One of my favourite Sydney photos - that I've posted previously - because
it brings back so many memories. Man O'War Steps on Farm Cove, the stone
jetty that was built by Governor Macquarie in the 1810s below the
government domain, now occupied by the NSW Government House. This photo is
most likely taken in 1954.

https://www.navy.gov.au/sites/default/files/Australia%20at%20buoy.jpg

Best viewed by clicking the magnifier, you can see at the bottom left the
overhead wires and tracks exiting the loop around the Fort Macquarie tram
depot and the nose of an O Class tram about to depart for George St.

Man O'War Steps, as the wharf is called, was variously used as a Vice Regal
wharf, naval wharf (as its name suggests), occasional ferry wharf and for
miscellaneous commercial purposes - for most of which the tram stop
provided a convenient link to the city. In what must be a record for
Australian bureaucracy, the NSW Government and, first the Royal Navy, then
the Commonwealth of Australia were in dispute for over 120 years about
whose responsibility it was to maintain the wharf, resolved only when
construction of the Sydney Opera House in the 1970s obliterated the whole
of Bennelong Point excepting the historic stone pier. Then it was clearly
in the hands of the NSW Government.

Out on the beautiful blue harbour, where I spent a lot of my youth sailing,
are the two lead ships of Australia's naval war in the Pacific in the
1940s: HMAS Australia at the buoy and in the far background, HMAS
Shropshire at the dolphins in Athol Bay. This location is also where we
went out on a ferry to welcome the Queen in February 1954 and I wonder if
this in fact dates the photo, because Australia was one of the naval escort
for the royal yacht. This is the time that Noel Reed would have taken his
photo of one of the "royal trams" at Man O'War Steps.

I grew up on the interface of land and water, using ferries, trams, private
and government buses (only missing out on electric trains till I was a
teenager!). It was the best time.

Tony P