The Hero of Waterloo Hotel

This guide to Sydney's Hero of Waterloo Hotel opens with an unexplained nightly mystery: chairs rearranged in an empty upstairs room. It traces the story back to publican Thomas Kirkman, a transported convict, and to his wife Anne, who died falling down the hotel's stairs in 1849. Along the way it covers the sandstone building's convict-era construction and a persistent legend about a smuggling tunnel to the wharf below. Listen for the piano in the bar as you pass the staircase where Anne fell.