We overcome our fear of sharks, dress up for the opera and somehow get a taste of Paris in Sydney ahead of WorldPride 2023

Words Jamie Tabberer

Beautiful Bondai beach

TOURISM AUSTRALIA

Hundreds of teeth — rows of them! — glisten as 11 brawny bodies in various shades of blue-grey twist and flex with predatory agility. No, I’m not cage-diving in the sublime waters of the world’s second most shark-infested country — although I now want to! — but inspecting the life-sized models at Sharks, a blockbuster exhibit in Sydney’s Australian Museum, on display into 2023. The oldest museum in Oz, established in 1827 and home to 21 million cultural and scientific objects, is an authoritative introduction to the land Down Under, treating both its oceanic and land-dwelling emblems with great respect. Before my trip, Attitude’s travel editor may have hammed up the fearsome reputation of this continent’s creatures — gaslighting this writer into thinking a bite of some sort was imminent — but the museum display assures me that, on average, you can count the people killed by snakes, crocodiles and sharks in Oz every year on one hand. (Granted, a swimmer was killed by a shark in spring 2022, but for perspective, that was Sydney’s first fatal shark attack in 60 years.) The space is also home to First Nationsled and informed exhibitions. The museum’s website states that it “respects and acknowledges the Gadigal people as the First Peoples and Traditional Custodians of the land and waterways on which the Museum stands.” The ‘respectful acknowledgement’ of space is a sentiment I will hear many times during my visit to Australia. (A key tool in this respect is the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies Map of Indigenous Australia, which aims to represent all the language, tribal or nation groups of Indigenous Australia.)