Smoko

Heading across the Sydney Harbour Bridge the first station your train will come to is Milsons Point, which serves the small community perched on the very edge of that shore of the harbour, facing south, across the water to Circular Quay and one of the prettier views anywhere. This station is on the bridge, in fact, on the northern approach to the span, so you have not yet left the structure which was opened in 1932. And the approach to the bridge continues for a few hundred metres beyond Milsons Point, all the way to the next station, North Sydney, the centre of a small CBD of its own. The train line is elevated between the two stations and passengers pass quite close to a row of apartment blocks built not long after the bridge was completed. You can see in through some windows if you are that way inclined, which some of us are. The other day a woman was seen to be leaning from one of these windows, elbows resting on the frame of her open kitchen window as she smoked a cigarette and watched three lorikeets pecking at the seed she had placed in a little bowl on the brick ledge. The scene was unutterably charming.