Sydney

Sydney (pronounced /ˈsɪdniː/) is the most populous city in Australia, with a metropolitan area population of approximately 4.34 million (2008 estimate).[3] It is the state capital of New South Wales, and was the site of the first British colony in Australia. It was established in 1788 at Sydney Cove by Arthur Phillip, admiral of the First Fleet from Britain.[4] A resident of the city is referred to as a Sydneysider.

Sydney is situated on Australia's south-east coast. The city is built around Port Jackson, which includes Sydney Harbour, leading to the city's nickname, "the Harbour City". It is noted for the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, and its beaches. The metropolitan area is surrounded by national parks, and contains many bays, rivers and inlets. It is listed as a beta world city by the Loughborough University group's 1999 inventory[5] and ranked 16th among global cities by Foreign Policy's 2008 Global Cities Index.[6] The city has hosted international sporting events, including the 1938 British Empire Games, 2000 Summer Olympics and the final of the 2003 Rugby World Cup. The main airport serving Sydney is Sydney Airport.

Sydney is one of the most multicultural cities in the world, which reflects its role as a major destination for immigrants to Australia.[7] According to the Mercer cost of living survey, Sydney is Australia’s most expensive city, and the 15th most expensive in the world.[8] Sydney also ranks among the top 10 most liveable cities in the world according to Mercer Human Resource Consulting and The Economist.
Radiocarbon dating suggests that the Sydney region has been inhabited by indigenous Australians for at least 30,000 years.[11] The traditional Indigenous owners of Sydney Cove are the Cadigal people, whose land once stretched from south of Port Jackson to Petersham.[12] While estimates of the population numbers prior to the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788 remains contentious, approximately 4000 to 8000 Aboriginal people lived in the Sydney region prior to contact with British settlers. The British called the Indigenous people the "Eora",[13] because being asked where they came from, these people would answer: "Eora", meaning in their language "here", or "from this place".[14] There were three language groups in the Sydney region, which were divided into dialects spoken by smaller clans. The principal languages were Darug (the Cadigal, original inhabitants of the City of Sydney, spoke a coastal dialect of Darug), Dharawal and Guringai. Each clan had a territory; the location of that territory determined the resources available. Although urbanization has destroyed much evidence of these settlements (such as shell middens), Sydney and its environs have rock drawings and carvings because of the nature of the rock, Hawkesbury sandstone.[15]

In 1770, British sea captain Lieutenant James Cook landed in Botany Bay on the Kurnell Peninsula. It is here that James Cook made first contact with an Aboriginal tribe known as the Gweagal[16]. Under instruction from the British government, a convict settlement was founded by Arthur Phillip, who arrived at Botany Bay with a fleet of 11 ships on 20 January 1788. This site was soon found to be unsuitable for habitation, owing to poor soil and a lack of reliable fresh water. Phillip founded the colony, further up the coast, at Sydney Cove on Port Jackson on 26 January 1788. He named it after the British Home Secretary, Thomas Townshend, Lord Sydney, in recognition of Sydney's role in issuing the charter authorising Phillip to establish a colony. The original name was intended to be Albion until Phillip decided on Sydney.[17] In April 1789 a disease, thought to be smallpox, killed an estimated 500 to 1000 Aboriginal people between Broken Bay and Botany Bays.[13] There was violent resistance to British settlement, notably by the warrior Pemulwuy in the area around Botany Bay, and conflicts were common in the area surrounding the Hawkesbury River. By 1820 there were only a few hundred Aborigines and Governor Macquarie had begun initiatives to 'civilize, Christianize and educate' the Aborigines by removing them from their clans.[13]
The International Exhibition of 1879 at the Garden Palace

