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In the interwar years of the 20th century Australian cities began to be reshaped by the impact of modernism upon architecture, engineering and town planning. Innovative approaches to urban design coupled with new materials and construction technologies and the need to adapt city spaces to new modes of transportation, communication and entertainment, produced profound changes in the built environment. For residents of Sydney, and indeed for Australians generally, the most obvious and significant manifestation of modernity in this period was the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge between 1923 and 1932. The bridge builders harnessed the technologies and skills of modern engineering to produce the world?s longest suspension bridge, and with this grand gesture Sydney began to assume its modern form. As travel writer Jan Morris has written, the Harbour Bridge is, "one of the most talismanic structures of the earth, and then by far the most striking thing ever built in Australia. At that moment, I think, contemporary Sydney began-perhaps definitive Sydney? (24).
This paper examines the Harbour Bridge as it has been represented in a series of (mostly) recent novels that focus on the period of its construction. Contemporary interest in the Bridge will be contrasted with the actual period of its construction when, despite its very obvious appeal to visual artists, the Bridge was all but ignored by writers of fiction. It will be argued that these recent novels look back at the construction of the Bridge through a postmodern lens, at a time when the Bridge has transcended its roots in functional interwarmodernity and been reinvented as a centrepiece of Australia?s most visible and theatrical urban space.
That the Bridge has evolved in this way is testament not only to its impact on the physical environment of Sydney and its Harbour, but also to the powerful emotional pull that it almost immediately acquired. Through a remarkable confluence of geography and history the Bridge was built at the very place where the nation?s non-indigenous settlement commenced, and in the space where post-settlement Australia is most visible to the world. Of course Sydney Harbour, and more particularly Sydney Cove, as they existed before the construction of the Bridge were hardly emotionally neutral spaces. The Harbour had held great significance to the Eora people...