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New South Wales, ACT and Jervis Bay Territory

Sydney

The Sydney metropolitan area has 3.828 million residents1 and is the capital of New South Wales, Australia. The city centers on a drowned river called Port Jackson and extends south beyond a similar inlet called Botany Bay. Its Opera House is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the city is a popular tourist destination. Sydney is an important grain and coal port, and has one of the nation's busiest airports.

The tallest building is Citigroup Centre, a 50 story office tower. Having the same number of stories, but shorter, is MLC Centre, the tallest reinforced concrete building in the world when it was first constructed. The geometry of the 41 story Aurora Place avoids parallel lines, and the building's outer curves are intended to echo those of the Opera House. Another landmark is the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the world's largest (but not the longest) steel arch bridge, nicknamed the 'Coathanger.'2
YearPopulationPolitical entity
1900 CE478,0003United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
2000 CE4,086,0004Australia

mid-ground white building with shell-like roofs; foreground wake of a ship; background: sky mostly, a bit of trees right of the Opera House and a distant industrial cranes to its left
Sydney Opera House

Historical maps

map showing part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, 1900 CE

map showing part of Australia, 2000 CE

Footnotes

1. Calculation for 2013 in world-gazetteer.com, accessed 4/20/2013.
2. Information about buildings and the bridge comes from Emporis.com, accessed 5/4/2013.
3. Tertius Chandler, Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth, 2nd ed. (The Edwin Mellen Press, 1987), "Tables of World's Largest Cities". From 1900 to the present Sydney has been the largest city in New South Wales.
4. Official estimate from world-gazetteer.com, accessed 4/20/2013.