Each week, Roy and I travel around the country side, looking for somewhere interesting to visit and introduce our online friends to. We travel to all sorts of places and all sorts of areas, and most of this travel is done by road. Australia is a big country and being able to move between interesting places is very important, but how often do we actually think about the roads which we use, or where they began. Well, Roy and I wanted to find out, and this week we want to get you thinking about it too, so we are going to visit Macquarie Place and show you the Macquarie Obelisk.
The Macquarie Obelisk is a big, sandstone statue in Macquarie Place Park on the corner of Bridge and Loftus Streets, and many of you who live in Sydney have probably walked past it without sparing it a thought. Yet it is the oldest monument to Australia's colonisation by the Europeans! Designed by the important colonial architect, Frances Greenway, the obelisk was ordered by Governor Macquarie and built in 1818 out of locally quarried sandstone.
So, the question now is what exactly is an obelisk and what was the point of building one in Sydney in 1818? An obelisk is a tall, thin, four sided monument which has a pyramid at the very top. They have been used for thousands of years, and some still standing date back to the time of the Egyptians. Usually, they are used to record important historical dates or events, or to commemorate important people. Although the Macquarie Obelisk commemorates Governor Macquarie in its name, it was not built simply to commemorate this colonial Governor. It has a much more important reason for being. As its inscription records, "This Obelisk was erected in Macquarie Place A. D. 1818 to record that all the Public Roads Leading to the interior of the Colony are measured from it".
When we travel to various places, most of us like to know approximately how far away that place is so that we can work out approximately how long it will take us to get there and plan for the trip. We even have devices like GPS's to help us work out how far away our destination is from where we are. In 1818 though, they had none of these things and it was impossible for people to say 'Parramatta is exactly . . . away from where I am currently standing'. Distances could be measured, but they had to be measured from a specific place. In 1818 the obelisk was built to be that place, and it records the distance of some of the important colonial roads at the time, including roads to Parramatta, Bathurst, Windsor and Botany Bay.