Interview: Pat Lonergan

In January 2025, Irishman Patrick “Pat” Lonergan stood at the summit of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, facing the city’s now-famous skyline. Decades earlier, in the 1960s, he had worked on the regular repainting of this iconic steel structure, without even a harness or safety net.

This year, after more than half a century, Lonergan returned to Australia with three of his daughters to proudly climb the bridge he had helped to preserve.

“I enjoyed Sydney and I loved the Bridge and the beautiful area surrounding the harbour,” he says. “I was determined I’d get back there.”

Leaving Ireland for work abroad

Born and raised near the Comeragh Mountains in rural Co. Waterford, Lonergan found few prospects for employment at home in his youth. He left Ireland for Great Britain, where he worked on the construction of the overhead railways. While there, he learned of an opportunity even further afield: the chance to work on the Australian rail network. He applied and was accepted.

However, a dispute with the union over his job grade meant that his new career on the Australian railways nearly ended before it began. “The union thought I was jumping over someone else in seniority,” Lonergan explains. “So I decided I’d leave the railways.”

Sydney calling

As luck would have it, Lonergan spotted an advertisement in the evening newspaper for another job, one that would come to define his time in Australia. Workers were needed to paint the Sydney Harbour Bridge as part of its annual maintenance, and the pay was excellent. “It cost me $5 to become a member of the union,” he recalls. “I started the following Monday.”

Lonergan was not a painter by trade, but “very few were, on the Harbour Bridge,” as he points out. “If you could work, and if you could paint, you were offered a job.” Amongst his colleagues on the Bridge were a London bus driver, a Dutch diamond cutter, and Paul Hogan, an Irish-Australian actor who later became known for his performance as Crocodile Dundee.

Fond memories and risky times

In the 1960s, there were few health and safety measures enforced on sites like the Sydney Harbour Bridge. “We could’ve been blown off that thing,” says Lonergan. “We never even bothered to look down, we just got on with our work.”

Despite the risks, he remembers his time on the Bridge fondly. “It was quite a pleasure working there because all the different ships went underneath the Bridge – Russian, Japanese, American – all over the world went under that Harbour.”

Thriving Irish community in Sydney

Beyond the Bridge, Lonergan found a place within the thriving Irish community in Sydney. A chance encounter led him to compete in a race through the city’s “Hungry Mile,” a docklands area named by the men of the Great Depression who would walk along the waterfront in search of work.

“A Great Day for the Irish on the Hungry Mile.”

With no running gear and no suitable shoes, Lonergan raced barefoot, and made headlines the next morning: “A Great Day for the Irish on the Hungry Mile.”

Through that race, he was introduced to Eugene O’Sullivan, a fellow Irishman, and soon started spending his Sundays playing the Gaelic games of football and hurling, and meeting his fellow Irishmen for “a drink and a chat” in the Catholic club on Castlereagh Street.

Decades later, when Lonergan’s granddaughter was preparing to run in the London Marathon, he shared the story of the Hungry Mile race with her. She managed to track down an old newspaper photograph of her grandad sprinting barefoot down the streets of Sydney.

Australian army reserve

Lonergan’s time in Sydney coincided with the height of the Vietnam War. Having been a member of the Fórsa Cosanta Áitiúil (FCA) at home, Ireland’s army reserve, he joined the Australian equivalent, where he did six weeks’ worth of training in the Australian bush. “Needless to say, we never did get sent to Vietnam, thank God.”

Return to Ireland with family

In 1970, after four years in Australia, Lonergan returned to Ireland. His wife had been pregnant with their first child when the couple arrived in Sydney, and two of their daughters were born there.

Two of their daughters live in Perth to this day, and one of them would later serve in the Australian army herself before becoming a nurse.

Having arrived home to Ireland to little available work, Lonergan once again relocated to Great Britain where he resumed work on the railways. He maintained strong ties to Australia, making five return trips over the decades.

Revisiting Sydney: a changed city

Sydney, he says, has changed enormously. “There’s high-rise buildings on both sides of the harbour now… The only thing that hasn’t changed is the Harbour Bridge!” He remembers spending his lunch breaks at a mobile sandwich van, at the time the only one of its kind in Sydney – “now they’re all over the place, every corner, everywhere!”

He speaks of revisiting a pub overlooking the harbour that he and his colleagues used to frequent after their shifts: “It was just the dockers and workers that went in when I was there, and now tourists go in there.

Every day, there’s hundreds of people who do the climb on the Bridge. If you’re ever in the city, you’ve got to do the climb, because from the very top of the Bridge, you can see the whole of the city.”

Climbing Sydney Harbour Bridge

In 2025, Lonergan realised his long-held dream of climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge. “They were very kind to me when they knew that I had worked there,” he says. “I was the only painter that came back.”

He kept in touch with some of his colleagues after leaving Sydney, including a man from Bristol who became a family friend, but sadly, “nearly all of those people have disappeared now.”

Standing on the summit of the Bridge this January, in the full heat of the Australian summer, Lonergan saw a transformed city of soaring skyscrapers, the Opera House he had seen being built, and of course, the Bridge itself. “The Sydney Harbour Bridge stands out,” he says. “It still overshadows everything else.”

Forever part of Sydney

The official Instagram page of the Sydney Harbour Bridge Climb shared a picture of Lonergan after completing the climb, alongside a black-and-white photograph of him in his 20s, standing on the Bridge he was employed to maintain. Dozens of commenters praised his efforts, with one writing that Lonergan is “forever part of Sydney” and “Sydney forever part of him.”

Now in his 80s, Lonergan has returned to his native Ireland and lives three miles outside of the town of Dungarvan, Co. Waterford. “It’s always nice to come back,” he says. “You always miss the homeland.” In his front room, he keeps a framed engineering drawing of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. He still intends to return to Sydney, “maybe by the end of the year, if not early next year.”