Claiming Australia

A part of the legal process for claiming a new colony in 1788 was to plant the flag. That moment would seem to be a reasonable important event in Australian history.
It took me a year to find out where the arrival of the first fleet was solemnised, by Captain Arthur Phillip raising the Union Jack.
I asked the City Council, I asked at the library, I asked at the Sydney Museum. I rang the Australia Day committee. They didn’t know. I eventually found the answer in a book about Sydney by Ruth Park.
The exact location where the first flag in Australia was saluted, on January 26th, is in Loftus street just alongside the City Library in Customs House at Circular Quay.
You can sit in the Paragon hotel across the road, and with a fine rum, ponder what the sailors and soldiers and convicts of the first fleet thought of this little ceremony. The first official Australia day
A replica of that Union Jack hangs limply on a tall flag pole surrounded by official inscriptions, wanting a breeze on most days.
Passers-by can barely see the flagpole. It is surrounded by a fleet of modern buses, waiting for their timetables to send them on journeys around Sydney.
I asked a dozen bus drivers what they knew of the flag. Most of them, parking here for ten years or more in their bus driving careers, did not know there was a flag pole there, let alone why it was there.