A few views of Sydney, Australia in April 1992 (B), including train views, etc. Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/ / lylehsaxon tokyoartmusic.blogspot.com/
This video is so nostalgic for me - 92 was the last year I lived in Sydney, before moving to QLD. I've always wanted to move back but I doubt I could ever afford it now.
You know - I'm really glad I took my video camera on this trip - these are the only videos I have from outside Japan at that time and they help piece the era together for me now. In both Japan and Australia in 1992, there were still elements from the 50's, 60's and 70's in the cities... much less so now.
You would barely recognize it now :-( by the way I love your videos of Tokyo pretty much may favorite city to visit and its really interesting seeing your point of view on my home town.
You did a great job of capturing the time. This is the Sydney I Love and miss. I left in ‘99 to try break the funk I was in but always intended coming back. Unfortunately I’ve come to realise this Sydney is gone.
@@tomspiers2087 to many high rise apartments, sydney looks like a bowl of metallic and glass nachos now, its ugly and overcrowded, no sunlight on the streets :(
Made me cry, such memories. I was a 21 year old on a working holiday. Lived in cheap digs Bayswater Road, Rushcutters Bay Dec 1991, I was working in Strand Arcade for The Body Shop. That park was my sunbathing spot 😁 on the 6th April 1992 I had returned from travelling, lived Rose Bay in house share and worked in Pitt Street for Select Appointments. Can still smell those trains 🙈 loved Grant Goldmans announcements at stations. Had a ball that year. I ended up living in Oz 1997 to 2004, became Australian Citizen. Lived here in UK since then. Can't believe it's nearly 30 years. I had seen lot of changes when I lived there 2nd time around and it's unrecognisable in many places. Thanks so much for sharing.
Kings Cross was a genuine red light district. Now it has been gentrified with many apartment towers constructed over the last ten years to replace the tourist hotels and the boarding houses that provided inexpensive long term accommodation.
So peaceful and easy to go to Sydney I remember being 4 years old in 92 and driving into the city with my parents who just parked on a Side street and then took us to the powerhouse museum - then catching the train and monorail around the city with ease. So gorgeous to Sydney used to be
Thank you for posting this video. Its strange... Sydney back in the 90's felt vibrant and exciting to me. I always felt like there was something to see and do in Sydney, which gave me a buzz of excitement. I don't feel the same way today about Sydney, but watching this video brought back that feeling somehow. Its probably nostalgia and a yearning to be young again, but I really do believe something about Sydney has been lost to time.
I think I know exactly what you mean. What it is, is that to communicate with people in 1992, to see what was going on, etc., you had to *go* somewhere. Now people give whatever is coming in on their smartphone top priority and so 1) they're never where they are - they're tuned into distant friends sending them things on their smartphones, and 2) Since they never really focus on anything other than their smartphones, there is no need to go out at all. People have become cyborgs. At the same time, offices have become vertical fortresses with stern guards looking suspiciously at people passing by, much of retail is done by delivery, etc. Actually, while I like technology basically, I think we are living in a pretty rotten era. Hopefully things will get better from here out.....
I think you hit the nail on the head re: nostalgia and yearning to be young again. I doubt there are many people who, mental or physical trauma aside, don't yearn for their younger days. Neural connections are still developing rapidly in the late teens due to all the novel experiences. Whether it's 1892, or 2092, someone will always express a desire to return to the years when they were younger. Nothing inherently special about 1992, unless one happened to be growing up during this time. And how could there be? It's implausible to think that the 90s, or any epoch one cares to identify - is it 1985-1994? Or 1950-1959? Maybe it's 1897-1911? - could be special relative to all the others in which humans have lived.
I was 17 in 1992 and this video felt like I was truly back in those days. Sydney was a great place and bizarre listening to those background conversations and old TV commercials. Me and my friends would hop on a train to the city after school, I remember having only $5 but could buy a few things compared to now Sydney has become so so expensive. We went to Brashs records on Pitt street, then hang out at McDonalds and walk around Pitt street mall. Nice seeing people without smart phones.
Agreed, HOYTS and Event Cinemas would have Aladdin (1992) cartoon, Home Alone 2, Sister Act, Ferngully The Last Rainforest, Alien 3 and many more in cinemas back then.
This video really stirred memories for me.I was 19/20 and life had been pretty awesome since I arrived in Sydney 89.Little did I know my life was going to change forever.Some bad luck and a poor choice or two and things were beginning to spiral out of control.I can’t believe it’s almost 30 years gone by.I know I shouldn’t but I find myself wondering how different my life might have turned out if it wasn’t for a small succession of occurrences.Truth be known I have no doubt it would have been significantly happier.This encapsulates a beginning and an end of so much.
Cheers Warden Freeman. I’m Okay...still battling. Sometimes it’s hard though knowing that if I’d done things differently I’d be in my Harbourside mansion or wherever I wanted just chilling. Grateful to still be here.
I was 23 and so many places in this video are familiar. You went to the top level of the QVB, why I never managed to do that astounds me. I walked through that building countless times. I went to the level below it (almost the top level) one Xmas around 1983/84 when they had a great Xmas display set up inside.
Glad you caught footage of the huge holes in the ground. They are my abiding memory of Sydney back then and I am amazed by the immense size of the buildings that filled them. Also lovely to see some monorail footage. It was too early for it's time.
Great video thanks so much for sharing. Was in Sydney a couple of months ago and was amazed how much it’s changed in the 8 years since I left there. It’s even more unbelievable how much the place has changed since this film was made over 30 years ago. Great job once again you brought back a lot of memories from my trips there as a young fella 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
This was filmed around the same time I was born in Sydney. Makes me appreciate the buildings, railway system, footpaths and roads I sometimes take for granted during my “boring” daily commute (back when we were commuting). Will be seeing Sydney CBD from a different lens next time I visit.
