Since the first flights in Sydney in 1910, the problem of exactly where to locate Sydney's airport has preoccupied and troubled planners, politicians and residents of the city. This thesis examines Sydney airport as a space, site and symbol under contestation by major social forces - Zukin - throughout the twentieth century. In doing so, it seeks to question the claims of both planners and anti-airport protestors to resolve and manage large-scale urban developments. Via a series of case studies of representations of the airport, the thesis develops an argument for understanding the airport as a heterotopia: neither sublime nor abject, but through such an extremist spatial imaginary pointing to the production of modernist space as a highly contested process. Because it localises and materialises discourses on the nature and goals of progress,internationalisation and globalisation, it is argued that the built form of the airport is, and will continue to be, a key site of such aerial modernity. The final chapter closely reads a series of airport tales- (a film, a play and a park) in order to consider the ways in which they rework the modernist sublime in domestic space.It is concluded that these stories offer a method of representing locality that goes beyond the existing understandings of locality as an essence of place. The appeal of the narratives lies in the shift that they develop, through excessive and negotiated representations of both the domestic and the sublime, from the local as essence, to locality as practice. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)