on the water of the harbour at Rose Bay, which made it the first international airport of the city. On 14 September 1945 nine Catalina flying boats landed and moored at the wharf there, bringing home Australian prisoners of war from the camps of the Pacific, and the restaurant that now occupies the waterfront building of the old flying boat base still carries the name.

The harbour defences are the other layer of history on the headland. The gun emplacements at South Head and the tunnels and batteries of the two world wars were built to protect the entrance from a naval attack that never came, and the concrete structures and their observation posts are part of the landscape of the walk. The signal station beside them is still in use for the shipping that enters the port, and the stack of buildings that grew up around it is the oldest continuous maritime installation in the country.

Geology

South Head is a sandstone headland, and its shape is the product of the same processes that built the harbour. The rock is the Hawkesbury sandstone of the Sydney Basin, deposited by rivers in the Triassic and cut through here by the sea at the point where the drowned valley of the harbour meets the open ocean. The cliffs on the ocean side are vertical because the waves attack the base of the rock and the joints let the blocks fall away; the harbour side is gentler, with ledges and platforms that appear at low tide.

The Gap is the most dramatic of those cliffs and the best known. It is an ocean cliff at South Head in the suburb of Watsons Bay, it faces the Tasman Sea, and it is a place of strong currents, rough water and a long history of wrecks and accidents. The rock at the top of it is weathered into a rough platform, the joints run back from the edge, and the waves that reach it come from an ocean with nothing in the way. It is a place to look at from a distance and from the fenced path, and the memorials on the clifftop are part of its recent history.

The beaches that follow the cemetery to the south are the product of the same energy. Sand accumulates between the sandstone headlands where the waves lose their force, and each beach is a separate system with its own reef, its own current and its own rhythm of loss and gain. The platforms at the ends of them are cut into the sandstone, the pools in the rock hold the animals of the intertidal zone, and the whole coast is a working geology lab that people happen to live on.

Out to sea the coast changes character with the depth of the water. The Tasman Sea reaches here across thousands of kilometres of open ocean, and the swells that arrive have been built by storms and by the winds of the roaring forties far to the south. The interval between the waves is long, which is why the surf on this coast arrives in clean lines rather than as a chop, and why the cliffs at the base of the headlands are under constant attack while the water inside the heads stays calm.

The cliffs have a structure that is worth looking at closely. The sandstone is bedded in horizontal layers, and the ledges and shadows on the face follow the bedding, with the harder bands standing out as shelves and the softer ones hollowed out beneath them. The face of the Gap is a single joint plane that the sea has exploited, and the falls of rock that have happened there are the result of the same structure: a block detached along a joint and lost to the water below.

Things to See

The walk along the cliffs is the main activity of the day and can be done in stages. The path from Watsons Bay leads past the signal station and the gun emplacements to the Gap, then climbs the ridge to the cemetery at Bronte, and continues along the clifftop past the beaches to the south. It is fenced where it needs to be, it is exposed to the wind, and it needs water and a hat; the whole of it takes three hours, and the sections can be linked by buses if the weather changes.

The cemetery deserves an hour of its own. The rows of headstones on the slope, the family vaults, the chapel and the paths between them make a place that is both a garden and an archive, and the names record the history of the eastern suburbs: the shipwrights, the publicans, the writers and the families who came from Ireland and England in the nineteenth century and from everywhere else in the twentieth. Visitors should follow the signs about respect for the graves, and the paths are steep in places.

The lighthouse at the tip of the headland is the end point of the clifftop walk and one of the best places in the city to watch the ocean. The path down to the light passes the signal station and the memorial to the wreck of the Dunbar, the water on both sides is deep, and the view north takes in the entrance to the harbour with the ferries coming and going. The building is small, striped and painted, and it has the proportions of a piece of working equipment rather than of a monument.

The return by ferry from Rose Bay is the civilised end to the day. The boat crosses the harbour past the naval base and the islands, the skyline stands above the water, and the view from the deck at the end of the afternoon is the one that appears in every account of the city. The fig trees in the park at Watsons Bay, with roots that spread across the grass like walls, are worth a last look before the bus leaves; a silver gull standing on a boulder in the park is the most visited bird in the country, and it knows it.

A word on the practicalities of the cliff walk is worth having. The path is exposed, so a hat and water are necessary and an umbrella is useless; the buses along the coast roads connect the beaches if the weather turns; and the ferry from Watsons Bay or Rose Bay is a better way home than the road at the end of the afternoon. The cafes at both ends of the walk are busy at lunchtime, and the bakery at Watsons Bay is the traditional stop for the travellers who have just come off the cliffs.

References

  1. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Sydney. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney
  2. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Sydney Harbour. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney%20Harbour
  3. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Sydney Ferries. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney%20Ferries
  4. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Manly ferry. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manly%20ferry
  5. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Manly, New South Wales. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manly%2C%20New%20South%20Wales
  6. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Mosman, New South Wales. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosman%2C%20New%20South%20Wales
  7. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Taronga Zoo. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taronga%20Zoo
  8. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Bondi Beach. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bondi%20Beach
  9. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Coogee, New South Wales. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coogee%2C%20New%20South%20Wales
  10. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Tasman Sea. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman%20Sea
  11. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Sydney Basin. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney%20Basin
  12. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Hawkesbury sandstone. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawkesbury%20sandstone
  13. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Sydney Harbour National Park. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney%20Harbour%20National%20Park
  14. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Watsons Bay. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watsons%20Bay
  15. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Port Jackson. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port%20Jackson
  16. Pells P. (2018) Engineering properties of the Hawkesbury Sandstone. Engineering Geology of the Sydney Region. 179-197. doi.org/10.1201/9780203757390-10
  17. Jernakoff P. (1985) Interactions between the limpet Patelloida latistrigata and algae on an intertidal rock platform. Marine Ecology Progress Series. 23. 71-78. doi.org/10.3354/meps023071