A hundred years ago, Sydneysiders felt themselves to be a long way from anywhere, and they were. The ships that sailed through the Heads into "one of the finest, most beautiful, vast and safe bays the sun ever shone upon" (the mariner Conrad again) brought fresh faces, merchandise, and letters, as well as a sense of connection with the larger world. They tied up at Circular Quay, which Conrad recalled as "the integral part" of the whole gorgeous harbor and the heart of the city.

The clippers stayed in Sydney for months while bales of wool were stowed, and the ships and their crews became part of the packed and colorful community that lived in the verminous alleys of the quarter known as The Rocks. The clippers were already a memory when Conrad wrote that "great steam-liners dock at these berths…grand and imposing enough ships, but here today and gone next week." In 2008, the turnaround time is about a day, and liners dock at the glassy, modernist Overseas Passenger Terminal, just across the water from the gleaming white sails of Jîrn Utzon's Opera House.

Today's cruise liners sure are big, or rather high. Their glassed-in superstructures tower over inadequate-looking hulls. When the Cunard Line's new Queen Victoria arrived in Sydney in February on her maiden voyage, passing a few feet in front of the Opera House on Bennelong Point on her way to dock at the terminal, it was as if a beautiful white-sailed boat had been obliterated for a moment by an office block.

More than forty years after the architect's notorious departure from the project, and thirty-five years since its opening with a compromised interior, Utzon's Opera House remains the most passionately talked-about building in Sydney, and one of the most discussed in the world. I see it every day when I walk through Rushcutters Bay to Darling Point for a draft of sea air and a gaze over the water, and after many changes of mind over the years, I have settled into an abiding love for it. Apart from its technological daring, Utzon's building is a triumph of concept—white sails like those on the water—and of scale. It suits the harbor. It's not monumental and overbearing but modest and lighthearted.

A sailing boat gets tension and energy out of the forces of air and water, and the whole of the Sydney waterfront gets its life from that meeting of land and sea, work and play, intimacy and grandeur, which Utzon so perfectly captured. Even the massive Harbour Bridge, a Depression-era technological marvel that now looks outsized in its setting, is a fun place, exploding with fireworks on New Year's Eve and enormously popular as a climb for energetic visitors, who see the harbor laid out below in all its complex folds, shimmering at daybreak and at sunset.

The massive old wharves and warehouses of the working harbor that Conrad knew are still there but made over for new uses. One houses the Sydney Theatre Company, directed by Cate Blanchett, and it's thrilling to take the long walk over the massive worn timbers to its Wharf Theatre home, which projects over the water at the end. I tumbled briefly out of the darkened theater at intermission late one afternoon and caught a hallucinatory glimpse of another huge liner, its decks crowded with passengers, gliding silently past as we all stared at one another from a few feet apart through the wharf's great glass panes. Other wharves, like the nearby Finger Wharf at Woolloomooloo, are now luxury housing, with restaurants to match, along the walkway.