Macquarie's tenure as Governor of New South Wales was a period when Sydney was improved from its basic beginnings. Roads, bridges, wharves and public buildings were constructed by British and Irish convicts, and by 1822 the town had banks, markets, well-established thoroughfares and an organised constabulary. The 1830s and 1840s were periods of urban development, including the development of the first suburbs, as the town grew rapidly when ships began arriving from Britain and Ireland with immigrants looking to start a new life in a new country. On 20 July 1842 the municipal council of Sydney was incorporated and the town was declared the first city in Australia, with Charles H. Chambers the first mayor.[18] The first of several gold rushes started in 1851, and the port of Sydney has since seen many waves of people arriving from around the world. Rapid suburban development began in the last quarter of the 19th century with the advent of steam powered tramways and railways. With industrialisation Sydney expanded rapidly, and by the early 20th century it had a population well in excess of one million. The Great Depression hit Sydney badly. One of the highlights of the Depression era, however, was the completion of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932.[19]

A rivalry has traditionally existed between Sydney and Melbourne since the gold rushes of the 1850s grew the capital of Victoria into Australia's largest and richest city.[20] Sydney overtook Melbourne in population in the early years of the 20th century,[21] and has remained the largest city in Australia since this time. During the 1970s and 1980s Sydney's CBD with the Reserve Bank and Australian Stock Exchange clearly surpassed Melbourne as the nation's financial capital.[22] Throughout the 20th century, especially in the decades immediately following World War II, Sydney continued to expand as large numbers of European and later Asian immigrants populated the metropolitan area. The culture brought about by immigrants was a major factor in the city's diverse and highly cosmopolitan atmosphere.
Sydney's central business district (CBD) extends southwards for about 3 kilometres (1.25 mi) from Sydney Cove to the area around Central station. The Sydney CBD is bounded on the east side by a chain of parkland, and the west by Darling Harbour, a tourist and nightlife precinct.

Although the CBD dominated the city's business and cultural life in the early days, other business/cultural districts have developed in a radial pattern since World War II. As a result, the proportion of white-collar jobs located in the CBD declined from more than 60 per cent at the end of World War II to less than 30 per cent in 2004.[citation needed] Together with the commercial district of North Sydney, joined to the CBD by the Harbour Bridge, the most significant outer business districts are Parramatta[41] in the central-west, Penrith[42] in the west, Bondi Junction in the east, Liverpool[43] in the southwest, Chatswood to the north, and Hurstville to the south. Sydney's skyline has been ranked as the best in Australia and the 25th best in the world (ahead of such cities as Los Angeles and São Paulo).[44]

The extensive area covered by urban Sydney is formally divided into 642 [45] suburbs (for addressing and postal purposes), and administered as 40 [46] local government areas. There is no city-wide government, but the Government of New South Wales and its agencies have extensive responsibilities in providing metropolitan services.[47] The City of Sydney itself covers a fairly small area comprising the central business district and its neighbouring inner-city suburbs. In addition, regional descriptions are used informally to conveniently describe larger sections of the urban area. These include Eastern Suburbs, Hills District, Inner West, Canterbury-Bankstown, Northern Beaches, Northern Suburbs, North Shore, St George, Southern Sydney, South-eastern Sydney, South-western Sydney, Sutherland Shire and Western Sydney. However, many suburbs are not conveniently covered by any of these categories.
The largest economic sectors in Sydney, as measured by the number of people employed, include property and business services, retail, manufacturing, and health and community services.[48] Since the 1980s, jobs have moved from manufacturing to the services and information sectors. Sydney provides approximately 25 percent of the country's total GDP.[49] The Australian Securities Exchange and the Reserve Bank of Australia are located in Sydney, as are the headquarters of 90 banks and more than half of Australia's top companies, and the regional headquarters for around 500 multinational corporations.[49] Of the ten largest corporations in Australia (based on revenue),[50][broken citation] four have headquarters in Sydney (Caltex Australia, the Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, and Woolworths). Fox Studios Australia has large movie studios in the city. The Sydney Futures Exchange (SFE) is one of the Asia Pacific's largest financial futures and options exchanges, with 64.3 million contracts traded during 2005. It is the 12th largest futures market in the world and the 19th largest including options.[51]