+adam murdock Thanks for the feedback! Most of the video I took with my Hi8 (analog) cameras was in Japan, but fortunately the cameras were still functioning when I visited Australia in 1992. By 1994 the cameras were dead and I didn't take any more video until 2006.
Fantastic video. I was just a young teenager when this was filmed but have memories of travelling to Sydney in the 90’s. So much has changed now almost 30 years passed. The monorail being gone is just one example. Thanks for sharing this. Inspired to film my own as a time capsule for the next generation. 🙂
Thanks for commenting! I've always felt more motivated to record images in cities, knowing how they keep changing. Looking back on my videos from 30 years ago (I took analog video from 1990-93 - mostly in Japan, with video from a three week trip to Australia my only footage of a country outside Japan), I'm always intrigued by the things I expected to stay the same and changed. For the things I recorded that I knew were going to change, it's just s simple feeling of "Glad I recorded that before it was gone" but for things I didn't expect to change, it's a more complicated feeling....
Thank you so much for putting up such thorough video documentation of Sydney! We really enjoyed the nostalgia as Sydneysiders who grew up here. It was fun playing spot-that-landmark.
Glad you enjoyed it! Australia is the only country outside of Japan that I took video in back then, so these have a special meaning for me in another way. As different as Sydney is from Tokyo, there are definite similar elements of the era.
I worked there in 1992, a young married banker for the CBA. I wasn't thinking right in them days. I knew very little about my environment and I didn't ask any questions. I didn't want to know. Ignorance was bliss and I somewhat miss it. And then one of the big CBA managers told me a secret and it still didn't sink in. It went in one ear and out the other. Youth...what a waste.
I needed some pictures & footage of Aussie cities in the 90's for reference for an art project and I'm so glad this video was recommended to me, because it's tremendously helpful. thank you so much for posting this, Lyle!
I really miss the old train announcements of those days. There was something soothing about that guy's voice. He could have said a train was going to the depth of hell and I would have felt safe going there.
Same thing here in Tokyo - before the recordings, when a human being was making the announcements, there was a feeling of the person making the announcement being on the same journey with you (which they were) which is completely absent with robot voice recordings (a kind of audio cut-and-paste way of lifelessly assembling words for the announcements).
@@lylehsaxon I completely agree. However in this era it was all pre-recorded, but the male voice they used was the same guy they used for years and none of it sounded robotic like they do today. It sounded like your favourite uncle telling you the destinations. You can hear a good example at 1:35. While I have you, I just wanted to thank you for uploading this video. Us Sydneysiders wouldn't have taken a lot of "regular" footage like this because we saw it every day. But now it's so special to see. I hope I can get to Tokyo one of these days!
Thanks for the feedback! At the time, people (in Japan) would often ask me why I was taking video in what they considered to be mundane areas. Thirty years on, the people who lived in those areas express interest in being able to see now what they didn't see any reason to record at the time, but now that that time is gone, the record is perceived as something valuable. I've always thought just about anywhere you go, there's something interesting to record, but I was laughed at a bit at the time. The footage I took in Australia is personally important to me for a variety of reasons. Sydney in particular reminded me in many ways of California (where I lived before coming to Japan). I took analog video from 1990 to 1993 and the only country other than Japan I took video in during that time is Australia. I was there for three weeks and have footage from the major cities on the east coast. About the announcements - what you say about the recordings reminds me of the buses here - where they have had recordings for a long time, but some human being read out each and every sentence, so the humanity is evident. The robot-voices they use now are obviously computer constructions of bits of recordings, so "The next station is" part is exactly the same recording, station after station, day after day, week after week, year after year. Probably torture is too strong of a word, but the announcements (the robot ones here in Tokyo) are intensely irritating to listen to. When a human being was making the announcements, it was comforting.
I left Australia in 2003 and haven't been back since. I want to visit, but at the same time I don't, because I have a perfect image in my mind, and a lot of good memories.
This is such a cool video! Thanks for sharing. I love it when we get a glimpse of the past like this. It's almost humbling to see how far we've come, but it's also a little sad to see that we'll never be able to return to such times... I think thee most important part of now is making the most of it, and preserving what we can for future generations to see as well.
Thanks for the feedback! At the time I had a sense that things were changing quickly and it was important to record many things that were clearly not going to be around for much longer. Most of my footage is of Japan, primarily Tokyo, so the Australia footage is especially important to me now, since I now see the same-era similarities between early nineties Japan and early nineties Australia.
Video with sound records really make you ponder all aspects of time. It doesn't seem all that long ago when I took this video, but here I am getting old and looking back on the nearly 30 years ago me.... The word I keep coming back to regarding the forward progression of time is "relentless".
Thanks for this trip down memory lane. I still live in Sydney and remember the early 90's here fondly. I wish a lot of it was still like that. Awesome footage.
This was part of a three-week visit I made to Australia. Really liked Sydney - it reminded me a little of San Francisco - nicer in a way. It seemed like it would be a great place to live. It's changed a lot then, has it?
Not one iPhone in sight and people reading newspapers at the Train Station I think the olympics were announced the following year as well. ahhh the good old days 😭😭😭
That time Surry Hills wasn't hip at all, it was the post industrial area until the 2000's where its all the hip and affluent young people with ego problems...fake persona and bitchy attitude. F* the internet and dating apps
Thanks so much for uploading this. This brought back so many memories, I hardly didn't know your exact locations right through the video. Everything was familiar! I was born in Sydney in 1968 and was 23 (about 4 month's off 24) when this was taken and was often in many locations in this. I love it! Strange trivia, I am mildly autistic and I occasionally get what I call flashback memories where I clearly smell things from my past (mainly childhood). These are imagined scents that seem completely random, they're not real (I have checked multiple times with others around), and I actually enjoy them. Sometimes music can stimulate them, or like just now a visual stimuli like the underground railway, I could clearly smell the distinct smell of train brakes. (If you're weird, like me, read on) For anyone curious, here's a quick list of things that I have imagined the smell of when there's no chance I actually did smell them at the time: My favourite and most frequent is the clear scent of cereal, not just any cereal, but nothing other than Fruit Loops! Diesel and hydraulic fluid are probably next frequently imagined, and they can be random or have visual stimuli, like watching a mechanical video. Honey and other nice smells like chocolate, cinnamon, even peanut butter. I imagine things like pepper, tomato or BBQ sauce, Vegemite. Other favourites are strawberry Quik (now Nesquik), apple and cinnamon (together) artificial banana like the lolly bananas, and there's things like the smell of someone ironing clothes, Aeroguard, salt and vinegar chips (not a favourite), train brakes, fresh stationary, and one time, even super glue! Googling this as symptoms is a worry. Might be a medical condition.
