Recalled to life

With our brief walk through The Rocks complete, Road Scholar had nothing more planned for us on this, our first full day in Sydney. This seemed an odd choice to me at the time. Most of the group had arrived Monday morning and the previous day’s breezy bus tour to Bondi Beach that culminated with a ferry ride across the harbor was our only other introduction to the city. I don’t think any of the 60, 70, or 80 somethings in the group had any intention of revisiting Sydney’s famous urban beach even if it had been closer than the eight kilometers or so from the central business district (CBD). Road Scholar was kind enough to provide us with prepaid transit passes that allowed us greater mobility had anyone opted to wander a bit. Although J had given us a handout with suggested places to visit, the timing of our lone free day seemed a bit premature to me.

Those of you who have followed me on some of my previous trips know that I enjoy visiting older large urban cemeteries and I thought, given Sydney’s relative youth as an urban center, a visit to either Waverley or Rookwood Cemetery might provide an interesting comparison with some of those I’d visited elsewhere.

When I’d announced my intention the previous day, J didn’t seem particularly impressed with either (perhaps this was her honest assessment or perhaps it was because both were rather distant from the city center and not easily accessed by public transportation). Based on her advice, I’d done some additional research before going to sleep Monday night and found a closer more urban option – Camperdown Cemetery that had been established in 1848 and, for 20 years, served as Sydney’s main general cemetery. D, one of my fellow travelers, had expressed an interest in joining me so we would spend the afternoon together beginning at the nearby

Royal Botanic Garden.

(Perfect light and promises.)

I’ll start with this confession. D and I spent much more time walking around the garden than we did in it.

The orange highlight on the map above shows the path we took as nearly as I can recall it. We might have started a bit farther to the west or to the north but you get the idea. Somewhere along the way we stopped for gelato (I got pistachio. D’s treat.) and when we got to the general vicinity of the Fleet Steps, I took this photo of the two striking structures gracing Sydney Harbour.

The circuitous rout had several purposes. First, it was a lovely day with a gentle breeze coming off Port Jackson. Second, it was a way to work up an appetite for lunch and help our bodies adjust to the new time zone. Third, I wanted to find Mrs Macquarie’s Chair – a spot I’d read about on Atlas Obscura. The view was lovely but not so different from those we’d had on our way there that it inspired a photo. I did, however, snap a shot of D perched atop it admiring something above her.

Eventually, we found our way to the Botanic House – a restaurant in the center of the Royal Botanic Garden – that’s overseen by celebrity chef Luke Nguyen. Nguyen was born in a refugee camp in Thailand in 1978 after his parents fled Vietnam by boat. A year later the family settled in Cabramatta about 40 kilometers west of Sydney where his parents ran a restaurant for 15 years. This experience served as the inspiration for Nguyen to become a chef.

He currently owns eight restaurants in Australia, Vietnam, and Hong Kong. The Botanic House has two serving areas – downstairs and upstairs. Its website describes them as follows, “Upstairs, relish in modern Asian cuisine crafted by Ambassador Chef Luke Nguyen, while downstairs offers a more laid-back experience at Farm Cove Eatery.” D and I opted for the upstairs modern Asian cuisine presented in a five course tasting menu.

I’d told our server that I didn’t want anything with beef or pork and when the chef forgot and unintentionally sent out the beef short ribs, he sent an additional vegetarian dish by way of apology. Of course, even though I’d had plenty to eat, I had to eat the extra dish because I didn’t want to insult him. It was a not inexpensive but wonderful lunch and would rank among the best meals I had in Australia. After lunch we were off to

Camperdown Cemetery.

Since J had discouraged me from visiting Waverley Cemetery, my hasty late night research Monday led me to decide to visit Camperdown Cemetery in the Sydney suburb of Newton. The two principal factors in the decision were its description as the only surviving cemetery of the three main early cemeteries in Sydney and its relative proximity (about 3 kilometers) from our hotel though it was twice that far from our starting point at Botanic House. (The other two cemeteries George Street Sydney and Devonshire Street Sydney are now the sites of the Sydney Town Hall and Central Railway Station respectively.)

After its establishment in 1848, Camperdown became the main burial ground for the Church of England in Sydney. This was about the extent of my research but I deemed it sufficiently interesting to prompt a visit.

We’d already done a good bit of walking leading up to lunch so we used our transit cards to take the tram part way there. (Though we’d also use the bus to take us back to dinner and our hotel, we’d end the day having walked nearly 18 kilometers.) As has often been the case in my travels, we hesitated at several points along the way because of my slow international internet connection and the sometimes unnecessary specificity of the steps in directions provided by Google Maps.

We managed to find our way there but when we arrived, I was underwhelmed by most aspects of the grounds and surprised by one in particular. Had I devoted a bit more time in my research the previous night, it would have tempered my expectations (but I was still adjusting to a 15 or 16 hour time difference so cut me some slack!).

I would have learned, for example, that “the present area of the cemetery is now substantially less than when people were buried.” I would have also learned that, unlike most of the cemeteries I’ve visited, Camperdown is no longer a working cemetery. In fact, the final burial took place in either 1948 or 1956. Or discovered that Richard O’Connell, the great grandson of William Bligh (the same Captain Bligh of the HMS Bounty and who served for a brief time as governor of New South Wales) was among those interred there.

The Cemetery has an understated and, to me, unprepossessing entry and among the first graves we saw was this one.

Although it has at least one memorial commemorating the Dunbar and Catherine Adamson shipwrecks, the fact that no one has been buried at Camperdown for more than half a century probably contributes to its rather rundown and somewhat disordered state.

The most surprising aspect was that it has become something of a dog park for the neighborhood

and has been such for long enough that no one I asked had any recollection of how or when it made this transformation.

It had gotten late enough and D and I grown tired enough that we opted to take the bus back into the city center. We were also still sated enough from lunch that we chose to have a light dinner at Spice Alley – an interesting conglomeration of mainly Asian casual street food type eateries that I’d rate as certainly worth a visit.

It’s a busy day tomorrow as we’ll visit Taronga Zoo, tour the Opera House, and take in a performance of Sunset Boulevard. As promised in the previous post, here’s where you can see a few additional photos from the day.