Responding to Sydney

so, yesterday was the trip around the rocks and then the ferry ride to watson's bay to see the gap and the heads of sydney harbor.  there is a strange mingling between history and nature and urban.  the rocks are right there in the heart of the city, right on the harbor and are very much a part of the urban landscape.  yet there was this transposition between the modern landscape and the fragments of the history of the place.  i seemed to be very aware of the layers and layers of what came before all day yesterday.  history of the land, history of the people interacting with the land, the stories that make up a location.

there was a poignancy that was palpable with each of the spaces.  not even really knowing any of the specific stories, there was a heavy sense of something having come before, people interacting with the space that i found interesting.  i was thinking how similar australia and the us are in that sense, that the history of the place adds so much to experience since there are such varied and unusual pasts for both countries being settled by outsiders, colonized and developing into something different.