‘Proper’ warships (although I’d prefer modern weaponry to defend against modern weapons)!
David
> On 17 Apr 2021, at 9:46 pm, TP historyworks@...> wrote:
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> 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.
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> https://www.navy.gov.au/sites/default/files/Australia%20at%20buoy.jpg
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> Tony P
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