I visited Sydney in 1996 for the final two nights of speedway at THE Sydney Showground. I stayed at the Thoroughbred Motel on Alison Road and would go to a little cafe called Argies for a good, cheap breakfast most days. It was on a road nearby, in like a small shopping mall. But when I returned in 2008, I could not find either Argies or the mall itself. Does anyone know this place to confirm I was not dreaming?!
1992, middle of the recession we had to have, the countries greatest recession since the 1930s. Unemployment was as high as 10.80% this year! Yet the city still looks great, even with some big construction projects! Yet the recession is evident from some empty holes from cancelled projects too.
Sydney is one of my favourite places to visit - I was there most recently about a month ago and it's still beautiful. The earliest I got to it was 1997. The thing that I notice immediately with old footage from any city is the absence of smartphones among the crowds! Cool to see the old airplane interior at the end, with the one big movie screen at the front of the cabin. It's just great seeing this footage from 1992. Thanks so much for sharing!
Glad you liked it! The only early nineties video footage I have outside of Japan is from this trip to Australia. At the time, I thought Sydney was kind of similar to San Francisco in a way - culturally. As I used to live in San Francisco, I felt both the feeling of adventure in a foreign city and also as though I had come back home....
@@lylehsaxon that's so crazy to hear that... this video and one other like it is the only one i've seen of this time period. You have no idea how valuable this video is to everyone who lived during these times in Sydney, thank you so much for posting it.
thanks for sharing ,we had great times thru the 80's and 90's in sydney ,everybody was hussling there was money everywhere eveyone was having a go at business or rapidly moving thru careers, soon the corporations took over with the aid of gov and we are stuck where we are today , under total control , living as a local we didnt think to video our own joint , we went all over the US for a year in 94 and then europe for another year video every thing as you did on your vist here ,transfered it all to CD as the tapes were getting a bit old , must have forty of em ,always thought itd be too boring to watch it all ,but you prove me wrong ,theres something interesting in every minute , the problem now i gotta get a bloody disc player to view them , this crap changes too quick for old guys to keep up , cheers brother
Thanks for the feedback! It's good that you've already crossed the analog to digital line with your video material from 1994-95. Probably getting the videos on the disks converted into video files that you can upload to UA-cam should be relatively easy. Getting analog tapes digitized now is becoming increasingly difficult since they don't make the hardware to play the tapes any more. Also, tapes degrade with time. In any case, I hope you post the material to UA-cam - it would be very interesting to see. (Come to think of it... maybe you were using digital tape by 94? My 90-93 material was all analog.)
@@lylehsaxon i'm not very tech savvy , i recall it was called sony hi 8 tape ,i will have to search for the box thats full of old handy cams and film cameras , i guess the battery packs and all that stuff is well dead by now i had a cpl of cameras that took those 1 gb sticks when they dropped film ,i suppose that stuff should be fired up every few months or it all goes to sleep for good , i know all the kids old i pods and early junk never wakes again , i noticed you have heaps of vids , i couldn't read the lingo but i like the way you have so much documented ,it all changes so quickly and were left sayin "remember the old so and so building ", thanks for your kind reply cheers from down under,,,, i ,just came back to add, i think i meant DVD not CD or that would be music , you see i'm really not tech savvy , cheers
21:50 there is a (small) glimpse of the AML&F woolshed. Looks like it was still intact. Not sure if anyone remembers when it burnt down, that was some fire! I guess it was sometime in 93 or 94?
Adzy_Est _2001 you can thank the globalist elite mate. They kept lying to us diversity would make the West better. Read some Thomas Sowell quotes on diversity. It’s a lie along with multiculturalism being without fault. If a Korean wants to protect her people/culture from “diversity” she is OK. If an Aussie or American does h/she is “racist” “Nazi”. It’s just propaganda used to justify demographic displacement and high immigration to support a Ponzi housing bubble economy. If the politicians cared about Oz they would allow immigration but let us digest and protect Aussie culture. Very sad
That was awesome ! you really made my day with that. some of that footage is priceless, i just wish you had kept going south from the Queen Victoria Building to the Cinema district. are you OK with me sharing this to FB group LOST SYDNEY, ? they would go nuts
Glad you liked it! Sure! Send them the link! I wish I'd covered the city in more detail, but I was only there for a fairly short time. (My main video focus is Tokyo.) The camera burned out that year (after being repaired several times) from overuse, but around 2007 I got a new playback deck and finally got the material digitized. This is "B" BTW, so there's also "A": "Sydney - April 1992 (A)" and "C": "Sydney - April 1992 (C)", as well as some other stuff, like: "1992 Sydney and Trip to Katoomba - (920415)", and "1992 Sydney (Trains, Nighttime Ferry) 920413", and some other stuff from other cities, etc. There's some overlap between the videos, but in any case, there's more than just this one.
Fundamentally, it wasn't a tour group trip, but on some parts of the trip I was part of a tour. Naw, just somebody in the train. I was trying to get an image of myself with the camera. The strange thing about that camera is how it was really obvious from the side, but not from head on.
