Our tour guide, Maggie, also had a story. She wore a wide-brimmed hat and carried a water bottle in a red leatherette pouch on her hip. I must be getting old because I found myself wondering where she'd got the (very practical) pouch from. I have reached the stage of life where practicality wins over aesthetics every time.
"My father was born in 1880" she told me. "He was much older than my mother, his second wife. He came as ship's engineer on a trade vessel built in Leith, but he was from Liverpool originally, from, what's it called? Totstext? Tostex?"
"Toxteth. You're a scouser" I replied.
"Am I? Is that what you call them?"
It's odd when people don't understand common British words or the cultural things you take for granted about life in Britain. How can you not know what a scouser is? A barm cake? An aubergine (which they call eggplant)?
"You know, I went to Liverpool to search out my heritage. We thought, well, it's on the river, so we'd better stay on the river. We booked a hotel on the river Mersey. My God, there was barbed wire. When we said we were going to, you know, Tox-teth, the owner of the hotel pulled a funny face and my husband decided we'd better not go there. Then we met a couple and they said "it's not that bad" and they took pity on us, gave us a ride there in their car. The woman even got my Dad's birth certificate for me and sent it here".
The walking tour of the rocks is worth every penny. It's full of tourists, of course, including the obligatory American man in shorts and long socks, the sort who interrupts the tour guide to ask for a recommendation for lunch (which he did, stating "I've got unlimited money"). He had a dull, lifeless face. He looked as though he never got excited about anything in his life, I pitied Maggie having to think up ideas to tickle his culinary fancy.
It might be touristy, but you discover the subtleties of a city that would otherwise pass you by. Maggie obviously loves her job. She has the air of a school teacher but doesn't seem tired of imparting the same stories over again. She told how the Cadigal aborigines (the tribe that inhabited Sydney Cove) were confused by he arrival of these white men on eleven ships. They'd never seen white men and they'd never seen anyone wearing clothes. They thought perhaps they were ghosts or huge floating islands. It must have been incredibly scary.
The cobbles in the photograph came from England. They were used as ballast in the bottom of the first fleet of ships to arrive at Sydney Cove. Without Maggie, we'd never have noticed them. The building is an old warehouse inspired by similar buildings in Amsterdam. We heard about the development and naming of roads, about the bubonic plage at the beginning of the 20th century and about the "larrikins" who hung about the narrow lanes "causing a ruck" and carrying socks full of wet sand to use as weapons. Life was unimaginably tough in Sydney 200 years ago.
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