Auckland and Sydney: A tale of two waterside cities

By GRAHAM REID

From 10,000m above, the water catches the last light and glistens like a mirror. The high rises around the city centre and the suburban sprawl beyond, even at this altitude, seem vibrant and vital.

The handsome bridge and shell-like Opera House attract the eye, and the water around is cut with ribbons of white wake from dozens of vessels, large and small.

Sydney Harbour insinuates itself between narrow fingers of land and where the heads open on to the Tasman it is at its most shallow, a mere 7 fathoms.

The entrance to this waterway is almost 3km across, so it's a wonder that Captain Cook - one of the more assiduous and curious of 18th-century explorers - missed it.

Cook and his crew hauled in at a smaller harbour further to the south in April 1770, collected flora (hence the name by which it is now known, Botany Bay) and stayed a week in that "capacious, safe and commodious" haven. And then he sailed away.

It was 18 years later when the First Fleet, captained by Arthur Phillip and carrying 736 convicts, sailed into what Cook had named Port Jackson.

Tourists today don't often go to Botany Bay. There is little reason other than historical curiosity, and Cooks Landing is under the flight path of rumbling jets. The water is polluted or replaced by runway, and wharves are spotted with oil tanks.

It is an unglamorous place and any visitor has to scratch hard to create a mental picture of what it must have been like when it was denoted with the name "terra nullius," an empty land. Aboriginal petroglyphs still visible around the harbour deny the fiction.

Yet oddly enough, standing on Pinchgut Island in Sydney Harbour it is possible, as it is standing on Ellis Island near New York, to squint out the trappings of contemporary culture and see the landform as it once might have been: the low roll of hills, the cliffs and small lines of sand around the shoreline ...

And then the past evaporates into high-rise and grandeur, the symmetries of the imposing Harbour Bridge and magnificent Opera House, the numerous pleasure and business craft using this busy waterway.

For any Aucklander, proud of the sparkling Waitemata, the question nags: how has Sydney achieved this vibrancy when my hometown, despite the recent fever of the America's Cup, has not?

There are many answers of course, but most glaring is that Sydney has created a city of offices and businesses on both sides of its waterway. Auckland has largely a sprawl of dormitory suburbs skirting its northern shore. Or a naval base, or Ministry of Defence land.

By having businesses on both shores, there was the need for cross-harbour traffic to develop and so Sydney took to the water.

Auckland progressively turned its back on its harbour and shut it off, even visually.

At this end of the century our efforts to re-engage the harbour seem a belated attempt to connect with something which was waiting there for us always.

And if we are so proud of our harbour, how do we show it? Harbour cruises are few, we have let die all the old piers from Point Chevalier round to Mairangi Bay, we prefer to be stuck in traffic on an inadequate bridge than take a ferry on a summer's day, although it is true that ferry timetables often preclude early risers and late-stayers in the city.

And you simply can't walk down to the water and hop on a boat for a leisurely harbour cruise which offers lunch and a bar, or take a dinner cruise in the manner of Sydney's lovely old boat the John Cadman.

Sail from Sydney Heads to Darling Harbour, however, and you will be swept from above by seaplanes and the occasional helicopter, a Bounty replica will limp past, and small flotillas of pleasure boats, windsurfers and the famous ferries cut the waves with astonishing regularity.

Sydney's harbourside development is architecturally interesting and diverse, not like many of the cheap, neo-fascist structures we have put up. And Sydney's waterside restaurants cater for all incomes.

Circular Quay - with its Museum of Contemporary Art and Opera House all within walking distance of the rail station and ferry depot - is a natural axis for tourists and locals alike.

And, aside from the restaurants and nearby pubs, Circular Quay is interesting in itself. Here are buskers and a heavily tattooed escapologist, clowns and carvers, and harbourside plaques which celebrate Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes, Clive James, Joseph Conrad and many others who have trod these stones. It feels historic and lived in, and if The Rocks is a gentrified version of its former self, at least a good part of it retains that Australian egalitarianism of public bars and cheap eats.

Where Sydney has art galleries and hotels, we have a tank farm. Where it has open-air bars and restaurants, we have a container wharf and high fences. Where it has people and a soul, we have barren tracts of land.

We may have begun to make the changes, but even now, other than restaurants and a maritime museum, there are no compelling reasons for our citizens to go there.

You have to wonder what Captain Cook would think of how these two cities, Auckland and Sydney, have developed.

And in which he might prefer to drop anchor today to let his crewmen recreate themselves and take on provisions.

* Graham Reid flew to Sydney courtesy of Air New Zealand and Tourism New South Wales.