Highlights and hijinks of Sydney Harbour Bridge

Words: John Borthwick Producer: Louise Starkey

The Sydney Harbour Bridge, one of Australia's most recognisable landmarks, is celebrating its 90th birthday — and there have been plenty of highlights and hijinks along the way.

In the 1930s, the structure was known as "the Iron Lung" as it kept Sydney working during the Depression. It was later nicknamed "the Coathanger", but for locals it has always been simply "the bridge".

The Sydney Harbour Bridge opened on March 19, 1932 — 117 years after the colony's founding architect, Francis Greenway, put its proposal forward, and nine years after construction started.

From the time it opened, the arch-and-pylons profile image became an instantly recognisable ideogram signifying "Sydney", but it shared similarities with England's Tyne Bridge and New York's Hell Gate and Bayonne bridges.

Six million hand-driven rivets. Five hundred and fifty thousand lengths of steel, weighing almost 53,000 tonnes. At 134m high it is the world's tallest steel arch bridge and, with a 503m span, the ninth longest spanning-arch bridge. Picture: RTA Archives

For every bland fact there is a back story that better tells the tale of this behemoth. Fourteen workers died on the site amid construction, two of them falling to the harbour. Picture: RTA Archives

An average 11,000 vehicles a day crossed the 2.4km stretch in 1932, each paying sixpence while a horse and rider paid a "trey", threepence. Today's figure is about 160,000 vehicles.

The toll, originally imposed to recoup the £6.25m construction cost, was paid off in 1988 but 34 years later an automatic toll still pings us up to $4 each trip.

Even though horses were banned long ago, the Bradfield Highway is classified as a Travelling Stock Route. You may still legally herd cattle across it — strictly between midnight and dawn — although no one has done so since 1999.

In 1932, seven Wirth's Circus elephants walked across the bridge, paying "tuppence" each.

Former professional racing driver Mark Webber fanged over the bridge in a Williams Formula One car in 2005 — probably the fastest-ever toll evasion.

In 1973, Frenchman Philippe Petit illegally stretched a highwire between the northern pylons and tripped a light fandango five times back and forth above the traffic.

In 2000, 250,000 people walked the bridge to support reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

Since 1998, the BridgeClimb company has ushered four million paying customers to the top of the arch and safely down again, making ours the "most climbed bridge in the world".