Although it is not possible, once you have set eyes on Sydney Harbour, not to want to spend the rest of your life there, taking the ferry from one shore to the other – a Flying Dutchman with a happy ending – we had made a solemn and binding agreement at the outset that on this visit at least we would not let it steal our hearts. It could caress and flatter us for a few days, while we unwound, but it was not otherwise to be allowed into our affections. This was the Australia we knew, the Australia of our separate pineapple-requiring pasts, and we did not want to have it stamping quite so soon on the still impressionable wax of our more recent experiences.

For my part I was content just to put my feet up and watch the Bridge. I say watch, not look at, because the Bridge is no static spectacle; unlike the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building or any other of those irresistibly banal landmarks whose chief attraction is their vulgar height, the Harbour Bridge is never still; just when you think you have it pinned, understand its angles and believe you know where it must be in relation to the rest of the glowing city, it rears up at you from an entirely unexpected and in truth entirely impossible location. That’s what it did to us as we drove in from the north along the Pacific Highway: it reared quite suddenly, rose and arched and swung, and then just as suddenly disappeared. When we next saw it, it was somewhere else, no longer showing us the grandeur of its span but its steep humped back, like the last and most terrifying run of a roller coaster.

Sydney Harbour would still be magnificent without the Bridge, but it is the Bridge which transforms its beauties from the merely actual to the symbolic. It joins and unifies and dominates and over-arches in the spirit of its own design – not stylish, not streamlined, not at all sleek or sophisticated, but spectacularly functional, a lumbering artisan somehow learnt in the ways of necromancy.