EXPLORING THE UNKNOWN SYDNEY

The Opera House along with the Sydney Harbour Bridge has become an icon for the visitor to Sydney, but the cognoscenti want to find hidden Sydney. Three areas within easy reach of Sydney are La Perouse, Manly and Leichhardt. All can be reached by public transport and are worthy of a visit.

The three areas chosen give insight into the history of Sydney since white settlement. La Perouse has continued to have an indigenous population and is home to many aboriginal families who have lived in the area for generations. During the Great Depression hundreds of families who were evicted from their homes because the husbands and fathers had lost their jobs, moved to the Crown Land at La Perouse and Little Bay and built humpies out of corrugated iron and scrap timber. Some of these families lived there until well into the 1950s.

Manly appeared early in the records of exploration of Sydney Harbour and its very name is a tribute to the aboriginal tribe who owned the land at the time of white settlement in 1788. When D.H. Lawrence came to Australia in the 1920s he set part of his novel Kangaroo in the Manly area and his protagonists lived in a typical Australian cottage called Emohruo (Our Home).

Leichhardt has a much later history. During the Great Depression of the 1930s it was the home of hundreds of working class people who could not find work. The resultant deterioration of the houses into slums made it a prime location when the Second World War ended for the Government to think of re-housing the locals, giving an opening for the settlement of the newly arrived Italian migrants during the 1950s.