Our day started with a walk to the Royal Botanic Garden for a guided tour focusing on Aboriginal culture and history. Our guide, Darren, has Aboriginal grandparents and has lived in that culture as well as living in “European” culture; he told us a lot about the land, the history, and the culture as well as taking about the plants and animals in the garden. I wish I could remember a tenth of what he told us!

This is a bat habitat with a Native symbol for Sydney on it.

We saw many endemic birds and animals, like this kookaburra and Australian Water Dragon.

There were four different Aboriginal groups living in Sydney at the time of first contact; the one we heard the most about was the Gadigal, who are named after the gadi or grass-tree plant.

I could have spent the entire day learning from Darren, but that was not to be – he brought us to the edge of the Garden and then gave us back to our guides so that we could visit the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

It, too, was overwhelming; here are a couple of works that struck me: Ken Unsworth’s “Suspended Stone Circle II” and Grace Coddington Smith’s “The Lacquer Room”.

We had lunch at the museum and then set out to explore a little bit more of Sydney, walking past the Frazer Fountain (no longer operational), Town Hall, and finally to the Queen Victoria Building which is now a modern shopping mall.

We returned to the hotel and packed; then we went to the opening reception for the full tour group (there will be 100 of us on the tour; there were 20 on the pre-tour) where we picked up Covid tests that we had to take before we can get on the plane to fly to Broome tomorrow morning. Diane and I both passed. whew

A beautiful rainbow over Darling Harbour greeted us at breakfast this morning. After breakfast and a quick trip to drop our laundry at Wash in the Rocks, we joined the group to walk to the Sydney Opera House for a guided tour.

We learned the story of the construction of the Opera House, the political battle that brought in a new architect, lots of statistics, and got to see (and hear) the Sydney Symphony rehearsing and watch the some of the members of the Australian Ballet practice some of their moves. We weren’t allowed to take photos during either of those segments, but photography was OK during the rest of the tour.

Lunch was included at the Opera Bar; the view and conversation were good and the food was ok.

After lunch, our guide Ronan took us on a short walk through the Rocks and told us a few stories about the early European settlement of Australia. We’d seen the William Bligh statue on our Monday walk but didn’t know why it was there; Ronan explained that Bligh was the fourth Governor of New South Wales and suffered a second mutiny here (it was the only successful armed takeover of an Australian government)!

Ronan also took us to see the “First Impressions” statue on Playfair Street; he told us about the protest demonstrations because the statue completely omitted the original inhabitants of the land, the Gadigal People (Aborigines). The statue itself is interesting because it’s a three-sided sculpture; it would be easy to miss one or two sides if you weren’t paying attention!