Watch: The Pogues singing about Sydney's Circular Quay

Circular Quay is the waterfront precinct on Sydney Cove at the northern edge of the Sydney CBD -- simultaneously a ferry terminal, railway station, bus interchange, and pedestrian promenade, with views of both the Sydney Harbour Bridge to the northwest and the Sydney Opera House on Bennelong Point to the east. It is where The Pogues' recording of 'And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda' -- Eric Bogle's devastating 1971 anti-war ballad about a soldier maimed at Gallipoli -- places its homecoming verse: the narrator's ship pulls in here, and he looks down at where his legs used to be.

Bogle wrote the song in Edinburgh in 1971, looking back at Australian history and the particular grief of Gallipoli from a distance. The Pogues recorded it for their 1985 album Rum, Sodomy and the Lash, with Shane MacGowan delivering a vocal performance of great controlled anguish. Their version introduced the song to a new generation and remains one of the most celebrated recordings in the Pogues' catalogue. Circular Quay itself is not a building or a specific address but a precinct -- the place where Sydney Harbour meets the city, where ferries have been docking since 1842, and where the First Fleet landed in January 1788 on land known to the Gadigal people as Warrung.

For visitors to Sydney, Circular Quay is an unavoidable entry point to both the harbour and the city's consciousness. Standing on the wharf with the Bridge on one side and the Opera House on the other, looking out at the water, the song's homecoming verse is easy to feel even without having heard it: this is a place where people have been arriving and departing for centuries, carrying what they brought with them.