Views of Sydney Cove. East side & West side.

Pair of famous c.19th hand coloured lithographic panoramas of Sydney Cove, (present day Circular Quay) published by William Dymock in 1888 during the celebrations of 100 years of colonial settlement. These panoramas were originally issued as aquatints by John Eyre in 1814.

Four views of Sydney, taken in the year 1810, have been published by Mr. William Dymock… Sydney itself, although it straggled over a large area, resembled a group of villages, which had established them- selves upon a number of picturesque eminences overlooking the waters of the harbour. The high land on the west side of the cove was surmounted by a couple of windmills, one of which was enclosed, for the sake of greater security, by the stone walls of the citadel; and there was a battery on Dawes’s Point, near which a sloop of war was anchored. Government-house was an unpretentious two-story edifice, built of brick, and surrounded by a verandah. Circular Quay was a green slope, and large gardens running down to the water’s edge occupied the site of what are now busy wharves….

These views, while making no pretension to be regarded as works of art, possess an interest which will increase with lapse of time, for the Sydney of the year 2000, it may be safely predicted, will be as unlike the Sydney of 1810 as the London depicted by Hollar is unlike the London of Queen Victoria.

[The Argus (Melbourne), Saturday 30 August 1884, p. 9.]