Sydney: Inside Australia's Suburbs | The Greatest Cities in the World | TRACKS

this is a city at the edge of the world perhaps its leading edge this is a city where people tell me they work to live and they do live fabulously well this is Sydney Australia scattered around its harbor it's surely one of the most beautiful locations in the world and perhaps an or place to stick your criminals yet this town was frog-marched into existence as a British penal colony scarcely two hundred years ago has this given it an identity crisis I intend to explore a typical 24 hours in the life of a sun-kissed wavelet down under metropolis [Applause] [Music] it's only 5 a.m. the Sun picks out some landmarks a Harbour Bridge a pretty famous opera house but Sydney is also on the ocean it has over 70 major beaches right on its breakfast patio and before they get into a business suit Sydneysiders like to spend a couple of hours in the swimsuit no wonder Sydney is really voted one of the top places to live in the world [Music] especially if you're shocked and so every morning while others get ready to the traffic goes up last year there were five despite their size a single shark is actually difficult to spot so Mike looks for what the Sharks are looking for huge shoals of fish bait fish find one of these and you may find something big and hungry something over here we're just coming back [Applause] six miles south we get to the famous surf beach [Music] this morning a shoal of fish is extremely close to the surf line if he cracks on he'll end up swimming straight through the middle of the Sharks brunch that is an animal that can fill you up its seconds luckily a large helicopter coming directly overhead and that's this river as for me I feel safer in a cab taxi there are hundreds of water taxis thousands of pleasure craft and more than a few kayaks here the water may occasion maybe a little unwelcoming but you can't ignore it Sydney is built on the world's largest natural Harbor there are over 300 kilometres of waterfront but this is the astonishing first impression of Sydney this is just a commuter point at working very stop for a bus but you come out into the essence of Sydney it's like a little suburban paradise 50,000 people will take a ferry today - 650 separate official suburbs of Sydney it's all strangely familiar it's fictiony by the sea this is quite an eerie experience for pomp like me because I'm now walking along a subtropical beach and cockatoos are flying overhead but this place isn't really a coaster or a corniche it's a version of a British promenade or seafront somebody has actually dropped down a toilet block from Weymouth behind me it's that municipal quality that really makes these faces like a like a like a parallel universe it's like Britain through the looking-glass even a Sydney municipal amenities seem special to me like this pool the ratepayer provides a bit of luxurious head anism for everyone everyone that is except for the man USB connect firstly the drain is opened and all the sand is scrubbed down and washed away it cleans the McCallum outdoor saltwater pool every week [Music] but this pool isn't exceptional there are 150 public pools like this across town or in pretty stunning locations meanwhile I'm just about done having the Boris Lee emptied this thing we now have to fill it up with salt water straight from the harbor the pool though is missing something something vital as far as a lot of Sydneysiders are concerned other people Sydney is a matey type of town it's 10:00 a.m. and this is more like it the icebergs can't please not just a deal it's a social immersion competition is fierce not just to win the race in this pool you have to prove yourself they will have a club man you want to be a member here you have to guarantee that you're going to turn up to take part in a race three Sundays out of four for five months during the winter season you have to do that for five years in succession otherwise you'll never make it as a life member of the icebergs but these swimmers remember I'm not on holiday this is everyday life their pool is at the edge of the famous surf beach at Bondi the surf may be free the beach may be almost empty but this swimming Club provides mates and it also seems to have a dress code title of swimwear this is the very beach where I noticed a lot of people wearing budgie smugglers now they're fairly tied to speed over the speedo was actually invented for these beaches and the first person to wear them in public was arrested for indecency it was a cliched hardy Scotsman who came up with the idea in 1928 to speed things up say speed on a better speed on as for me I feel distinctly overdressed in my Cape Cod gingham pantaloons the icebergs is the only licensed winter swimming club in the world hence the name and the ice in the opening ceremony of the winter swimming season I haven't got the stamina to hold on to my eyes for long enough to jump into the water [Applause] [Music] the idea is to cool down the water ready for winter training and in case you wondered