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Sydney Harbour Bridge

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Sydney Harbour Bridge

The Sydney Harbour Bridge is a steel through arch bridge across Sydney Harbour that carries rail, vehicular, bicycle, and pedestrian traffic between the Sydney central business district (CBD) and the North Shore. The dramatic view of the bridge, the harbour, and the nearby Sydney Opera House is an iconic image of Sydney, and Australia itself. The bridge, nicknamed the Coathanger, formally opened in March 1932. In the 8 years during the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, 16 construction workers died — 14 on the bridge itself and 2 in the Moruya granite quarries.

Quotes

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  • The Opera House is a splendid edifice, and I wish to take nothing away from it, but my heart belongs to the Harbour Bridge. It's not as festive, but it is far more dominant – you can see it from every corner of the city, creeping into frame from the oddest angles, like an uncle who wants to get into every snapshot. From a distance it has a kind of gallant restraint, majestic but not assertive, but up close it is all might. It soars above you, so high that you could pass a ten-storey building beneath it, and looks like the heaviest thing on earth. Everything that is in it – the stone blocks in its four towers, the latticework of girders, the metal plates, the six-million rivets (with heads like halved apples) – is the biggest of its type you have ever seen. This is a bridge built by people who have had an Industrial Revolution, people with mountains of coal and ovens in which you could melt down a battleship. The arch alone weighs 30,000 tons. This is a great bridge.
    • Bill Bryson, "Down Under" ("In a Sunburned Country") (2000), pp80-81
  • There the proud arch Colossus like bestride
    Yon glittering streams and bound the strafing tide.
    • Erasmus Darwin, "Visit of Hope to Sydney Cove, near Botany Bay" (1789)
  • Between 1930 and 1982, 92 persons fell from the Sydney Harbour Bridge into the water, 59 metres below. The major problem among survivors was pulmonary trauma, often with severe respiratory failure. The position of impact influenced survival, the feet-first vertical position being the most favourable. Mortality rate from the fall was 85%.
  • Before the Sydney Harbour Bridge there were two Sydneys. With it there was one, united by a monumental arch that rose above the water and the rooftops and wrote itself into the iconography and romance of the city and entire country. The bridge facilitated the greatest geographical change to the Sydney basin since the rising of the waters shifting the ocean to what would be the city's doorstep. The bridge brought together the 300,000 on the north side with the 600,000 to the south side. It gave both access to land and facilities that had been prohibitively distant before, opening up the northern beaches and further afield.
  • To get on in Australia, you must make two observations. Say, "You have the most beautiful bridge in the world" and "They tell me you trounced England again in the cricket." The first statement will be a lie. Sydney Bridge [sic] is big, utilitarian and the symbol of Australia, like the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower. But it is very ugly. No Australian will admit this.
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