Dictionary of Sydney

Last year I was a small contributor to the new online Dictionary of Sydney. From all accounts it was a mammoth task but the dictionary is now available as a valuable source of information for those of us who like Sydney, those who live there, and those from Melbourne who say Sydney is a “nice place to visit …………but a bit far out of town”

For my part I spent two enlightening years working in Sydney 1968/69 straight after graduation from RMIT, and immediately before I moved to London for quite a few years. It was during my time in Sydney that I met one of my life mentors, a Canadian designer who earlier had been a rather humanitarian USAF jet fighter pilot in the Korean conflict. (another interesting story for another day). Gino also had the paperwork to fly a small Cessna so he took a few studio colleagues up and over the Sydney CBD, including myself. It was on that day whilst flying north over George Street that I took a series of photographs on my new Nikon SLR. Some years later I had the images professionally “stitched” together to create an interesting panorama of Darling Harbour Sydney, as it was in 1969.

Anyone interested can view the photograph on the Dictionary of Sydney website http://www.dictionaryofsydney.org/ then type in Darling Harbour 1969 in the search facility,
Alternatively it is also on my son’s photographic website www.filedimage.com and a large print lurks somewhere on a wall in the Sydney Town Hall.

Geoffrey Putnam
Melbourne Campus