I was there as a visitor, so didn't know what was what, but I enjoyed using the system. What I liked best was boarding a really old type train that ran with the doors open! I jumped on as the train began departing and really liked looking out the open door as the train went over the Harbor Bridge.
@gof22 I'm not really sure of the types of spiders in Japan exactly, but I have seen some fairly large ones on seldom used trails in the mountains. In the city though, you hardly ever see them. The only one's I've ever seen in my apartment are little tiny ones. Actually - in the big cities in Australia, I don't recall seeing any spiders. Within large cities, I think you'd be okay. - LHS
90s-early 2000s Sydney the best city in the world by far.......i remember Melbournians were begging for people to come live in their city back then and jealous of Sydney LOL
Great Video. You got to come back to Sydney. Still beautiful natural scenery with the harbour, the beaches, the landscape, the landmarks and suburbs. The traffic is pretty bad, very busy and high cost of living. And also the median house price is almost $1.5 million.
Man some of the streets and allys this guy was in around wooloomooloo were dodgy as back then and even now. Amazing he didnt get robbed with a camera there.
I had no idea! I do remember noticing that every parked car I saw had one of those locks that locked the steering wheel to the brake pedal ("Cars must get stolen a lot here, I thought"). Also, a local friend I visited commented on his cheap VCR, "I had a better one, but it was stolen... so I've given up on buying anything expensive - it'll just get stolen."
@grig60 Oh, I wouldn't say that. It's just the standard expression people have when they're out in public. As soon as they see a friend, they brighten up. - LHS
It's been so long... I'm not sure, although (I think) at least some of the domestic flights I took in Australia on that trip were something smaller than a 747....
7:35. That's a rare sight now..a phonebox.😯😯😯 Young people born after 1992 are probably watching this thinking "What the hell are these?., rocket ships.😁😂😂
I have always wanted to visit Australia but the thought of running into one of the huge species of spiders that live in Australia absolutely scares me. Also, what types of spiders live in Japan and how big do they tend to get?
That's like saying you wouldn't want to visit the US because of bears or India because of Cobras. Yes we do have venomous spiders here, but it's still a pretty rare occurrence to actually see one. The great thing about snakes and spiders is they generally don't want human interaction as much as humans don't want interaction with them. They want to stay out of our way and we want to stay out of theirs.
I wonder. Maybe not, since everyone is recording everything all the time - back then not many people were recording street scenes with expensive equipment.
Yeah, I don't take much video now... it's bloody hard to do street videography now, unless you've got a hidden camera, and I don't want to do that it that way.
This video is so nostalgic for me - 92 was the last year I lived in Sydney, before moving to QLD. I've always wanted to move back but I doubt I could ever afford it now.
Nah Sydney is cooked now
If Sydney stayed like that I doubt I'd ever have left when I did.
Wow the old Chatswood interchange. Chatswood has changed a lot since 1992.
You know - I'm really glad I took my video camera on this trip - these are the only videos I have from outside Japan at that time and they help piece the era together for me now. In both Japan and Australia in 1992, there were still elements from the 50's, 60's and 70's in the cities... much less so now.
You would barely recognize it now :-( by the way I love your videos of Tokyo pretty much may favorite city to visit and its really interesting seeing your point of view on my home town.
You did a great job of capturing the time. This is the Sydney I Love and miss. I left in ‘99 to try break the funk I was in but always intended coming back. Unfortunately I’ve come to realise this Sydney is gone.
Your right, the 90s were the last of the old dayz sadly my-friend. #peace.
@@billymack333 so true.
@@tomspiers2087 to many high rise apartments, sydney looks like a bowl of metallic and glass nachos now, its ugly and overcrowded, no sunlight on the streets :(
I was 18 yrs old in sydney at this time. I really miss the 90s. These times we are in now are scary .
Knew id find you on one of these 😀
Made me cry, such memories. I was a 21 year old on a working holiday. Lived in cheap digs Bayswater Road, Rushcutters Bay Dec 1991, I was working in Strand Arcade for The Body Shop. That park was my sunbathing spot 😁 on the 6th April 1992 I had returned from travelling, lived Rose Bay in house share and worked in Pitt Street for Select Appointments. Can still smell those trains 🙈 loved Grant Goldmans announcements at stations. Had a ball that year. I ended up living in Oz 1997 to 2004, became Australian Citizen. Lived here in UK since then. Can't believe it's nearly 30 years. I had seen lot of changes when I lived there 2nd time around and it's unrecognisable in many places. Thanks so much for sharing.
Kings Cross was a genuine red light district. Now it has been gentrified with many apartment towers constructed over the last ten years to replace the tourist hotels and the boarding houses that provided inexpensive long term accommodation.
Ah back in the days when you actually felt like you're actually in Australia
gotta love all those falcon taxis
So peaceful and easy to go to Sydney I remember being 4 years old in 92 and driving into the city with my parents who just parked on a Side street and then took us to the powerhouse museum - then catching the train and monorail around the city with ease. So gorgeous to Sydney used to be
I was 5 grew up in granville 😂
This was 2 years before i was born, and man it was a completely different time to be alive
Thank you for posting this video.
Its strange... Sydney back in the 90's felt vibrant and exciting to me. I always felt like there was something to see and do in Sydney, which gave me a buzz of excitement. I don't feel the same way today about Sydney, but watching this video brought back that feeling somehow. Its probably nostalgia and a yearning to be young again, but I really do believe something about Sydney has been lost to time.
I think I know exactly what you mean. What it is, is that to communicate with people in 1992, to see what was going on, etc., you had to *go* somewhere. Now people give whatever is coming in on their smartphone top priority and so 1) they're never where they are - they're tuned into distant friends sending them things on their smartphones, and 2) Since they never really focus on anything other than their smartphones, there is no need to go out at all. People have become cyborgs. At the same time, offices have become vertical fortresses with stern guards looking suspiciously at people passing by, much of retail is done by delivery, etc. Actually, while I like technology basically, I think we are living in a pretty rotten era. Hopefully things will get better from here out.....
