Tag: central station

For just over a year now I’ve been producing a history podcast alongside my good mate Alistair Taylor. Stories from Sydney: History of the Harbour City was Alistair’s brainchild, born from that perfect combination of a brilliant idea and the covid-lockdown-induced time to accomplish it. I was brought onboard to give it a much needed infrastructure bent and keep him on task.

The premise is simple. Each episode one of us, the host, dives into the history of something in (or around) Sydney we’ve oft wondered about. The listener gets to sit back, learn about something new and chime in with questions, comments and distracting tangents along the way.

First and foremost, we made the podcasts for ourselves. The history of Sydney as taught in school felt so two dimensional. First Nations tribes, penal colony, growing city, global metropolis. The broad strokes were there, but it felt like the detail was missing. We both studied history in high school but came away knowing more about Persepolis, the capital of the ancient Persian empire, than the city we lived in.

We knew there was so much more to find out about the places that were so familiar and that only our ignorance was standing in the way. This isn’t the work of professional historians. We are 100% amateurs when it comes to history (although I will point out Alistair topped our Ancient class in year 12 with perfect marks) so mistakes are made and we’re often going off a single source. Stories from Sydney is about getting an overview of a fascinating tale and hopefully building up a broader understanding of the complex ecological, indigenous, colonial and contemporary stories of our city.

I should add that the name is something of a misnomer. Being based in regional NSW, my tales are prone to wandering well outside the Sydney Basin to explore the history of the land on which so much of Sydney’s wealth has come.

We’ve made 12 episodes in the last 12 months, not bad considering that for the first 6 months Alistair was based in California and we were coordinating recording sessions across a particularly challenging time difference. I should also mention that each episode ends with a clue from host to listener for the topic of the subsequent episode, so best to listen in order!

Stories from Sydney can be found on all the usual podcast platforms (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc.) and in your browser at https://storiesfromsydney.podbean.com/.

Here’s a quick recap of the ground we covered across the 8 episodes of Season 1 in 2020.

1: Sydney Stadium and The World Championship Fight at Rushcutters Bay

Alistair launched our podcast with this absolutely cracker of an episode about the title fight between Jack Johnson and Tommy Burns and the role Sydney played in an important moment in the racial desegregation of the sport of boxing.

2: The Saga of Sydney’s First Railway

My first turn to host and I chose something very on brand; the story of Sydney’s First Railway! The line from Cleveland Fields (Central) to Parramatta Junction (Granville) took a few wrong turns before it finally opened in 1855, quite a few years after the global rail boom had kicked off.

3: The Sydney Language and the Missing Notebooks of William Dawes

Here Alistair tells us about how we came to know a little of the Eora language through the relationship between the English Dawes and Cammeraygal Patyegarang.

4: Celebrating a new Beginning Across the Blue Mountains

In this tale we learn about some of the early expeditions from the colony across the Blue Mountains and a little pub that opened on the other side, in Hartley.

5: The Last Woman Hanged at Darlinghurst Gaol

Louisa Collins was the last female judicially hanged in New South Wales. This episode we discuss a little bit of the working history and geography of southern Sydney and the beginnings of the feminist movement in the town.

6: From the Valley to the Gully

While the early colonists were in awe of the inaccessible Blue Mountains, the people of the Dharug, Wiradjuri and Gundangara Nations used the Mountains as a summer camp and a place for meeting and exchange. This episode explores the history of Indigenous use and displacement in the mountains and how contemporary development on the Cumberland Plain is threatening sacred sites much farther upstream.

7: The Hospital that Rum Built

Lachlan Macquarie turned a glorified penal camp in Sydney Cove into an outpost of empire and a worthy town in its own right. The Hospital on Macquarie Street is one of Sydney’s oldest buildings and its story gives an great insight into the functioning of the colony at the time and the role of rum in those early years.

8: Overengineered and Underdelivered (The Story of the Great North Road)

Our concluding episode for Season 1 explores the first attempt to build a road north from Sydney to the growing settlements on the Hunter River. The road was the Colony’s greatest engineering endeavour at the time but came to irrelevance quite quickly, leaving it as a picturesque and accessible spot to see some 200 year old infrastructure today.

We’re currently on a mid-season hiatus from Season 2, but there are 4 episodes from this year uploaded to enjoy as well. If you’d like to keep up with the podcast you can follow us at facebook or instagram and of course subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Pedestrians left at the kerb by Google Maps

By Jed C

On December 12, 2018

In Transport

It’s 2018; when you’re in an unfamiliar part of town and you’re figuring out how to get to where you’re going, what do you do? You certainly don’t ask for directions or to borrow someone’s street directory. If you’re navigationally minded you might get a bearing from the sun or, if you find yourself in Melbourne or Adelaide, a known street that forms part of a grid. Chances are though, you’ll whip out your phone and open Google Maps.