it's only snow once in Sydney since records began the best place for a groom I feel I feel like being in a Tom Collins cocktail but cocktails aren't the preferred tipple here it's beer on the menu after the races everyone goes to the bar of the eighty-year-old club to socialize the picture of beer is not only one of the prizes in the swimming competition it's also the heart of old Sydney having a drink with your mates is one of the most traditional things you can do especially at 11:00 in the morning you don't serve beer in pints because it gets too warm too quickly so you have a schooner or a jug beer and rum are actually fundamental to Sydney they were the first currency it was hard working hard drinking men that built this suburban paradise and I wonder are they a dying breed the one o'clock gun fires every day in Sydney on this little island fort it's a reminder that the place was once a military round penal colony and garrison about 220 years ago a man called Frances Morgan stood up here on pimps gun Island he was working standing on the gallows in fact cause he was about to be hanged and he looked out and he said his last words he said well you have here indeed a most beautiful [Music] yes it was beautiful but the first settlers had other things on their minds in the early days this was a very hard life there was only one water source and all their crops failed in this strange land survival was touch-and-go many of the convicts brought here may not have even been criminals at all but they were workers they were shipped here and forced into what was essentially indentured slave labour sydney gained a culture of honest ordinary working people and a hundred years ago they had a tough reputation this was the most notorious street in sydney known as the suez canal it was haunted by gangs called push it in the 19th century and apparently down here was the haunt of a particularly ferocious gang of women who would jump on unwary sailors pull out their gold teeth and steal their clothes pretty quiet now in fact Sydney now has a reputation for having very little crime this area in particular because the rocks are no longer filled with criminals but with tourists nowadays the homicide rate is 400 times less than similar cities in America but that slightly dodgy past has worried 20th century Sydneysiders about 50 years ago Sydney wanted to become that overrating thing modern it's been a bit of a rickety journey where a few yards from the bridge now on the other side and we left all that tourist stuff behind and we come across this all these beautiful streets these quiet streets still a bit inner-city but this was essentially where the Sydney side has decided originally to establish themselves and they built what effectively was Australia's first town this is what they wanted for themselves and it's just like a sort of English Georgian city but then they became very embarrassed by it because it turned into a slum and so it out in about 1960 they decided that they try and sell the whole thing and they put an advertisement in their New York Times but nobody bought it so then 10 years later they thought they'd knock it down and and turn it into some lovely car parks because to see they were ashamed of luckily the urge to look ahead among some people correspondent with an urge to look back amongst others the rocks area was saved by Union action Sydney was becoming self-conscious and sophisticated so where Hubble the tough guy is gone by repute the hardest men of the city the rigors of a Sydney Harbour Bridge this lump of man-sized Meccano was built in the 1930s most of the steel was shipped in from Middlesbrough and needs constant maintenance I'm helping to remove some steps for painting about a hundred metres above the water the guys on shift today are both immigrants Joe's from Croatia and George is a Brit from the East End of London when the British immigrants were shipped out here on ten-pound tickets in the 1950s the reality of the place often fell below their expectations and they were called the whinging poems did you find that adjusting to Australian life was difficult no well they're difficult that living it I did it sunny it's warm yeah good food yeah nice people you haven't turned into a whinging palm in anyway then you haven't done your show you ask anyone here if I have go whinging you know Joe be honest well Joe you tell me where does he wind actually the biggest winter we got as a lovely George came here from the more confrontational parts of the East End of London he thought he'd fit in with Sydney's legendary reputation but it seems he was a little disappointed about one aspect I'll tell you one thing I did notice Gruyere when I first got here I thought I'll go and see a rugby league game so I've gone into the pub and there's all self Sydney supporters all drinking in there yeah minutes later all these things your supporters come in oh here we go it's all gonna go off as it would in London yes but nothing they're all going off hello Dave oh aware that's not you know that's because