Sydney, November 3: Sunday in the Parks with Don

Sunday was shaping up to be a beautiful beach day, which is part of why we walked from Bondi Beach to Coogee Beach on Saturday when it was overcast when the path was less crowded. The day started at 60 degrees and the forecast was calling for sunshine and 90 degrees.

From our hotel, we walked to Hyde Park, passing a Palestinian protest I decided was wisest if I stayed away from. I'm still wrestling with my feelings on the issues. I know I want the hostages released. I know there are no quick solutions. I know I want the world to get along. I know I don't know how to make that happen. In my mind, all the leaders are wrong and have messed up and innocent people are suffering. But that's takes me back to, free the hostages then we can figure out the rest.

On my visit last year I had hoped to go inside St. James' Church on King Street. St. James' was built by the convicts from 1819-1824 and is the oldest church in Sydney. It is located across the street from Hyde Park Barracks. You can thank former Governor Lachlan Macquarie for it. Macquarie's touch, and his name, are prevalent in Sydney. Like St. Stephen, it is what looks like a British-style church.

In the category of good things come to those that wait, the organ was replaced this January. The organ had been in the balcony, but was moved to the front of the church. With 3,500 pipes, it is the third largest organ in Sydney, after the Opera House organ (with over 10,000 pipes), and the one in Sydney Town Hall. As a result, they have a lot of recitals in this church. As with the one in the Opera House, only a small portion are visible. There are 81 stops. The one in Sydney Town Hall is a Victorian organ with more limited variety. The historian, Jim, who gave us the tour is visibly quite proud of their organ. As if on cue, the organist popped in. After putting on his shoes which he keeps with the organ, Marco Sever seemed to be showing off for us. As he warmed up, he added extra flair. It is am impressive organ. I'm glad we got to experience the sound.

The church has a complicated history with pipe organs in general. During ancient Rome, organs were associated with brothels, later circuses. To this day, Eastern churches refuse to have instruments, saying only voices are good enough. Charles the Great (also known as Charlemagne) was given a pipe organ by the emperor of Constantinople to put in a party hall. Instead he put it in the cathedral in Aachen (which I visited with my host parents in 2018). After that, every church wanted a pipe organ!

St. James' has lovely stained glass windows that thanks to the tall buildings around it, only see sunlight about 15 minutes a day. We were not lucky enough to catch it at the right time, but we were lucky enough to have a taste of what the organ can do, and have a private tour by someone who truly loves the building. Thank you, Jim.

We then walked across the street to one of my favorite museums in the world, Hyde Park Barracks.

What I love most about the museum is the self-guided tour. Once you put on the headset, it is easy to feel transported through the building's history and visit at your own pace.

Though I had visited last year, I learned things this time through. I noted over its 29 year history, around 50,000 of the 80,000 convicts transported to New South Wales (NSW) passed through these gates. Convict transfers ended in January 1848. It then became a Female Immigration Depot from 1848-1887. Original immigrants included those escape the Irish famine and others seeking asylum. the literate read to the illiterate. Women used their skills from reading to sewing to help each other. At the time they had one medical officer for 100 sick women. It ceased being a residential institution in 1887. 

During the 1970s-1980s many artifacts were unearthed during conservation.

After thanking the women working there, I asked for advice on what to visit next. They recommended the Justice & Police Museum (JPM, since Aussies prefer abbreviations).  

I easily got distracted along the way by stopping in the Museum of Contemporary Art, a favorite of mine on last year's visit when I took clay and formed it into a ball to be added to a sculpture. The Korean artist's name is Kimsooja. It is part of a 2016 piece called Archive of Mind. The link has a picture of how it looked upon completion in 2023. I don't know which ball was mine, or even if mine made the cut. I was a little disappointed to not see it still there, with this aromatic blob by Ernesto Neto in its place. "Just like drops in time, nothing 2002" contains tumeric, paprika, cumin, cloves, pepper, and fenugreek.

We continued the walk to the JPM, located around the corner from where we worshipped that morning. The JPM was the police headquarters from 1840 (when gold was discovered) through 1980. Twelve years after it closed, it became a museum in 1991. The museum contains three buildings, including a courtroom and cells, and a creepy taxidermy of the police dog. I'm not a fan of taxidermy. There was a police bicycle on display, but no words to put it in context. 

Dress up collection

Courtroom

Yes, I'm curious!

 

The Rogue's Gallery humanized the convicts
with their back stories. I could have spent hours
scrolling through the images.

To finish with the theme of the post, I'll end with our cutting through the Botanical Garden. We used an entrance I did not use last year, and as a result, I was thoroughly thrown off course. It is a botanical garden in the middle of a major city, and not in the middle of nowhere. In other words, it was fun to get lost.

We walked around the wishing tree three times forward, three times backwards and made a wish. I learned a couple of days later (along with the rest of the world) my wish did not come true.

Don and I continued through the park, past Café de Wheels, up the 113 steps, and got lost on the way to finding the door of the AirBNB where I stayed last year. Through the magic of technology, I found it.

We ate dinner at a trattoria nearby and were served by a charming French waiter. He was living here for three years to learn English. As we had skipped lunch because breakfast was so filling, we were famished!

As with last year, it was about the same amount of time to walk back to the room as it was to take mass transit. Back at the room, we found we had no towels and a loud family in the next room. It was time to leave hotel number one, city number one, and move to the next destination via a 9 am flight to Uluru.

We walked 30,000 steps, up 22 flights of stairs and crashed early.

The next day we learned the Wicked world premier was a few blocks away from our hotel. By then we were too far away to see how the area was transformed to the Yellow Brick Road let alone catch a glimpse of Ariana Grande wearing a replica of Glinda's dress from the original 1939 Wizard of Oz.

Random pictures that did not fit any posts, but which I like anyway: