Tag: #SydneyHarbourBridge

The Arch That Cut the Sky — Part Five

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Tsamouris, the Fastener Specialists©

Part Five

The completion of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932 established Sydney as a truly global city, giving it a
landmark to compete with any of the modern world’s great architectural marvels. With the largest single arch
of its kind, it was as instantly recognizable as Paris’s Eiffel Tower or New York’s Chrysler Building.
The ease of crossing the harbour was immediately felt across the city. The population of the North Shore
increased, while the once-thriving ferry businesses declined. The Bridge soon became a host to various
stunts and tourist attractions, with the southeast pylon opening as a popular lookout, offering uninterrupted
views of the city and beyond.

To recoup the Bridge’s significant construction and maintenance costs, tolls were introduced, inspiring
clever workarounds from enterprising citizens. By the 1980s, the tens of millions of vehicles that had crossed
the Bridge had recouped its original cost of USD 500 million (EUR 460 million) in tolls. However, the tolls
were increased to pay for the Sydney Harbour Tunnel and ongoing maintenance costs.

Each year, a team of skilled workers labors for 200,000 hours to keep the Bridge in sound working order, with
the intention of maintaining it for a thousand years. The exposed parts of the Bridge are repainted every five
years, requiring 30,000 liters of its trademark steel-grey paint.

The Bridge has always attracted thrill-seekers determined to climb it, legally or not. For the last twenty years,
the slightly less adventurous have been able to take the guided Harbour Bridge Climb over the arches, with
the summit inspiring more than a few marriage proposals.

Over its 86 years, the Bridge has been a site of protest, civil action, and celebration in Sydney, with its first
closure in 1946 to celebrate Victory Day at the end of World War Two. In May 2000, a record-breaking
250,000 Australians of Indigenous and non-Indigenous descent marched across the Bridge in the historic
Walk for Reconciliation, acknowledging the dispossession of Australia’s First Nations peoples.

Sydney is among the first places on Earth to welcome a new year, and staking out a prime viewing spot to
celebrate the New Year’s Eve fireworks display on the Harbour has become a cherished tradition. The two
spectacular pyrotechnics shows at 9 pm and midnight take months to plan, with eight tonnes of rockets
exploding in the sky over the Harbour, cascading down the Bridge in a raucous celebration of life.

The building of the Bridge played a significant role in the technical revolution of the 1930s, seen as evidence
of Australia’s industrial maturity in the mechanical age. It displaced the pastoral and agricultural way of life,
ending the horse and buggy era, and introduced the age of steel bridges, commuter trains, and cars.

Today, the Harbour Bridge sits in a redefined Sydney as a symbol of pride and national identity, holding a
deep emotional resonance for many Sydneysiders. As the writer Ruth Park described, “…[it] hangs there like
the ghost of the wheel of fate, in a sky brindled with sunset, until darkness comes and vanishes away this
remarkable shape, which is above all things, that sign of Sydney.”

The story is based on the podcast series “The Bridge: The Arch that Cut the Sky,” created with the support of
the State Library of New South Wales Foundation. You can support it by listening at the
thebridge.sl.nsw.gov.au.

Please note that the photographs used in this story are sourced from the State Library of New South Wales
Foundation website for the podcast. These images are not our intellectual property and are used solely for
non-commercial purposes.

The Arch That Cut the Sky — Part Four

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Tsamouris, the Fastener Specialists©

Part Four

As the opening day of the Sydney Harbour Bridge approached on 19 March 1932, the city spared no
expense in its celebrations. A huge garden party for 2,500 guests was held at Government House, while the
Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress hosted the lavish Sydney Harbour Bridge Ball at the Town Hall. Essay
competitions were held for schoolchildren, with one young critic, ten-year-old Mavis Combo of Cabbage
Tree Island Aboriginal School, approving of the finished Bridge and praising Bradfield’s decision to oppose
underground schemes in favor of open-air travel.

A “goodwill scroll” made its way from Tottenham, Victoria, collecting well-wishes from hundreds of students
at 72 schools before being delivered to Premier Jack Lang and Governor Game by the captains of Fort Street
Boys’ and Girls’ High Schools. On 16 March, Children’s Day saw over 10,000 students from 194 schools
across New South Wales walk across the Bridge, braving wet and windy conditions.

Traveling great distances to attend the opening was commonplace, with nine-year-old Lennie Gwyther riding
his horse Ginger Mick alone for four months from rural Victoria to Sydney — a journey of almost 621 miles
(1,000 kilometers). As a reward for his bravery, Lennie was invited to the official opening and proudly rode
Ginger Mick across the Bridge’s span.

However, the opening ceremony was not without controversy. Premier Lang, known for his dislike of excess
and ceremony, clashed with those loyal to the British monarchy who demanded that King George VI or
Governor-General Philip Game open the Bridge. Security was increased in response to threats of disruption.
The unrest came to a head when Francis De Groot, a member of the paramilitary New Guard, rode on
horseback to the front of the assembly and sliced the ceremonial ribbon with his sword, declaring the Bridge
open “in the name of the decent and respectable people of New South Wales.” De Groot was swiftly arrested
and later fined, but not before Premier Lang retied the ribbon and officially declared the Sydney Harbour
Bridge open, accompanied by a 21-gun salute.

Bradfield, having worked tirelessly to make the Bridge a reality, arrived early to ensure everything met his
exacting standards. In his speech, he thanked the workmen who had “responded to the trusts we placed in
them” and “built the bridge a credit to industrial Australia.”
As many as one million people attended the opening celebrations, which included a parade, floats, and the
first fireworks display from the Bridge. The ceremony was broadcast nationally and to the United Kingdom
and United States, cementing Sydney’s status as an international city ready to take its place on the world
stage.

The opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge left an immediate and lasting legacy, with some parents even
christening their newborns Bridget, Archie, Sydney, and Archibald that year. Indisputably, the Bridge had
transformed Sydney, and its impact would continue to shape the city for generations to come.
The story is based on the podcast series “The Bridge: The Arch that Cut the Sky,” created with the support of
the State Library of New South Wales Foundation. You can support it by listening at the
thebridge.sl.nsw.gov.au.

Please note that the photographs used in this story are sourced from the State Library of New South Wales
Foundation website for the podcast. These images are not our intellectual property and are used solely for
non-commercial purposes.

The Arch That Cut the Sky — Part Three

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Tsamouris, the Fastener Specialists©

Part Three

With loans that would take the city 55 years to pay off, construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge
commenced on 28 July 1923. The scale of the project was immense, requiring eight years, 1,400 laborers, six
million hand-driven rivets connecting roughly 52,800 tonnes of steel beams, 272,000 liters of paint, and,
tragically, the lives of 16 workers. Upon completion, it would stand as the largest single-arch bridge in the
world.

Bradfield’s vision for the Bridge was just one part of his grand plan to modernize Sydney’s transport system,
which included an electrified suburban railway spanning above and below ground to serve the city’s growing
population. The granite for the Bridge’s decorative pylons came from Moruya, the sand from the Nepean
River, and the cement from Kandos, while the majority of the steel was imported from England, with only
20% locally fabricated in Newcastle.

The Bridge provided much-needed employment during the Great Depression, becoming known as the “iron
lung” for its massive injection into the economy. The workforce was diverse, including English engineers,
Scottish and Italian stonemasons, American, British, and European riggers, and Irish and English
boilermakers and machinists. The government favored giving work to war veterans, union members, and
men with families, and reduced working hours from 44 to 33 to spread the available jobs among more
people.

However, the physically grueling and dangerous nature of the work led to numerous accidents and fatalities.
Reg Saunders, a 19-year-old apprentice stonemason at the Moruya Quarry, described the bloody initiation
process that lasted for months. Workers standing on the Bridge hundreds of feet in the air, secured only by
ropes, had to catch newly forged, scalding-hot metal rivets and bolts in buckets of water and hammer them
into the beams, risking injury or death from falling objects.

In 1928, construction of the steel arch itself began, with concrete pylons rising on either side of the harbor. It
would take two years for the arches to touch in the middle, forming a structure weighing 39,000 tonnes. The
feat caused great anxiety among the engineers, as such an architectural achievement had never been
attempted before.

The arch was self-supporting, allowing the giant cables to be removed—a historic day commemorated by
the raising of British and Australian flags on both sides of the Bridge. With the arch completed, construction
proceeded swiftly. By June 1931, the deck was in place and topped with asphalt, and rails were laid for trams
and trains. In January 1932, the final piece of granite was laid on the northwest pylon.

The Bridge’s first test came in February, with a load-testing using 96 steam locomotives laid end-to-end atop
its deck. Having passed these stress tests, the Sydney Harbour Bridge was declared safe for traffic and ready
to welcome the sea of humanity awaiting the harbor crossing.

On 19 March 1932, after decades of political wrangling, upheaval, and incredible feats of construction, the
Sydney Harbour Bridge would finally open to the public in a grand spectacle that included fireworks and an
unexpected interruption equally as explosive as the planned festivities.

The story is based on the podcast series “The Bridge: The Arch that Cut the Sky,” created with the support of
the State Library of New South Wales Foundation. You can support it by listening at the
thebridge.sl.nsw.gov.au.

Please note that the photographs used in this story are sourced from the State Library of New South Wales
Foundation website for the podcast. These images are not our intellectual property and are used solely for
non-commercial purposes.

The Arch That Cut the Sky — Part Two

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Tsamouris, the Fastener Specialists©

Part Two

As the 20th century dawned, Sydney’s rapid growth and the outbreak of the bubonic plague in the early
1900s made it clear that the city was in desperate need of a permanent harbour crossing. The public works
project would be the largest ever attempted in New South Wales, requiring the demolition of shanties and
shacks in North Sydney and Millers Point to make way for the bridge and an underground railway system.

The government held four separate bridge design competitions between 1900 and 1924, attracting more
than 20 submissions from national and international engineering companies. The designs were exhibited in
the Queen Victoria Markets, but none would succeed in meeting the rigorous demands of Sydney’s citizens
and city planners.

Two visionary engineers emerged as the strongest contenders: Norman Selfe and John Job Crew Bradfield.
Selfe, an engineer, naval architect, and inventor, had conceived of a harbour crossing decades before the
bridge we know today was built. His 1901 design for a steel cantilever bridge from Dawes Point to
McMahons Point was accepted by the NSW Government, but political tides and economic factors prevented
its construction. Selfe won a second competition outright in 1903, but his vision was again lost to the
vagaries of Sydney’s politics and a change of government in 1904.

Enter John Bradfield, a civil engineer with a brilliant academic mind. Bradfield was a paradox: bold and
visionary as a planner, but cautious as an engineer. In 1912, he submitted a design for a cantilever bridge
from Dawes Point to Milsons Point, which received government approval. However, the onset of World War I
delayed any construction efforts.

In the post-war years, Bradfield traveled the world researching bridge designs, eventually discovering an
arch bridge in New York City that would be suitable for the enormous span of Sydney Harbour and more
cost-effective than a cantilever bridge. With the help of his tenacious secretary, Kathleen Butler, known as
the “bridge girl,” Bradfield convinced Sydney’s politicians that a single-arch bridge could be built without
blocking the city’s vital shipping lanes.

After decades of political maneuvering and delays, the Harbour Bridge Act was finally carried in 1924. That
same year, Bradfield recommended accepting the tender of Dorman Long & Co. of Middlesbrough, England,
whose design for a two-hinged arch with piers and pylons in granite-faced concrete was judged to be the
best.

Bradfield’s vision was set to become a reality, as he announced in a speech in 1921: “The tender
recommended, for the two-hinged arch bridge with granite masonry facing, is my design as sanctioned by
Parliament and as submitted for tenders… Due to our gallant soldiers, Australia has recently been acclaimed
a nation. In the upbuilding of any nation the land slowly moulds the people, the people with patient toil alter
the face of the landscape… They humanise the landscape after their own image…”

The path was now clear for the most ambitious construction project Australia had ever seen, a task that
would take eight years, six million hand-driven rivets, 1,400 laborers, and the lives of 16 workers.
In the next chapter of this story, we will meet the people who built the Sydney Harbour Bridge, transforming the visions
of countless planners, designers, dreamers, and engineers into a magnificent reality.

The story is based on the podcast series “The Bridge: The Arch that Cut the Sky,” created with the support of
the State Library of New South Wales Foundation. You can support it by listening at the
thebridge.sl.nsw.gov.au.

Please note that the photographs used in this story are sourced from the State Library of New South Wales
Foundation website for the podcast. These images are not our intellectual property and are used solely for
non-commercial purposes.

The Arch That Cut the Sky — Part One

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Tsamouris, the Fastener Specialists©

Part One

Long before the Sydney Harbour Bridge became an instantly recognizable symbol of the city, the dream of a
permanent crossing linking the north and south shores had captured the imaginations of Sydneysiders.
However, the path to realizing this ambitious vision would span over a century, fraught with political,
economic, and engineering challenges that threatened to derail the project at every turn.

In the early days of the colony, the Indigenous peoples of the Eora Nation traversed the waters of Port
Jackson in their carved wooden canoes, called nawi, establishing trading routes and fishing with spears and
hand-lines. The arrival of the British in 1788 would forever alter the lives of the Eora, as the nascent city of
Sydney rapidly expanded, encroaching upon and erasing their traditional lands.

As the colonial settlement grew, the need for a more efficient means of crossing the harbour became
increasingly apparent. Initially, the only options were to travel by boat, a sometimes treacherous undertaking,
or to make the long journey around the harbor’s edge, which could consume the better part of a day.

Enterprising individuals, such as former convict Billy Blue, seized the opportunity to establish ferry services,
with Blue’s venture proving so successful that he was granted land on the North Shore by Governor
Macquarie. By the late 19th century, millions of passengers, vehicles, and horsemen were crossing the
harbor each year, navigating an often chaotic and increasingly dangerous system of water transport.

The idea of a bridge spanning the harbor seemed an impossible dream to most, a task far beyond the
resources of the young city. Yet, the vision persisted, capturing the minds of ambitious town planners and
engineers who saw the potential for a grand engineering centerpiece that would both serve the city’s needs
and stand as a testament to its growing ambitions.

Over the course of a century, four government bridge plan competitions would be held, and more than 70
designs put forth, each vying to be the one that would finally unite Sydney’s shores. But political tides,
economic upheaval, and engineering challenges would repeatedly conspire to thwart these efforts, leaving
the dream of a harbor bridge tantalizingly out of reach.

It would take the tenacity and vision of a select few to finally set the wheels in motion for the construction of
the Sydney Harbour Bridge, a story of perseverance, ingenuity, and the unshakeable belief in the power of
engineering to transform a city and its people.

The story is based on the podcast series “The Bridge: The Arch that Cut the Sky,” created with the support of
the State Library of New South Wales Foundation. You can support it by listening at the
thebridge.sl.nsw.gov.au.

Please note that the photographs used in this story are sourced from the State Library of New South Wales
Foundation website for the podcast. These images are not our intellectual property and are used solely for
non-commercial purposes.