Come now, TripAdvisor — your “things to do” in Parramatta are mostly, on inspection, not in Parramatta at all. It has the air of a shrug: nothing here, try somewhere else. Whether that’s a slight or simply unfamiliarity, I’m not sure, but it deserves a fresher look than that.
In fairness, what we saw was, like a lot of city centres, largely concrete and glass — distinctly corporate. There may well be hidden corners, but we weren’t in explorer mode: it was past 33 degrees, which is emphatically not walking-tour weather. We arrived by bus and made straight for Westfield Parramatta, because air conditioning was survival, then caught a bus to the ferry terminal and took the cruise back to Circular Quay. The right call, honestly.
A small curiosity: the ferry nominally runs hourly, but there’s a two-hour gap late in the morning, because at low tide the Parramatta River simply becomes too shallow for the boat to reach the wharf. The timetable, in other words, answers to the moon. On a cooler day the riverside stretch would be well worth the time — walking or cycling the river path and ferrying back looks like exactly the kind of thing that ought to be at the top of that “things to do” list.
The glass towers are hiding something old. Parramatta was founded in 1788, the same year as Sydney Cove, when the young colony’s poor coastal soil drove the settlers upriver to farm — which makes it one of the oldest European settlements in Australia. Old Government House, out in Parramatta Park, is the country’s oldest surviving public building and now part of a World Heritage listing. The name itself is older still: Burramatta, from the Darug, is usually translated as “the place where the eels lie down.” Not, it turns out, a town with nothing to see.