Yarranabbe · Sydney · NSW 2027
The Aboriginal name for Darling Point.
Older than the bridge. Older than Australia. The name, older still.
Few addresses change hands here. Fewer still change character.
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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. That first pattern is still visible today in the walled gardens, the carriage drives, and the long-held stewardships that define the street.
Streets of the Darling Point peninsula include Yarranabbe Road, Darling Point Road, Carthona Avenue, Greenoaks Avenue, Thornton Street, Mona Road, Mona Place, Loftus Road, Sutherland Crescent, Sutherland Avenue, New Beach Road, Eastbourne Road, Ascham Avenue, Annandale Street, Mitchell Road, St Mark's Road, and the short courts behind McKell Park. Immediately adjacent postcodes are 2027 (Point Piper, Edgecliff), 2028 (Double Bay), 2029 (Rose Bay), 2025 (Woollahra), and 2023 (Bellevue Hill). The park at the foot of the peninsula, Yarranabbe Park on New Beach Road, is one of the official Sydney New Year's Eve fireworks vantage points.
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, occupy it still.
The finer Victorian period is represented by The Swifts (Lucas-Tooth's Gothic mansion, remade in 1882) and Cloncorrick (1884, John Horbury Hunt). The interwar years are represented by Craigend (1933–34), whose Moorish doors are reported to have come from a mosque in Zanzibar and whose grounds include a Japanese contemplative garden. Craigend was the residence of the United States Consul-General from 1948 until 1999.
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. Sydney's architectural historians still regard it as one of the more thoughtful early experiments in high-rise living in the country.
Notable buildings of Yarranabbe Road and the wider peninsula include: 1 Yarranabbe Road (Yarranabbe House, c. 1840); 11 Yarranabbe Road (Glenhurst Gardens, 1958); 22 Yarranabbe Road (Norfolk, PopovBass, 2025); 38 Yarranabbe Road; 47 Yarranabbe Road; 51 Yarranabbe Road; 56 Yarranabbe Road; 73 Yarranabbe Road; 81 Yarranabbe (77–81 Yarranabbe Road — eight residences by Tzannes for Henroth, in development); 83 and 83a Yarranabbe Road; 87–97 Yarranabbe Road. On Darling Point Road: 75, 86, 101, 107 and the flanks of Bishopscourt. On Carthona Avenue, Greenoaks Avenue and Mona Road: the heritage villas that form the historic core. 7 Annandale Street (Fortis, 2025) sits adjacent.
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, true to its long preference for understatement.
Yarranabbe keeps the same discipline, nationally, for three other categories of careful Australian things: motorcars, yachts and aircraft. For sale and by appointment. Currently inviting purveyors.