that's the Sydney where do you think this would be matey you call everyone mate I met the premier I called in my son remember he's nine I'm sure some of those palm immigrants were originally lured here by the idea of sitting under the stars by a Billabong in fact Australia is one of the most urbanized societies in the world everybody down under apparently wants to live downtown the Crocodile Dundee story is increasingly becoming just that a story that's a cowhide leather cowhide okay and then I can go right out to kangaroo can i oh absolutely keep going there's you kangaroo leather I see kangaroo leather and I can add a few appurtenances to this I'm gonna make myself even more of a song the beauty with kangaroo leather is yeah very malleable so you can fold it up in your pocket it's actually a very strongly the three times stronger than cowhide and your hats on back the front okay Jeff thinks that it was only in the summer of 2000 that Sydney lost its Bushwhacker image after the Olympics the rest of the world saw Sydney forward it was this magnificent spot and a number of customers we had that said you know they move here in a blink of an eyelid because we were in international City we had that cafe culture we had the food culture we had the wine the beers it wasn't just a yeah quite a sophisticated thing which they didn't expect but that sophistication has that grown in the last in the last 20 months almost definitely you know in the early 80s so late 80s yeah we were thought to have been kangaroos hopping down the street the last frontier from that we've now grown into I think Sydney Opera House is the most visited Opera House in the world yes well I've been a visited then it may have been the Olympics that tipped world opinion but it all started with this place the Sydney Opera House actually did something for City Planning it set a benchmark it said if you want to identify your city and give it a self international face then he better stick up a slightly preposterous bill people said Sydney lacked culture and this extravagant Barnstormer was the remedy it was designed to show off to be as much an ornament to the waterside as a facility it was started in 1950 and took nearly 20 years to compete during that period it went 20 times over budget all because of those staggeringly beautiful seashell slices of dome the building of this place really did come out of a paranoia the paranoia have been forgotten it says look at us you won't ignore us down at the other end of the world William it seemed to work with the Opera House him a growing awareness of what Sydney could be amongst Sydneysiders themselves it could be more than prawns pies and barbecues more than surf and beer more than a good fight my goodness without its beer glasses it was beautiful in the last few decades Sydneysiders have certainly woken up to how valuable their Harbor is all heavy industry and docks have been moved elsewhere although it's still so polluted that if you catch a fish gear you're advised not to eat it thanks mainly to the harbor this city is now climbing the charts as the most expensive place to live in the world it's currently fifteenth ten years ago it wasn't even in the top 100 these are the rich eastern suburbs but there's there's tons of it miles and miles of winding lanes going out onto the headlands and and they go out onto the headlands I I can't get down to the water side because the waterside is someone's back god never seen anywhere quite so neatly kept this isn't just sort of manicured lawns these are micro manicured lawns there's somebody coming out here with nail scissors and cutting these hedges it's like walking through the set of Desperate Housewives than those Desperate Housewives aren't swinging beer they're sipping coffee little bit in the stands lunchtime downtown I'm not only working as a knocker barista I'm not only doing so in top-flight modern architecture I'm at a fashion show in Australian fashion we know this being Sydney it's for a new range of swimwear these are the high heels and hairdos of a new international Pacific Rim Sydney one that designer Anna thinks would love to be a fashion name across the world it's amazing because it has the beach and the cities you know which is so great about it but I don't know if it's you know it can compete on a fashion really it's not on a sewer level yeah I think we're at the top is Fashion Week here now an important week not just for Sydney but for world kind of appreciate the angle that Sydney fashion is coming from an Australian fashion it's coming from then it's definitely worthy so and I have one last question to ask you can I get you any coffee of any kind I'm not sure I'm very good I can do it you look you look like you're quite good behind the bar yeah you could be selling the story yeah undressed especially as a barista today yeah [Music] [Music] since most power lawyer that Sydney's had has now completely disappeared and it's it's a sort of world ranking city really amorous place but I wonder whether because it's now become so