A history of New Year’s Eve, Sydney: From ‘the crowd’ to ‘crowded places’

Abstract

This article presents a history of Sydney's New Year's Eve event. First established when a crowd gathered outside Sydney's General Post Office in 1897 to celebrate the inauguration of International Standard Time, in more recent years it has evolved into a signature event on the city's calendar, drawing in excess of 1 million people into the Central Business District in a spectacular celebration of the global city. For those authorities charged with managing the event an enduring problem concerns the question of security: how is the aggregate of human bodies that gather to be governed in ways that secure it from the risks it presents: be they risks to public order (riot), to the crowd itself (panic), or external to it (terror attack) or to the population (viral spread)? This article maps how crowds have been thought as objects of government in relation to the New Year’s Eve event.