Sydney Festival

Sydney Festival is a major arts festival in Australia's largest city, Sydney that runs for three weeks every January, since it was established in 1977. The festival program features in excess of 100 events from local and international artists and includes contemporary and classical music, dance, circus, drama, visual arts and artist talks. The festival attracts approximately 500,000 people to its large-scale free outdoor events and 150,000 to its ticketed events, and contributes more than A$55 million to the economy of New South Wales.

History

The origins of the Sydney Festival are in the Waratah Festival which was established in 1956 by the Sydney Committee and took place from late October to early November, coinciding with the blooming of the NSW emblematic flower the Waratah. It was an important cultural event which included a parade, a popular art competition, beauty contests, exhibitions, performances and the Lord Mayor's reception at the Sydney Town Hall.

Sydney Festival was established by the Sydney Committee, the NSW State Government and the City of Sydney with a view to attracting people into the city centre during the summer holiday month of January. In many ways it is probably still best understood as a celebration of Sydney and what the city has to offer. In the festival's early years, its program offered everything from vintage car rallies, face-painting and kite-flying to bocce, dog obedience trials and Chinese scarf dancing.

Sydney

Sydney /ˈsɪdni/ is the state capital of New South Wales and the most populous city in Australia and Oceania. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds the world's largest natural harbour, and sprawls towards the Blue Mountains to the west. Residents of Sydney are known as "Sydneysiders". Sydney is the second official seat and second official residence of the Governor-General of Australia, the Prime Minister of Australia and the Cabinet of Australia.

The Sydney area has been inhabited by indigenous Australians since the Upper Paleolithic period. The first British settlers arrived in 1788 to found Sydney as a penal colony, the first European settlement in Australia. Since convict transportation ended in the mid-19th century, the city has transformed from a colonial outpost into a major global cultural and economic centre.

The population of Sydney at the time of the 2011 census was 4.39 million, 1.5 million of which were born overseas, representing many different nationalities and making Sydney one of the most multicultural cities in the world. There are more than 250 different languages spoken in Sydney and about one-third of residents speak a language other than English at home.

.au

.au is the internet country code for Australia.

History

The domain name was originally allocated by Jon Postel, operator of IANA to Kevin Robert Elz of Melbourne University in 1986. After an approximately five-year process in the 1990s, the Internet industry created a self-regulatory body called .au Domain Administration to operate the domain. It obtained assent from ICANN in 2001, and commenced operating a new competitive regime for domain registration on 1 July 2002. Since this new regime, any registration has to be ordered via a registrar.

Operation

Oversight of .au is by .au Domain Administration (auDA). It is a not-for-profit organisation whose membership is derived from Internet organisations, industry members and interested individuals. The organisation operates under the consent of the Australian government which has legislative power to decide the operators of electronic addressing in the country.

Policy for .au is devised by policy development panels. These panels are convened by auDA and combine public input with industry representation to derive policy.

Sydney (TV series)

Sydney is an American situation comedy series that aired on CBS in 1990. It was created and written by Michael J. Wilson and Douglas Wyman and starred Valerie Bertinelli, Matthew Perry and Craig Bierko.

Synopsis

Sydney Kells (Valerie Bertinelli), the daughter of a now-deceased policeman, brings her New York City detective agency (in which she is the only investigator) back to her hometown and her family, including her over-protective brother Billy (Matthew Perry), himself a rookie cop. As she struggles to balance her personal and professional life, the main source of her work comes from an uptight lawyer (Craig Bierko), with whom she shares sexual chemistry. She and her best friend Jill (Rebeccah Bush) frequent a neighborhood bar run by Ray (Barney Martin), her father's old police partner.

Cast