We’re all used to the type of map that Google Maps, Apple Maps, or OpenStreetMap present to us. They look more or less like the street directory of yesteryear. Roads are emphasised with width and colour indicating how busy they are. Parks are green, water is blue. The main difference is that now shops are marked and, if you zoom in, you get greater detail.

If you’re navigating by road, this is just fine. They’re colour-coded by type of road in the familiar orange-yellow-white hierarchy and if you input your destination none of that matters anyway as a blue line appears to guide you effortlessly to your destination. This tool even works (to a point) for public transport navigation. Worlds away from the days of carrying multiple timetables and optimistically standing at windswept bus stops.

These maps, however, are not made for pedestrians. The colour coding of roads tells drivers something, it tells them if a road is designed for high traffic volumes or not. But it doesn’t tell pedestrians much. Sure, a yellow road will be busy, but will it have regular safe crossing points and accessibility ramps? A thin white road probably won’t have too much fast moving traffic, but are there footpaths?

It’s easy to look at these maps and think that they simply show us what is there. It’s easy to forget that there is a hidden bias to these maps, that they’re designed to be used in a specific kind of way.

When was the last time you used Google’s directions while driving and it suggested you take an illegal right turn? Or told you to continue through onto a street that is blocked off to cars? When Google, Tom Tom and their ilk were first introducing this software they had their fair share of bugs. Over time we became more dependent on and trusting of these directions, often with, errr, unforeseen consequences. But nowadays they’re connected to extremely accurate databases that know not only when a right turn can be legally made, but when the traffic conditions are conducive to making one turn as opposed to another.

This data just doesn’t seem to exist for pedestrian trips. Try using Google Maps to navigate as a pedestrian and you’ll be sent the long way around, advised to walk along roads with no footpaths, across car parks or industrial lots. Why is it that walking directions on Google Maps include the disclaimer “Use caution–walking directions may not always reflect real-world conditions” and yet public transport directions and driving directions don’t? It’s like the pedestrian directions are in beta. But they’re not. Pedestrians just aren’t considered to be an important user group.

A screenshot from Google Maps showing walking directions between Prince Alfred Park Pool and the Powerhouse Museum near Central Station, Sydney. Google Maps walking directions suggest a long way around primarily using Cleveland Street, Regent Street and Harris Street. A much more direct and pedestrian friendly route using the Devonshire Street Tunnel and the Goods Line has been marked in Red. — Google Maps suggested walking route across Central Station involves walking alongside a series of high volume, high speed roads. The red line is my suggested route, through the Devonshire Street tunnel and along the Goods Line. This route is not only much more direct but involves no interaction with vehicular traffic. Notice on the left that users have the option to avoid ‘Ferries’ for some reason, but not stairs, steep sections, busy roads or an absence of footpaths.

Have a look at the layers you can choose to populate your map with:

Default – Yep, that’d be your car-centric map.
Transport – In Sydney this means all the train lines are marked in orange. Buses and ferries aren’t shown. This would be the equivalent of having a ‘Driving’ option that only showed major freeways.
Traffic – Another useful layer if you’re driving
Cycling – You’ll want to have a pretty good idea of what you’re doing before you rely too heavily on this

Despite the fact that drivers, passengers, public transport user and cyclists are almost always pedestrians at the start or end of their journey, there’s no layer available that helps to convey information in a way that helps someone navigating on foot.

A pedestrian layer could show pedestrian crossings and traffic signals with crossing points. It could highlight intersections that have long average wait times for pedestrians or force to you to double-cross, like City Road at Broadway. It could show off-road walking tracks in the manner of the cycling layer. (Use the cycling layer as a pedestrian at your own risk, you could easily find yourself ambling along a bike only route getting sworn at in much the same way as if you decided to wander onto a freeway.) It could use information from the terrain layer to show steepness, it could show footpath availability, protection from the elements and it could integrate internal pedestrian accessways through train stations and shopping centres.

Much of this sort of information is presented on fixed signage installed by local councils, the City of Sydney taking pedestrian navigation particularly seriously. Yet increasingly we turn to our phones for such directions, as a tool that most of us have on hand 24/7. A platform like Google Maps has the capability to take all of this data and present it in a highly customisable and user friendly format, just like it does with driving directions.

This post was originally published on WalkSydney.