After more than a hundred flights to Australia over the past twenty-five years, I have accumulated a working knowledge of Sydney that is different from knowing it as a resident. It is the knowledge of repeated layovers: where to walk when there are only a few hours free, which streets lead efficiently down toward the harbour, where to find coffee early, and which familiar things are worth doing again rather than replacing with something new.
Over time that familiarity has turned into genuine fondness. Sydney is one of the few cities where I do not feel much obligation to optimize a layover. I can return to places I already know and still find something I had somehow missed.
This one, on September 28 and 29, was unusually good.
Downstairs at the Art Gallery
I spent part of the afternoon at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. I have been there before, but this time I wandered farther downstairs and found the Edmund and Joanna Capon Research Library.
It was a great little discovery, although "little" does not really describe the collection behind it. This is a working research library and archive rather than simply a quiet museum reading room. Its collections support research into Australian and international art, with books, periodicals, exhibition catalogues, artist files, archives and other documentary material accumulated by the Gallery over decades.
That changes the feeling of the place. Upstairs, the museum presents finished objects and exhibitions. Downstairs is some of the documentary machinery behind understanding them: catalogues, records, correspondence, ephemera and the accumulated trail of artists and exhibitions.
There is something satisfying about discovering a room like that after years of thinking I know the building. Sydney does this to me fairly often. Familiarity gradually strips away the pressure to see the obvious things, which leaves more room for finding the obscure ones.
Grana
From the gallery I made my way toward Circular Quay for an early dinner at Grana, on the ground floor of Hinchcliff House on Young Street.
Grana takes its name from the Italian word for grain, and the idea is literal. The restaurant sources grains from NSW farms, including heritage varieties, mills them on site and uses the flour for its pasta and pastry production. Much of that work is deliberately visible from the dining room. It gives the restaurant a clear organizing idea without making the meal feel overly formal.
I ordered the kangaroo.
What struck me first was the texture. Kangaroo has a reputation for being extremely lean and potentially unforgiving, but this was tender and deeply cooked into the dish, much more like the result of a slow braise than anything gamey. It was rich without tasting heavy and considerably more subtle than I had expected.
It was simply very good.
The dish also made sense in the context of Grana: recognizably Italian cooking built around Australian ingredients rather than an attempt to reproduce Italy literally. After so many Sydney meals over the years, it was nice to find something that felt both grounded in the city and genuinely new to me.
The Opera House
At 6:30 I was in the Joan Sutherland Theatre for Opera Australia's Great Opera Hits.
I had gone expecting an enjoyable concert. Leon Vitogiannis singing Rossini's "Largo al factotum" turned it into the highlight of the day.
It is already a wonderfully excessive piece of music: Figaro announcing himself at full speed, the vocal line demanding agility, comic timing and enough personality to make the whole thing feel effortless. Vitogiannis had all of that. Opera Australia's biography notes that he has previously performed Figaro in The Barber of Seville, and he looked completely at home with it.
The Flower Duet was also very good, but Largo al factotum was the moment that stayed with me.
My original seat was beside a young family of five with three boys under seven. It was clearly a well-intentioned family outing, but one of the boys was three and had equally clear ideas about remaining quiet during the performance. It is hard to be mad at a three-year-old for being three, although opera was proving to be a difficult setting for all of us.
At intermission, a sympathetic usher quietly moved me to the front row.
Suddenly I was about ten feet from the stage.
At that distance, opera changes. The sound is still the obvious thing, but you also see the mechanics of it: breath, facial expression, timing between singers, and the physical work behind phrases that sound effortless from farther back. There is much less separation between performer and audience. For a program built from familiar pieces, that closeness made them feel newly alive.
There was something slightly absurd, and wonderful, about the progression: beginning the evening beside a restless three-year-old and ending it close enough to the stage to watch the singers work.
By about nine I was back at the hotel.
Before Sydney Wakes Up
I don’t run much so it’s not a stretch that my favorite run anywhere in the world is in Sydney.
When I have the opportunity, I leave the hotel while dawn is only beginning to hint at the horizon and head down toward The Rocks. At that hour the route belongs to a different city. The daytime traffic is nowhere to be seen, and Millers Point is particularly good before Sydney wakes up.
I work my way through The Rocks, up Nurses Walk and toward the Harbour Bridge, climbing the steps onto the span across from the Glenmore.
The objective is not distance or pace. It is timing.
I try to reach somewhere near mid-span as dawn breaks. The bridge gives a different perspective on a city I otherwise know mostly from ground level: the harbour opening beneath me, the Opera House off to one side and the CBD gradually acquiring definition as the light comes up.
On September 29, cloud on the horizon initially made the sunrise look unpromising. Then the sun found openings through it.
From the bridge I watched shafts of light spread out from behind the clouds—the literal effect behind the slightly overused phrase god rays. From up there the description felt justified. Bright bands came through the cloud layer and reached across the harbour while much of the city remained in the softer blue-grey light of early morning.
I stopped.
That pause at mid-span is part of the run anyway. There seems little point in arranging to be on the Harbour Bridge at dawn and then treating it as a split time.
Eventually I doubled back.
The return is what makes the route work. I come back through Millers Point and The Rocks toward the water, then follow Circular Quay around the harbour. By then Sydney is beginning to wake. Ferries are moving. Cafés are opening. The first commuters are appearing.
Then comes what I think of as the victory lap: around the Opera House itself.
Less than twelve hours earlier I had been inside listening to Rossini from about ten feet away. Now I was running around the outside of the same building in the first light of morning.
For a landmark that has been photographed almost into abstraction, the Opera House remains remarkably resistant to becoming ordinary. Its geometry changes as you move around it; from one angle it is the familiar collection of white sails, from another a set of tiled shells, concrete ribs and surprisingly massive structural forms. Running around it gives you all of those perspectives in a few minutes.
That was enough running.
Breakfast, Coffee, Airport
I finished with breakfast at Rossini's at Australia Square, then a flat white at Batch on Pitt Street before the pickup to the airport.
By then the city was fully awake and the layover was effectively over.
That may be what I liked most about these twenty-four hours. None of it felt like an itinerary assembled to extract maximum value from Sydney. I went back to the Art Gallery and discovered a research library beneath it. I ate kangaroo at an Italian restaurant built around grain milled on site. I went to a familiar Opera House and heard a young baritone tear through Figaro, then unexpectedly found myself ten feet from the stage. The next morning I ran a route I have done before, only to find the harbour producing a sunrise I had never seen before.
After twenty-five years and more than a hundred flights to Australia, Sydney is no longer novel to me.
That is different from saying I have finished discovering it.