Walking Sydney: walk #3 The Rocks, Walsh Bay & Circular Quay with Gail Jones

Opera House sails © Michael Daly

The third walk in Walking Sydney: Fifteen walks with a city's writers is with novelist Gail Jones among the crooked streets of the Rocks, under the rumbling Harbour Bridge, down to the wooden piers at Walsh Bay, looping back to finish under the sails of Sydney's most famous building. Present on our walk are literary antecedents: Kenneth Slessor and his deep time of the Harbour, Virginia Woolf and her invented errands taking her 'street haunting' through London, Joseph Conrad at anchor on the western Quay, Walt Whitman's 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry' in which he communes with the commuters of the years to come: 'you that shall cross from shore to shore/ years hence are more to me, and more in my/ meditations, than you might suppose'. Gail's city is a place of rapturous aesthetic encounter and a portal to time in all its dimensions.

Read more in Walking Sydney: Fifteen walks with a city's writers, out September 1.