100 Years of Sydney, Australia – 100th Anniversary – Centenary

1888 was Sydney’s big birthday party for a hundred years of British settlement — fireworks, processions, a Centennial Park carved out of the old Lachlan Swamp paddocks, and enough commemorative china and newspaper specials to bury a sideboard. This gallery is that mood in pictures: the city dressing itself as a finished colonial capital, not the bark camp Fowles had been arguing with forty years earlier. Say centenary of settlement, not “100 years of Australia in the Federation sense - the Commonwealth is still thirteen years away.

What the celebrations papered over is part of the story too. Aboriginal Sydney was not invited to toast the anniversary; the official script was progress, wool, and steam. For this page you don’t need a thesis — just don’t let the title slide into 1901. Keep Centennial Park, the late-1880s exhibition culture, and the difference between this set and the 1938 one-hundred-and-fiftieth material elsewhere on the blog.

Use the images as a scrapbook of how Sydneysiders were taught to see their own past in the boom decade before the 1890s crash. Caption what you can identify; leave the rest as a centenary-era view rather than inventing photographers.

100 Years Of Sydney Australia - 100th Anniversary - Centenary