For sure Man. I was at Sydney Uni around this time. Pub rock was at its peak and the city was buzzing. Great times for sure
I think you hit the nail on the head re: nostalgia and yearning to be young again. I doubt there are many people who, mental or physical trauma aside, don't yearn for their younger days. Neural connections are still developing rapidly in the late teens due to all the novel experiences. Whether it's 1892, or 2092, someone will always express a desire to return to the years when they were younger. Nothing inherently special about 1992, unless one happened to be growing up during this time. And how could there be? It's implausible to think that the 90s, or any epoch one cares to identify - is it 1985-1994? Or 1950-1959? Maybe it's 1897-1911? - could be special relative to all the others in which humans have lived.
I was 17 in 1992 and this video felt like I was truly back in those days. Sydney was a great place and bizarre listening to those background conversations and old TV commercials. Me and my friends would hop on a train to the city after school, I remember having only $5 but could buy a few things compared to now Sydney has become so so expensive. We went to Brashs records on Pitt street, then hang out at McDonalds and walk around Pitt street mall. Nice seeing people without smart phones.
Agreed, HOYTS and Event Cinemas would have Aladdin (1992) cartoon, Home Alone 2, Sister Act, Ferngully The Last Rainforest, Alien 3 and many more in cinemas back then.
@@CameraMan66 No Event Cinemas in 1992. The George St movie strip was Village, Hoyts and Greater Union
@@petkez oh okay it was different back then
@Frank. T and we looked cool walking around with a Brashs plastic bag. Lol.
The closest thing to a time machine
This video really stirred memories for me.I was 19/20 and life had been pretty awesome since I arrived in Sydney 89.Little did I know my life was going to change forever.Some bad luck and a poor choice or two and things were beginning to spiral out of control.I can’t believe it’s almost 30 years gone by.I know I shouldn’t but I find myself wondering how different my life might have turned out if it wasn’t for a small succession of occurrences.Truth be known I have no doubt it would have been significantly happier.This encapsulates a beginning and an end of so much.
Jesus that was depressing to read. Since you'd be in your late 40s/early 50s now, I hope you're doing better
Cheers Warden Freeman. I’m Okay...still battling. Sometimes it’s hard though knowing that if I’d done things differently I’d be in my Harbourside mansion or wherever I wanted just chilling. Grateful to still be here.
@@billymack333 chin up my man!!
@@StuHutch Thank you brother.
I was 23 and so many places in this video are familiar. You went to the top level of the QVB, why I never managed to do that astounds me. I walked through that building countless times. I went to the level below it (almost the top level) one Xmas around 1983/84 when they had a great Xmas display set up inside.
This is where I’ve lived in Sydney all my life. A lot hasn’t changed that much, whilst a few things have completely altered.
This video should be in the national film archives. It captured Sydney very well. What you did was capture the sounds as well as the sights.
Glad you caught footage of the huge holes in the ground. They are my abiding memory of Sydney back then and I am amazed by the immense size of the buildings that filled them. Also lovely to see some monorail footage. It was too early for it's time.
Hard to believe 30 years ago, I was driving a taxi in Sydney then so the video brings back bitter sweet memories of that era
It's hard to realise that Sydney has changed so much!! Totally mind blowing!
Sydney in the 90s is my favourite decade that's my opinion just because classic disney films in theatres with Beauty and the Beast and more.
Changed for the worst sadly...
Immigration in the old days was good not now
@@harleyguy7 I want to watch Beauty and the Beast cartoon in cinemas again!
@@CameraMan66 bruh how many comments are you gonna make about Beauty and the Beast
@@MrSkeleton131 i'm not gonna mention anymore about it now.
A stunning and perfect video capturing the beauty of 1992 in wonderful Sydney.
Cause you've mentioned beauty, classic Beauty and the Beast was already out by then
I miss this Sydney
Great video thanks so much for sharing. Was in Sydney a couple of months ago and was amazed how much it’s changed in the 8 years since I left there. It’s even more unbelievable how much the place has changed since this film was made over 30 years ago. Great job once again you brought back a lot of memories from my trips there as a young fella 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
This was filmed around the same time I was born in Sydney. Makes me appreciate the buildings, railway system, footpaths and roads I sometimes take for granted during my “boring” daily commute (back when we were commuting). Will be seeing Sydney CBD from a different lens next time I visit.
My beautiful home ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤
An amazing piece of history. I was 10 when this was filmed.
that was a great vid man i grew up in syd in the lte 80's and 90's the best time in syd was the early 90's
+adam murdock Thanks for the feedback! Most of the video I took with my Hi8 (analog) cameras was in Japan, but fortunately the cameras were still functioning when I visited Australia in 1992. By 1994 the cameras were dead and I didn't take any more video until 2006.
Mid 90s were the best
Amazing, about 32 years ago, It's crazy to think that everyone who was alive then has passed away now. It's like watching ghosts.
Fantastic video. I was just a young teenager when this was filmed but have memories of travelling to Sydney in the 90’s. So much has changed now almost 30 years passed. The monorail being gone is just one example. Thanks for sharing this. Inspired to film my own as a time capsule for the next generation. 🙂
Thanks for commenting! I've always felt more motivated to record images in cities, knowing how they keep changing. Looking back on my videos from 30 years ago (I took analog video from 1990-93 - mostly in Japan, with video from a three week trip to Australia my only footage of a country outside Japan), I'm always intrigued by the things I expected to stay the same and changed. For the things I recorded that I knew were going to change, it's just s simple feeling of "Glad I recorded that before it was gone" but for things I didn't expect to change, it's a more complicated feeling....
Thank you so much for putting up such thorough video documentation of Sydney! We really enjoyed the nostalgia as Sydneysiders who grew up here. It was fun playing spot-that-landmark.
