The Opera House, Bondi Beach, and a brunch culture that has legitimately changed how the world eats breakfast
Sydney is the city that invented contemporary brunch culture — the avocado toast, the single-origin pour-over, the poached egg on sourdough with house-made hollandaise — and exported it globally via Australian and New Zealand expats. Beyond the obvious (Opera House, Harbour Bridge, Bondi Beach), Sydney is a city of extraordinary multicultural food: the largest Vietnamese community outside Vietnam is in Cabramatta; Chinatown and Sussex Street run some of the best yum cha in the southern hemisphere; and the Marrickville inner-west strip contains Lebanese, Ethiopian, Greek, and Vietnamese restau…
Sydney Harbour was the site of the first European settlement in Australia — the First Fleet of 11 ships carrying 1,500 people (roughly half of them convicts) arrived at Botany Bay in January 1788 under Captain Arthur Phillip, who quickly moved the colony north to Sydney Cove for its better freshwater. The Gadigal people of the Eora Nation had inhabited the Sydney region for at least 60,000 years before contact; the settler period brought smallpox, land dispossession, and near-total destruction of the local population within years of first contact. The colony transitioned from a penal settleme…