A Trip to Australia and New Zealand
Sydney - Downtown
The very early history of Sydney City is the history of Australia. Sydney was Australia until the nineteenth century when the colony began to expand into the interior and along the coast. As noted elsewhere in this section, Governor Lacland Macquarie did much to organize the structure of the city, to build important physical structures, and to establish critical procedures in the 1820s. On July 20, 1842, Sydney was declared to be the first city in Australia.
In 1851, gold was discovered in Australia and Sydney was the port through which the resultant gold rush was funneled. In this respect Sydney played something of the same role that San Francisco was playing half a world away at roughly the same time. During the last part of the nineteenth century Sydney became a center for industry and both the economy and the population expanded dramatically. By the turn of the century, Sydney's population was more than one million souls. Today, it is well over four million.