Glad you enjoyed it! Australia is the only country outside of Japan that I took video in back then, so these have a special meaning for me in another way. As different as Sydney is from Tokyo, there are definite similar elements of the era.
I worked there in 1992, a young married banker for the CBA. I wasn't thinking right in them days. I knew very little about my environment and I didn't ask any questions. I didn't want to know. Ignorance was bliss and I somewhat miss it. And then one of the big CBA managers told me a secret and it still didn't sink in. It went in one ear and out the other. Youth...what a waste.
Wow great footage. Some parts of Sydney still look exactly the same, other parts barely recognisable.
6/4/22 30 Years later to the day.
I needed some pictures & footage of Aussie cities in the 90's for reference for an art project and I'm so glad this video was recommended to me, because it's tremendously helpful. thank you so much for posting this, Lyle!
I really miss the old train announcements of those days. There was something soothing about that guy's voice. He could have said a train was going to the depth of hell and I would have felt safe going there.
Same thing here in Tokyo - before the recordings, when a human being was making the announcements, there was a feeling of the person making the announcement being on the same journey with you (which they were) which is completely absent with robot voice recordings (a kind of audio cut-and-paste way of lifelessly assembling words for the announcements).
@@lylehsaxon I completely agree. However in this era it was all pre-recorded, but the male voice they used was the same guy they used for years and none of it sounded robotic like they do today. It sounded like your favourite uncle telling you the destinations. You can hear a good example at 1:35.
While I have you, I just wanted to thank you for uploading this video. Us Sydneysiders wouldn't have taken a lot of "regular" footage like this because we saw it every day. But now it's so special to see. I hope I can get to Tokyo one of these days!
Thanks for the feedback! At the time, people (in Japan) would often ask me why I was taking video in what they considered to be mundane areas. Thirty years on, the people who lived in those areas express interest in being able to see now what they didn't see any reason to record at the time, but now that that time is gone, the record is perceived as something valuable. I've always thought just about anywhere you go, there's something interesting to record, but I was laughed at a bit at the time. The footage I took in Australia is personally important to me for a variety of reasons. Sydney in particular reminded me in many ways of California (where I lived before coming to Japan). I took analog video from 1990 to 1993 and the only country other than Japan I took video in during that time is Australia. I was there for three weeks and have footage from the major cities on the east coast. About the announcements - what you say about the recordings reminds me of the buses here - where they have had recordings for a long time, but some human being read out each and every sentence, so the humanity is evident. The robot-voices they use now are obviously computer constructions of bits of recordings, so "The next station is" part is exactly the same recording, station after station, day after day, week after week, year after year. Probably torture is too strong of a word, but the announcements (the robot ones here in Tokyo) are intensely irritating to listen to. When a human being was making the announcements, it was comforting.
I left Australia in 2003 and haven't been back since. I want to visit, but at the same time I don't, because I have a perfect image in my mind, and a lot of good memories.
Get rid of your memories and live! Memories hold people back, they're stupid!
This is such a cool video! Thanks for sharing. I love it when we get a glimpse of the past like this. It's almost humbling to see how far we've come, but it's also a little sad to see that we'll never be able to return to such times... I think thee most important part of now is making the most of it, and preserving what we can for future generations to see as well.
Thanks for the feedback! At the time I had a sense that things were changing quickly and it was important to record many things that were clearly not going to be around for much longer. Most of my footage is of Japan, primarily Tokyo, so the Australia footage is especially important to me now, since I now see the same-era similarities between early nineties Japan and early nineties Australia.
Gordon station and the old antique shop on the corner. Haha.😀
Good to see people walking around with no phone in sight.
Sad to think that most of the elderly you see in this video have passed away
Video with sound records really make you ponder all aspects of time. It doesn't seem all that long ago when I took this video, but here I am getting old and looking back on the nearly 30 years ago me.... The word I keep coming back to regarding the forward progression of time is "relentless".
Watching this as somebody who wasn't alive then. I want to time travel back to the 90s, I'm so curious about how everyone lived then.
Thanks for this trip down memory lane. I still live in Sydney and remember the early 90's here fondly. I wish a lot of it was still like that. Awesome footage.
This was part of a three-week visit I made to Australia. Really liked Sydney - it reminded me a little of San Francisco - nicer in a way. It seemed like it would be a great place to live. It's changed a lot then, has it?
Wow I feel like I could almost smell the exhaust from all those old cars haha. Oh what memories
Not one iPhone in sight and people reading newspapers at the Train Station I think the olympics were announced the following year as well. ahhh the good old days 😭😭😭
Dam i was like 4 or 5 years old
I really like the way you filmed it...great work
Thanks for the feedback - I appreciate it!
i lived on crown st surry hills was in a band like everybody else my age with grunge and all. I bloody miss the 90s man!
tobagotb10 that's only a two minute walk from Surry Hills.
That time Surry Hills wasn't hip at all, it was the post industrial area until the 2000's where its all the hip and affluent young people with ego problems...fake persona and bitchy attitude. F* the internet and dating apps
Thank fark grunge died and the rave scene took over Sydney.
Thanks so much for uploading this. This brought back so many memories, I hardly didn't know your exact locations right through the video. Everything was familiar! I was born in Sydney in 1968 and was 23 (about 4 month's off 24) when this was taken and was often in many locations in this. I love it!
Strange trivia, I am mildly autistic and I occasionally get what I call flashback memories where I clearly smell things from my past (mainly childhood). These are imagined scents that seem completely random, they're not real (I have checked multiple times with others around), and I actually enjoy them. Sometimes music can stimulate them, or like just now a visual stimuli like the underground railway, I could clearly smell the distinct smell of train brakes.
(If you're weird, like me, read on)
For anyone curious, here's a quick list of things that I have imagined the smell of when there's no chance I actually did smell them at the time:
My favourite and most frequent is the clear scent of cereal, not just any cereal, but nothing other than Fruit Loops!
