The Anzac Bridge spanning Johnstons Bay is one of Sydney's more recent landmarks. It was built to replace a century old swing bridge and provides a key link between Sydney City and the suburbs to the west via Victoria Rd and an east-west route from the city to the M4 motorway at Concord.

Formerly known as the Glebe Island Bridge, it is the longest cable-stayed bridge in Australia and amongst the longest concrete cable-stayed bridges in the world. The main span of the bridge is 345m long and 32.2m wide. A pre - stressed open grillage, it has two 1.85m deep longitudinal edge beams, cross girders at 5.17m spacing and a 250 mm thick slab. The concrete deck is supported by two planes of stay cables attached to the 120m high reinforced delta-shaped reinforced concrete towers which make the bridge a landmark visible from many of the city's inner metropolitan suburbs.
The Anzac Bridge was opened on 3 December 1995 by the Premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr. The bridge increased the capacity of the road network connecting the city and the western suburbs.
On Remembrance Day, 11 November 1998, the New South Wales Government bestowed the bridge to the NSW Returned Serviceman’s League for re-naming as ‘The Anzac Bridge’ and unveiled a monument of a digger bowed in silent reflection.  The monument is located at the western end of the bridge on the northern side. A second bronze statue, of a New Zealand digger, followed on the southern side in April 2008.
A handful of sand from Gallipoli rests under the foot of the digger as a permanent connection with comrades who fell and remain at the Gallipoli Battlefield in Turkey.
The Anzac Bridge links Glebe Island in the west to Pyrmont in the east.  Glebe Island was part of a land grant made to the colony’s first chaplain, Richard Johnson, in 1789. The name was derived from the term Glebe, which means a plot of land belonging to an English parish church. Glebe Island was joined to the mainland in the 1850s by reclaiming the channel and building a causeway. Sydney’s first abattoirs opened on Glebe Island in the 1850s. As the population grew residents complained about the droving of cattle and sheep in the streets. In response to this issue and to provide better access for the growing suburbs, a timber bridge was constructed using Tasmanian blackbutt.

Earlier bridges at this location

The first bridge, Blackbutts Bridge, completed in 1857, was a bridge with a manual swing span opening, to allow shipping into Johnstons Bay and the adjacent Blackwattle and Rozelle bays. The abattoirs were demolished in 1915 and in 1918 work commenced on building storage and shiploading facilities for grain. Sydney’s first container berths were on Glebe Island. Both the grain and container activities have moved elsewhere and the Glebe Island wharves are now mainly used by car-carriers. The grain silos remain, but are no longer in use.
The steel swinging bridge which still stands along side Anzac Bridge was opened in 1903 and is now the oldest bridge of its type in Australia. It was designed by Percy Allan, along with the Pyrmont Bridge which crosses Darling Harbour. The swinging bridge replaced Blackbutts Bridge.

Glebe Island swing bridge seen below the road deck of Anzac Bridge

The bridge featured two fixed truss spans and an electronically operated swing span. The swing spans were among the largest in the world at the time the bridge was built and some of the earliest to be powered by electricity. The power came from the nearby Ultimo Power House which also powered Sydney’s trams. The four-lane bridge carried significant traffic loads and was in use until the opening of the current bridge.

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