Mrs Macquarie's view

Lady Elizabeth Macquarie - wife of Governor Lachlan Macquarie - used to sit on her convict-carved stone chair, enjoying the best view of Sydney Harbour.

She is said to have made a point of watching ships arriving from England. Maybe a bit like me taking a look at the two 'Canberra class landing helicopter dock (LHD) ships' at nearby Garden Island.

They are said to have been built in Spain, and are being finished off in Melbourne and here in Sydney. But they don't half look like one we saw being built in southern India last year. There had been a strict ban on photography around the shipyard there, and now I see why. The Spaniards contracted the job out to India and don't want anyone to know!

So what do we want our LHDs to do for us? In the words of militaryfactory.com  it's 'to strengthen the RAN inventory against growing regional threats (such as that posed by China)'. You could probably paraphrase that as 'so we could fight a war against China', but put that simply it sounds as stupid as it probably is. That's the navy for you, I guess. There again, watching the news today, it starts to look like we really have been given a role in some geopolitical adventure folly in the South China Sea by our American masters. The Macquaries would have been quite at home with geopolitical adventures, of course. That's why they were here to start with.

What else have we got for Mrs Macquarie to look at? We've got an endless deluge of lunchtime joggers, some of them just running up and down a flight of steps for their whole lunch break. We've got the world's most photographed opera house and bridge. We've got all the tourists photographing them.









So she's got a colourful and lively place to sit and pass the time.