Stories From Sydney

We're back for Season 4! Instead of our usual 2 minute teaser episode we are launching with a bang: just shy of 2 hours of mostly 18th century prose!

In this episode Jed surprises Alistair with a dramatic reading of several passages  from Watkin Tench's 1793 publication 'A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson'. The stories we explore relate to some of the first journeys the colonisers made to Dyarubbin, the river that they had mistakenly identified as both the Hawkesbury and the Nepean.

Tench's writing gives us access to life on the river in the first years of the colony and shows some of the earliest interactions between the British and the Dharug people in the brief period before their displacement began.

In this bonus episode we discuss Following the Flow, a documentary exploring the people, places, ecology and history of the Macquarie Wambool River in Western NSW.

Alongside Stories from Sydney, Jed has been working on this project for the past 3 years and is very excited to be bringing it to Sydney for a screening at the Golden Age Cinema in Surry Hills in July. As well as chatting inland waterways we crack open the vault and return to some fondly remembered clips from Jed's episodes 'Celebrating a New Beginning Across the Blue Mountains' and 'The Town Where the Bell Meets the Macquarie'.

Head to www.followingtheflow.com.au to watch the trailer and join our mailing list or connect with @FollowingtheFlowfilm on facebook and instagram. We hope to see you there!

In the last episode of Season 3 we briefly trace the history of Australia's first and most important export, coal, and the city with which it is inextricably linked. We trace this history from the dreaming of the Awabakal people all the way to the open cut coal mines of the Upper Hunter that frame our national narrative to this day.

In the early years of the 20th century Sydney was the undisputed Department Store capital of the world. Retail family dynasties competed with each other to open the largest, most modern and most spectacular stores from Broadway to Wynyard.

This episode we discuss five of the biggest names in Sydney's department store history, charting their rises and inevitable falls to find out what has become of some of these epic buildings and one-time institutions today.

In 1880 the bushranger era came to a dramatic end in Eastern Australia with the infamous death of Ned Kelly in Melbourne. Earlier that same year a man just as infamous at the time was hanged at Darlinghurst Gaol after engaging in his own wayward adventures across the colonies of New South Wales and Victoria and in the South Pacific.

Some 110 years later the letters Andrew George Scott, known to the 19th century public as 'Captain Moonlite' wrote,came to light in the New South Wales State Archives. These letters gave a surprising insight into the mind of a fascinating character and gave queer Sydney an erstwhile hero.

In this episode we explore just a few of Scott's misadventures and discuss his ongoing significance to Australian culture.

This episode was written based on the work of Garry Linnell is his book 'Captain Moonlite: The Tragic Love Story of Captain Moonlite and the Bloody End of the Bushrangers'.

Well before the gold rushes of the mid 1800s, there was another all but forgotten resource extraction boom which played an important role in the expansion of the early colony. After being first logged along the Hawkesbury River, red cedar soon became the third largest export from the nascent port of Sydney and was known colloquially as “red gold”. It played a vital role in the foundation of places as diverse as Kiama, Maitland, and Byron Bay, and its presence is still to be observed in many buildings throughout Sydney today. 

A short video on red cedar which features the Reading Room in Canberra is available here. You can also check out the Macquarie Armchair, the oldest surviving piece of Australian red cedar furniture, or read this short article which contains many beautiful images of red cedar trees. Stories about red cedar have also featured in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Newcastle Herald.

This episode we discuss the story of the Sydney Cove, a ship that set sail from Calcutta bound for its eponymous port in 1796. The Sydney Cove never quite made it the whole way, but after countless misadventures just under half of her crew did.

We discuss the history and significance of the local bowlo with special guest Louis Heath. Perhaps you, like us, have always wondered where this quaint game comes from, and why so many bowling clubs dot the streets of Sydney. If so, then you're in luck! We'll dive into the royal origins of the sport, its enormous boom in popularity in the post-war era, and what the future holds for these local institutions.

If you would like to discuss bowlos or share resources with Louis, you can reach him at [email protected]. You can also read his thesis here, or simply reference this graph showing the steady rise and fall of bowling clubs over the last 100+ years. Here is the newspaper article about the significance of third places during the COVID pandemic that is mentioned during the episode.

You can also read Wendy Bacon's investigative stories on the proposed development of Paddington Bowling Club here, and this Herald article about the recent restoration of the land to the Aboriginal Land Council.