Diesel and hydraulic fluid are probably next frequently imagined, and they can be random or have visual stimuli, like watching a mechanical video.
Honey and other nice smells like chocolate, cinnamon, even peanut butter.
I imagine things like pepper, tomato or BBQ sauce, Vegemite.
Other favourites are strawberry Quik (now Nesquik), apple and cinnamon (together) artificial banana like the lolly bananas, and there's things like the smell of someone ironing clothes, Aeroguard, salt and vinegar chips (not a favourite), train brakes, fresh stationary, and one time, even super glue!
Googling this as symptoms is a worry. Might be a medical condition.
The brain is a mysterious thing. I had a musician friend who could see colors when he heard sounds....
Superb memories miss those days
I visited Sydney in 1996 for the final two nights of speedway at THE Sydney Showground. I stayed at the Thoroughbred Motel on Alison Road and would go to a little cafe called Argies for a good, cheap breakfast most days. It was on a road nearby, in like a small shopping mall. But when I returned in 2008, I could not find either Argies or the mall itself. Does anyone know this place to confirm I was not dreaming?!
Sydney has always been a beautiful city and it still is to this day. 🇦🇺
Sydney vivid, more high rise and Sydney metro almost opening. Yes it's lost some of its charm but its also more lively than ever before
I wish I could time travel here where I want to time travel in the 90s when I watch Beauty and the Beast in cinemas which would be a lot of fun!!!
Great footage! Thumbs up
Wow the terminal was different back then.
1992, middle of the recession we had to have, the countries greatest recession since the 1930s. Unemployment was as high as 10.80% this year! Yet the city still looks great, even with some big construction projects! Yet the recession is evident from some empty holes from cancelled projects too.
21:21 This frame is quite significant because this area has been prodoundly transformed.
Sydney is one of my favourite places to visit - I was there most recently about a month ago and it's still beautiful. The earliest I got to it was 1997. The thing that I notice immediately with old footage from any city is the absence of smartphones among the crowds! Cool to see the old airplane interior at the end, with the one big movie screen at the front of the cabin. It's just great seeing this footage from 1992. Thanks so much for sharing!
Glad you liked it! The only early nineties video footage I have outside of Japan is from this trip to Australia. At the time, I thought Sydney was kind of similar to San Francisco in a way - culturally. As I used to live in San Francisco, I felt both the feeling of adventure in a foreign city and also as though I had come back home....
@@lylehsaxon that's so crazy to hear that... this video and one other like it is the only one i've seen of this time period. You have no idea how valuable this video is to everyone who lived during these times in Sydney, thank you so much for posting it.
R.I.P Monorail
God, I miss this time!
thanks for sharing ,we had great times thru the 80's and 90's in sydney ,everybody was hussling there was money everywhere eveyone was having a go at business or rapidly moving thru careers, soon the corporations took over with the aid of gov and we are stuck where we are today , under total control , living as a local we didnt think to video our own joint , we went all over the US for a year in 94 and then europe for another year video every thing as you did on your vist here ,transfered it all to CD as the tapes were getting a bit old , must have forty of em ,always thought itd be too boring to watch it all ,but you prove me wrong ,theres something interesting in every minute , the problem now i gotta get a bloody disc player to view them , this crap changes too quick for old guys to keep up , cheers brother
Thanks for the feedback! It's good that you've already crossed the analog to digital line with your video material from 1994-95. Probably getting the videos on the disks converted into video files that you can upload to UA-cam should be relatively easy. Getting analog tapes digitized now is becoming increasingly difficult since they don't make the hardware to play the tapes any more. Also, tapes degrade with time. In any case, I hope you post the material to UA-cam - it would be very interesting to see. (Come to think of it... maybe you were using digital tape by 94? My 90-93 material was all analog.)
@@lylehsaxon i'm not very tech savvy , i recall it was called sony hi 8 tape ,i will have to search for the box thats full of old handy cams and film cameras , i guess the battery packs and all that stuff is well dead by now i had a cpl of cameras that took those 1 gb sticks when they dropped film ,i suppose that stuff should be fired up every few months or it all goes to sleep for good , i know all the kids old i pods and early junk never wakes again , i noticed you have heaps of vids , i couldn't read the lingo but i like the way you have so much documented ,it all changes so quickly and were left sayin "remember the old so and so building ", thanks for your kind reply cheers from down under,,,, i ,just came back to add, i think i meant DVD not CD or that would be music , you see i'm really not tech savvy , cheers
@gof22 I think so. It's been a long time. Some of the wine on the trip was complimentary and some I bought... - LHS
いつも日本の何気ない日常等を撮影しているライルさんが海外の風景を撮影しているのが逆に不思議な感じがします(*^^*)
あの頃の動画は、日本以外オーストラリアしか無いです。
Thats the Sydney i remember moving back in a few years cant wait miss everything about it, especially bondi beach. You look familiar are you an actor?
Not an actor, but some say I look like the "Back to the Future" guy Michael J Fox....
21:50 there is a (small) glimpse of the AML&F woolshed. Looks like it was still intact. Not sure if anyone remembers when it burnt down, that was some fire! I guess it was sometime in 93 or 94?
6 July 1992.
👍 this is great!!!
6:32 - 6:42 Looks very similar to Per Gessie from Roxette which is so awesome!!! I guess back in the 80s and 90s the hair style was like that so yeah!
Wow Australia has changed so much since 1992 it's even changed a lot since 2001 when I was born
Adzy_Est _2001 you can thank the globalist elite mate. They kept lying to us diversity would make the West better. Read some Thomas Sowell quotes on diversity. It’s a lie along with multiculturalism being without fault. If a Korean wants to protect her people/culture from “diversity” she is OK. If an Aussie or American does h/she is “racist” “Nazi”. It’s just propaganda used to justify demographic displacement and high immigration to support a Ponzi housing bubble economy. If the politicians cared about Oz they would allow immigration but let us digest and protect Aussie culture. Very sad
Less diversity with more having dark hair and dark eyes and less blonde or ginger hair and bright eyes.