expensive to live here why people are gonna be working so hard to keep up with the Joneses now I've gotta have any time to enjoy themselves anymore but they certainly intend to try and to taste what the world has to offer Sydney is rapidly absorbing culture from every other country on the globe a thousand new immigrants come to this city every week I'm at a ceremony that happens most days at 3 p.m. there's a six-month waiting list to become a citizen Claudine was born in Singapore and moved to Sydney a year again she's decided to take up Australian citizenship so she can stay here permanently until the 1970s Australia had a white-only immigration policy but since then it's welcomed people from over 250 nations so with those taking the oath under God please stand now from this time forward under God I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people I pledge my way to Australia and its people whose Democratic beliefs I share this democratic beliefs I share whose rights and liberties I respect whose rights and liberties I respect and whose laws I will uphold and obey and whose laws I will uphold congratulations you're now officially Australian [Applause] [Music] Church in and seokwon son [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] alongside the free framlingham cakes and the meat pies are a series of questions designed to reinforce authentic Australian culture bridge-building friend it was the premiere [Music] well that was nice it was as if all those people were being given the chance to to start all over again to wipe the slate clean and be reborn in this city and I felt oddly envious all this multicultural glamour and new sophistication actually rests on a city which is profoundly Australian but I mean in quite another way than cricket Vegemite and budgie smugglers as I intend to find out it's late afternoon I'm taking off from Sydney's oldest airport this was where the first flying boats arrived and ushered in a modern age of an easy travel but I'm setting off to encounter something that predates history an original lost world that lies beneath this metropolis I'm heading north to encounter the real Australia the edge of the city comes with a suddenness that takes your breath away Oh and follow the city half along the coast with coming all the whole spirit up so the rejoin the outer northwestern suburbs after having traversed a great empty space of wilderness credible these are the national parks which make up 30% of the metropolitan area they remind us what Sydney would have looked like when the ancestors of the person I'm about to meet came here up to 70,000 years ago that's about 60,000 years before mankind made it to Britain 65,000 people hunted and lived in this place Sydney was an Aboriginal Portland but the white men brought in chicken pox which nearly wiped out of Australia's indigenous people and now they make up less than 2% of the population Allen is one of their cultural leaders Alan good Thanks for meeting me here welcome your Aboriginal land what I've come to see on the edge of these northern suburbs is a sacred site of seven thousand year old Aboriginal art that's a man site we forbid Aboriginal women from coming arey an urban sydney is full of aboriginal sites of significance to the aberration biggest and indigenous ad gallery of any city in the world just in metros boundaries of laughs just registered we've got 7,000 aboriginal sites you're looking at emia you're looking at while in in the far corner you've got the Creator by Amy boy amy is the one who created all that we see here he's a great creator he was with the Lightning out of his head and in his belt it's this really exciting place to be actually I think for me it has such a power doesn't it I have a real sense of belonging every time I'm here these carvings can in fact be found right across the city telling the story of when they were kangaroos here this Valerie you see him running through the bloody bush now he would have frightened the jinkies earlier as my father told me many years ago he said I'll you know you've got to look after the land because God's not making no more meeting Allen is a reminder that this city is like a ship in a sea [Music] it's a capsule of modernity afloat in a wild place the continent of Australia is still 98% desert and bush and the city is unmistakeably part of this continent just as the continent still impinge --is on the modern metropolis these are the Botanic Gardens about this time in the evening you can walk out from a perfectly recognizable twentieth century city into a perfectly recognizable 19th century Park and there are the coconuts in the tree except that this time of night the coconuts wake up the gardens are boringest Peter is worried about his national tree collection and I've come here to help with a little experiment Peters idea is to try a scarecrow to discourage the bats from roosting in the more damage to trees yeah normally that way waking up in the afternoon yeah and then they fly at night and then they come back in the morning you don't want