Sydney Harbour Bridge design by Norman Selfe, c 1903

Watercolour

ML 1401

Norman Selfe (1839 –1911) was an engineer, naval architect, inventor urban visionary and Sydney identity.  Decades before the existing Harbour Bridge was built, Norman Selfe proposed a steel cantilever bridge across the harbour with its northern foot in McMahons Point. Never realised due to financial constraints the watercolour is a reminder of what might have been and that harbour crossings and imagining the future of the city has been a continuing obsession.