Mark Bowyer

Our independent travel guide to Sydney Harbour Bridge (VIDEO) celebrates the vision and ambition that built the bridge - while exploring the complicated political moment from which it sprang. Work on Sydney Harbour Bridge began during the post WWI boom years of the early 1920s. In the middle of construction, the New York stock exchange crashed. The Great Depression hit the Australian economy especially hard. At its peak, unemployment in Australia may have hit 30%.

Part III in our video series, America in Vietnam - a travel guide, dives into the Buddhist Crisis of 1963 and the violent coup that ended the long rule of South Vietnam’s founding president, America’s man, Ngo Dinh Diem, in November 1963. Our series is designed for history-focused travellers interested in exploring the places behind major historical events. In this case, we’re focused on 1963 and two former capitals of Vietnam; Hue and Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City).

Visitors to Sydney flock to the Circular Quay to admire our most celebrated icons - the Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, or to jump on a ferry to Manly. There are colonial-era buildings and a few statues here but there’s little that interprets the area’s complicated history. This is where Australia’s most important colonisation stories begin. The Rocks is where the invasion and dispossession of a continent inhabited for an incomprehensible 60,000 years begins.