them here terrible things I've ever seen they're all lying there look at them in there like in their raincoats rats around them they take on a take off throughout the day because of the noise from the tractors and trucks and people right they take off and land again and take off a man again continually over time yeah the foliage the tree the tree can't produce its own food and then the tree starts to die yeah and your mr. tree man I am when there's five ten twenty thousand of them 20 thousand sometimes yeah especially during mating season and when they migrate for north or south they'll come in influx and then go out again so there's sort of hoonigan bats really yeah they're very frisky all right yes when they wake up the Yang's because the way I see it they were fruit bat right yeah presumably they they wake up yeah the first thing they do is get themselves upright and have a sheet that's all got my head on we're gonna hide somewhere all right so what do we do we strike that switch yeah flying Foster's of the largest species bat with wingspans of a meter big enough it seems not to be easily frightened I haven't really taken off nope not a flicker it's just that old scarecrow again yeah we hope to see the bats fly away and leave Sydney for good but they're just slime I think you're not that thing again they've seen it before [Music] it's 6:00 p.m. after the bats leave the city center to get some food for the people so what we do is we just go straight over to you know I'm getting to the middle of the bridge yeah you say there's a little red diamond to sting me over the bridge yeah that lets us know that we're on the right side of the harbor and then we turn left for the port I'm at the helm of radar one of the city's oldest and finest ferries it's the evening rush hour and people need to get home most will head towards the Setting Sun because that's where most people live and it's there in West that I'm told I'll find the real heart of this city [Music] the city centre of Sydney might get er like so many others but the geographical center the real center the actual middle of this place is 20 miles to the west these are the great western suburbs of Sydney 40 miles of quarter acre plots at night this can be a quiet place so people come to returned and services League clubs borrow cells I've been told or just like a British Legion except this is a parallel universe they may have a minute silence every day for fallen comrades but upstairs they also have Las Vegas there are hundreds of these clubs across the city and nearly every one in Sydney the longest one last year this club alone made a million dollars it does this by tapping into a Sydneysider addiction gambling Warren is the entertainment officer and this this is the engine room this is the token machine territory this is where money is made and money is lost you are faint a sort of local casino in a way that we don't have Sydneysiders gamble more per head than anyone else in the world in fact more money is spent on gambling than on sporting cultural or entertainment events but as well as the high adrenaline stuff there's some no gear excitement - I'm here for the evening raffle where the big prize is a tray of meat and so we have seafood yeah fish pork chops rather nice roast pork Ricky packs the eggs and bacon sausages and this is tomorrow's barbecue here I have 28 hampers to give away including toilet rolls and baskets of fruit all I have to do is read out the number all the punter has to do is check the number and pick up their groceries well good evening welcome and we don't have any undignified looking through our pockets because I'm gonna press the first number here okay so we're gonna be where our spiked drinks other people here tonight who are liable to do that the first number is two to nine to do to 902 double to 902 does anybody claim that raffle prize anywhere in the house due to nine and I'm allowed four minutes before moving on three minutes 52 seconds someone claims the prize - here's the number one double five bubbles it it's a long night in the western suburbs luckily I've got another appointment in the North suburbs which promises to be a little more animated thank you oh now I nearly made a classic mistake there in Sydney if you're a bloke on your own you mustn't get in the back of a taxi because that will be getting up yourself mostly people like to sit on the front yes if you're sitting on the back definitely snobby and they don't like to be snobby no they don't like they don't like to even a mention to be snow so it's getting up yourself if you go in the city on the bound night so you just a mate who happens to be getting a lift and they just want to sit in the in the front to get after being a regular Joe is a very important part of being a Sydneysider if you get too full of yourself your mates will cut you down to size they call it the tall poppy syndrome across Sydney to the Manly Sea Eagles Stadium on the northern beaches there are ten Rugby League clubs across Sydney it's the big sport in this town with an