Yarranabbe.

Yarranabbe is a peninsula, a road, and the older name for both. Before it was Darling Point, the Gadigal called this ground Yarranabbi and Eurambi. It took its current designation from Elizabeth Darling, the wife of the colony's seventh governor; the older name migrated down the hillside, onto a single road and a single park that still bear it.

The peninsula tips out between Rushcutters Bay and Double Bay, so that Yarranabbe Road — the shoreline road — faces back across the water toward the bridge, the Opera House, and the city itself. The outlook is one of the few in Sydney that is of the city, rather than merely near it.

What has shaped the place more than geography is restraint. The peninsula was subdivided in 1833 into twenty large villa allotments, each of roughly three to seven acres, and the pattern of that first subdivision is still visible today in the walled gardens, carriage drives, and long-held stewardships that define the street.

Lindesay, built for the Colonial Treasurer between 1834 and 1836, is the peninsula's first surviving house and Sydney's earliest example of the domestic Gothick mode. Carthona, raised by Sir Thomas Mitchell in 1841 at the water's edge, has passed through only three families in nearly two hundred years — the last of them, the Bushells of tea, occupying it still.

The finer Victorian period is represented by The Swifts (1882) and Cloncorrick (1884, John Horbury Hunt); the interwar years by Craigend (1935), whose Moorish doors were drawn from a mosque in Zanzibar and whose grounds include a Japanese contemplative garden. Craigend has served since 1948 as the residence of the United States Consul-General.

Modernist Sydney is represented on the peninsula primarily by Glenhurst Gardens at 11 Yarranabbe Road — an eleven-storey block completed in 1958 which, at the time of its construction, was the largest apartment building then under way in Australia. It remains, in the judgement of Sydney's architectural historians, one of the more considered early experiments in high-rise living in the country.

For an address of fewer than four thousand residents, Yarranabbe has produced, or harboured, an unusually broad cross-section of the twentieth-century Australian imagination. Dorothea Mackellar, who gave the country the poem it quotes most often, lived at Cintra from 1933 until her death in 1968. Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, the first aviator to cross the Pacific, took a house on Greenoaks Avenue in the 1930s.

Gough Whitlam — and, quite as importantly, Margaret Whitlam — kept a Darling Point apartment from the early 1970s until 2012. Helen Reddy, who had left Australia for America in 1966, returned to the peninsula late in her life and died there in 2020. The tradition continues in a less public register; the peninsula today is home to some of the country's most active private philanthropists and family offices, in keeping with its long preference for understatement.