The city has the highest median household income of any major city in Australia (US$42,559 PPP). As of 2004, the unemployment rate in Sydney was 4.9 percent.[52] According to The Economist Intelligence Unit's Worldwide cost of living survey, Sydney is the sixteenth most expensive city in the world, while a UBS survey ranks Sydney as 15th in the world in terms of net earnings.[53] As of 20 September 2007, Sydney has the highest median house price of any Australian capital city at $559,000.[54] Sydney also has the highest median rent prices of any Australian city at $450 a week. A report published by the OECD in November 2005, shows that Australia has the Western World's highest housing prices when measured against rental yields.[55] Sydney has been classified as a "Beta" global city by the Globalization and World Cities Study Group and Network.[56]
City of Sydney from Balmain

Shopping locations in the central business district include the Queen Victoria Building, the pedestrian mall on Pitt Street, and international luxury boutiques in the quieter, northern end of Castlereagh St. Oxford Street in Paddington and Crown Street, Woollahra are home to boutiques selling more niche products, and the main streets of Newtown and Enmore cater more towards students and alternative lifestyles. Many of the large regional centres around the metropolitan area also contain large shopping complexes, such as Parramatta in Western Sydney, Bondi Junction in the Eastern Suburbs and Chatswood on the North Shore, most of which are Westfield brand shopping centres.

Sydney received 7.8 million domestic visitors and 2.5 million international visitors in 2004.[57] In 2007, the (then) Premier of New South Wales, Morris Iemma established Events New South Wales to "market Sydney and NSW as a leading global events destination".
Sydney has two main daily newspapers. The Sydney Morning Herald is a broadsheet, and is Sydney's newspaper of record with extensive coverage of domestic and international news, culture and business. It is also the oldest extant newspaper in Australia, having been published regularly since 1831. The Herald's competitor, The Daily Telegraph, is a News Corporation-owned tabloid. Both papers have tabloid counterparts published on Sunday, The Sun-Herald and the Sunday Telegraph, respectively.
Seven Network broadcasting dishes in Epping.

The four commercial television networks (Seven, Nine, Ten) and TVS, as well as the government national broadcast services (ABC and SBS) each have a presence in Sydney. Historically, the networks have been based in the northern suburbs, but the last decade has seen several move to the inner city. Nine has kept its headquarters north of the harbour, in Willoughby. Ten has its studios in a redeveloped section of the inner-city suburb of Pyrmont, and Seven also has headquarters in Pyrmont, production studios at Epping as well as a purpose-built news studio in Martin Place in the CBD. The ABC has a large headquarters and production facility in the inner-city suburb of Ultimo and SBS has its studios at Artarmon. Foxtel and Optus both supply pay-TV over their cable services to most parts of the urban area. The five free-to-air networks have provided digital television transmissions in Sydney since January 2000. Additional services recently introduced include the ABC's second channel ABC2 (Channel 22), SBS's world news service SBS2 (Channel 33), an on-air program guide (Channel 4), a news, sport, and weather items channel (Channel 41), ChannelNSW: Government and Public Information (Channel 45),[70] Australian Christian Channel (Channel 46), MacquarieBank TV (Channel 47), SportsTAB (Channel 48), Expo Home Shopping (Channel 49), and Federal parliamentary broadcasts (Channel 401 to 408).

Many AM and FM government, commercial and community radio services broadcast in the Sydney area. The local ABC radio station is 702 ABC Sydney (formerly 2BL). The talkback radio genre is dominated by the perennial rivals 2GB and 2UE. Popular music stations include Triple M, 2Day FM and Nova 96.9, which generally targets people under 40. In the older end of the music radio market, Vega and MIX 106.5 target the 25 to 54 age group, while WS-FM targets the 40 to 54 age group with their Classic Hits format mostly focusing on the 70s & 80s. Triple J (national), 2SER and FBi Radio provide a more independent, local and alternative sound. There are also a number of community stations broadcasting to a particular language group or local area.

Certain areas in Sydney are also being used for tests of digital radio broadcasting,[71][broken citation] which the government plans to roll out in the future to replace the existing analogue AM and FM networks in much the same way as they are doing with analogue and digital television at present.