attendance of 1.5 million every week and I'm visiting an unusual supporters club the Eagles angels once again it seems like I've stepped through the looking glass the Golden Girls towering over me have a total of 15 Olympic medals between them and over 300 world titles and records but they value their friends about their achievements and it's clear I think what we talk about is about life and people try to work and they work hard because they won't have the best house and they want to have you know the best clothes and the best car but I think I don't on the beaches we just we work but we want to enjoy our life at the same time too we will give up on things that material things to be able to have that we're very close with our mates you know every weekend we've got a gang over for barbecue there's sausages there's kids galore playing in the pool and it's very very sad to tell you this but even in the way live in - the kids are in the pool so we have this lifestyle that is very much something around the kids and our mates can I tell you how incredibly valuable mates are three years ago my husband was diagnosed with a terrible cancer these guys they got together and raised half a million dollars to pay for his treatment to go to America and have clinical treatment which saved his life I have experienced firsthand how incredibly committed to mates we are here in Oz but before the match is half darling I have to move on again for another suburban experience and this time it's an emergency at this time of night Sydney streets acquired people go to bed early so they can get up early but some people weren't getting any sleep at all in the wires wildlife rescue headquarters calls come in from all over town from poor Sydneysiders having trouble with invasions for native animals well if you had have told me before I joined wise that there were snakes all over Sydney old and laugh but there are and people don't believe it you name people cell but that's not snakes in the eastern suburbs I've joined Barry to help rescue these creatures from these people and to take them back to the bush snakes possums and bandicoot's are a common nocturnal problem all over Sydney but tonight a call has come in from a girls college in the center of town it's now the middle of the night but Kathryn and Eugenie are too scared to go to bed please do not enter inside and I heard like all these laughing and squawking outside and there's these massive crows chasing this out I like crazy birds where they do I know fly straight through you straight past my base so it's the closer to break yeah and now it's my job to chase it out I need to ask you Barry is the idea that we you're gonna try and capture it by hand and put it in here or you're gonna try and put this so I'm going to try and net it I don't think you'll be able to catch it by hand all right so do you want to do that or do you want me to do that's up to you I think I'm gonna have a go then just as long as we don't hurt oh there he is I have to say that he looks pretty suspicious there's absolutely no doubt he fakes not the not the man with the net not the man with name they've sent the man with a name okay um is it all right if I stand on your bed I'm doing circumstances yeah but he's looking flying to it is he [Music] my al meshing skills clearly needs some work so to stop the bird getting too distressed uh Nev it to the expert [Music] ladies and gentlemen [Music] he has got some sort of an eye injury I don't know that it's serious but we'll get an assist in the morning yes I'm gonna take it first to our reptile coordinator and otherwise people will be able to pretty well assess it and decide whether it does need venomous but who cared or whether they will be able to treat it themselves don't even want the injuries [Music] the first settlers must have found this an unsettling place a strange landscape and the other end of the world filled with weird creatures in 200 years this city has grown up quickly I take a last look over it from McQuarrie's lighthouse built in 1818 it was the first in Australia I can see the dorm coming up now and brighten down there Putney over there late on Eppie which is over there but and right over there on Liverpool all those incredible familiar names but of course if I turn this way then the nearest land is 7,000 miles in that direction and about 1,500 miles in that direction if I wanted to go to New Zealand which I suppose as far away as anywhere from anywhere else Sydney was incredibly isolated for 200 years perhaps that's the reason that the people who were living here wanted to make themselves at home they wanted these things to be cozy and homely and perhaps is only in the last 20 years where they could allow themselves to be a little bit more exotic [Music] [Applause]

Channel: TRACKS

Views: 374,035

Keywords: TRACKS, tracks travel channel, tracks travel, tourism, australia, sydney, gambling, traveling, culture, australian culture

Id: YUdSeTYe92o

Length: 45min 25sec (2725 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 09 2019