I was born 3 months before this
When you went to Sydney, Australia did you go with a tour group? Just curious but at 13:37 was that your daughter looking out the window?
That was awesome ! you really made my day with that. some of that footage is priceless, i just wish you had kept going south from the Queen Victoria Building to the Cinema district. are you OK with me sharing this to FB group LOST SYDNEY, ? they would go nuts
Glad you liked it! Sure! Send them the link! I wish I'd covered the city in more detail, but I was only there for a fairly short time. (My main video focus is Tokyo.) The camera burned out that year (after being repaired several times) from overuse, but around 2007 I got a new playback deck and finally got the material digitized. This is "B" BTW, so there's also "A": "Sydney - April 1992 (A)" and "C": "Sydney - April 1992 (C)", as well as some other stuff, like: "1992 Sydney and Trip to Katoomba - (920415)", and "1992 Sydney (Trains, Nighttime Ferry) 920413", and some other stuff from other cities, etc. There's some overlap between the videos, but in any case, there's more than just this one.
13:50: Kentucky Fried Chicken!!!
Fundamentally, it wasn't a tour group trip, but on some parts of the trip I was part of a tour. Naw, just somebody in the train. I was trying to get an image of myself with the camera. The strange thing about that camera is how it was really obvious from the side, but not from head on.
5:04 Sigrid Thornton on Midday with Ray Martin.
Still looks the same today as she did back then.
Nice vid. For train buffs, at 18:10 video evidence that k set train rostered on eastern suburbs line, very rare! Jm
I was there as a visitor, so didn't know what was what, but I enjoyed using the system. What I liked best was boarding a really old type train that ran with the doors open! I jumped on as the train began departing and really liked looking out the open door as the train went over the Harbor Bridge.
@grig60 No, I wish I had, but I didn't make it out that way. I did visit Canes (sp?) though. - LHS
I protest to the inability of being able to be transported permanently back into this era. :(
Feel the same way
1:25 that train still in service till now 😁😁😁😁😁
@gof22 I'm not really sure of the types of spiders in Japan exactly, but I have seen some fairly large ones on seldom used trails in the mountains. In the city though, you hardly ever see them. The only one's I've ever seen in my apartment are little tiny ones. Actually - in the big cities in Australia, I don't recall seeing any spiders. Within large cities, I think you'd be okay. - LHS
When Sydney still had Ppl on its streets.
It still does, and more than ever before
Hi there, is there a way to contact someone about using this footage in a video please?
That would be me... but generally I don't allow use of my material. What exactly do you want to use it for (and it's better to contact me via gmail).
Did you go to Tasmania as well?
90s-early 2000s Sydney the best city in the world by far.......i remember Melbournians were begging for people to come live in their city back then and jealous of Sydney LOL
Now sydney people running to Melbourne to find a roof
true....
Great Video. You got to come back to Sydney. Still beautiful natural scenery with the harbour, the beaches, the landscape, the landmarks and suburbs. The traffic is pretty bad, very busy and high cost of living. And also the median house price is almost $1.5 million.
Man some of the streets and allys this guy was in around wooloomooloo were dodgy as back then and even now. Amazing he didnt get robbed with a camera there.
I had no idea! I do remember noticing that every parked car I saw had one of those locks that locked the steering wheel to the brake pedal ("Cars must get stolen a lot here, I thought"). Also, a local friend I visited commented on his cheap VCR, "I had a better one, but it was stolen... so I've given up on buying anything expensive - it'll just get stolen."
10:27 The monorail is long gone now, too.
Not having been there since 1992, I'll probably be a bit shocked at the changes the next time I visit.
26:10 haha how fast is the old xf taxi going? Before excessive speed enforcement
Was the wine complimentary?
@grig60 Oh, I wouldn't say that. It's just the standard expression people have when they're out in public. As soon as they see a friend, they brighten up. - LHS
The demographics of Town Hall and Central train platforms have changed a bit since then.
No Social Distance Back in 1992
Am i too specific to say that kiosk looks like a Yugoslav K67? 1:48
1:21 I forgot the train announcement recording was a male. So many other things I remember about Sydney as a kid.
The guys name was Grant Goldman well known radio announcer.
@@thefatman1929 He passed away in jan 2020
The seats on Qantas geez.... Was that the 747-400?
It's been so long... I'm not sure, although (I think) at least some of the domestic flights I took in Australia on that trip were something smaller than a 747....
7:35.
That's a rare sight now..a phonebox.😯😯😯
Young people born after 1992 are probably watching this thinking "What the hell are these?., rocket ships.😁😂😂
Shhhh!!!!! That's the time portal! I forgot to cloak it!
Sydney still has phone boxes. Phone company wanted to get rid of them but I think the government didn't allow their removal.
You travel the Eastern Suburbs line mostly eh?
No idea! I kind of randomly rode some trains while visiting....
I have always wanted to visit Australia but the thought of running into one of the huge species of spiders that live in Australia absolutely scares me. Also, what types of spiders live in Japan and how big do they tend to get?
That's like saying you wouldn't want to visit the US because of bears or India because of Cobras. Yes we do have venomous spiders here, but it's still a pretty rare occurrence to actually see one. The great thing about snakes and spiders is they generally don't want human interaction as much as humans don't want interaction with them. They want to stay out of our way and we want to stay out of theirs.
one day ppl will look back at 2019 footage this way?
I wonder. Maybe not, since everyone is recording everything all the time - back then not many people were recording street scenes with expensive equipment.
I'm watching to see if i can see myself.
Back on the days when you could get away with filming and no one would criticize you or question you.
Yeah, I don't take much video now... it's bloody hard to do street videography now, unless you've got a hidden camera, and I don't want to do that it that way.