Book

No Second Attempt:

by Phil Charles

The Men Who Built the Sydney Harbour Bridge Out Over Open Water and Closed It in a Single Night, 1923 to 1932 In August 1930, two halves of a steel arch hung out over Sydney Harbour from opposite shores. Each was held back by 128 cables anchored in tunnels cut into the sandstone, and nothing stood under either of them. They had to meet in the middle, and there was no way to try it first. No Second Attempt tells how the Sydney Harbour Bridge was actually built. The author is a civil engineer with fifty years in the profession who went back to the record. The story begins in a government drawing office, where John Bradfield had spent years arguing for a crossing nobody would pay for. It follows the contract to an English firm whose London designers, under Ralph Freeman, drew every member of a 1,650-foot arch that Sydney would approve but never design. It goes 200 miles down the coast to Moruya, where masons from Aberdeen and Italy dressed granite in a town built for the job. It goes to Milsons Point, where hundreds of homes came down to make way for the workshops. And it goes out onto the steel, where four-man rivet gangs drove six million rivets by hand. Lawrence Ennis, the director of construction, had to put up a structure nobody could test until it was standing. Then comes the night of 19 August 1930. The cold opened the gap at the crown again, the cables were let out six inches at a time, and at ten o'clock the pins met. True story of the jobs that built Australia, told by an engineer who has read the record.

Publication date: October 3, 2026