Life Outside the Law
AUSTRALIA is Welcoming:
From Urban to Outback (Part 2 of 2) BY Hon. David E. Cain, Ret.
With seashores and nearby mountains, skyscrapers and architectural icons, spacious inner-city parklands and botanical gardens and national parks to the north and west, it is easy to see why Sydney attracts more than 15 million visitors a year.
The British colonized Australia in 1788. The oldest shopping center in the world, David Jones, was established in Sydney in 1838. In 1888, the City Hall was built, and expansion has been rapid ever since. Metropolitan Sydney’s population is now at five million (more than the entire population of New Zealand). The total number living in Australia is 25 million and 90 percent live within 60 miles of the coast.
But the future may be clouded by the catastrophic wildfires that have spread across hundreds of miles of New South Wales southeast of Sydney toward the Tasman Sea. During our visit, there was talk of a morethan-two-year drought and spotty wildfires, but nothing like what has happened since.
A visit to the Blue Mountains, about two hours west of Sydney, was part of the last leg of our train ride that began four days earlier in Perth on the West Coast some 3,000 miles away. In the Blue Mountains National Park, we took the Scenic Skyway with its glass-bottom cable cars from one 1,000-foot cliff to another, where we boarded the Scenic Railway that features a 52-degree
60 | Columbus Bar L aw yers Quarterly Spring 2020
