The city in the background is both familiar and distant. Some buildings are recognisable, like the turrets of Mark Foy’s department store on Elizabeth Street, now the Downing Centre courthouse. Other details belong to a city long past: triple-storey commercial buildings with awnings and iron lace, walls covered in painted advertisements for tea and tobacco companies, cars with spoked wheels and canvas canopies.
As the album continues, the construction of the tunnels slowly progresses until a concrete shell encases them. Hyde Park is reinstated, ahead of the opening of the line in 1926. By the time the Sun was predicting the ‘beach skyscrapers’ and ‘wireless telephony’ of the future city, trains had been moving through the newly built tunnels for two years.
As remote as these images of Sydney can seem in sketches, plans and photographs, they are connected to everyday experiences in the present-day city. Although a network of moving walkways was never built, the Domain Express Footway still conveys people to and fro. Hundreds of trains carrying thousands of passengers travel through the City Circle tunnels daily, while up above a new cycle of rapid change works to reshape the city.
Vanessa Berry is a Sydney writer and artist, whose latest book is Mirror Sydney (Giramondo, 2017). The Library has acquired the original artwork for her book.
This article first appeared in SL magazine, Winter 2018.