Over the past decade, the urban condition of Sydney has been increasingly discussed using the language of globalization. Yet the increasing sensitivity of global city theorists to issues of representation alert us to the problems of confidently using the global as an adjective to describe two nouns (Sydney and city) of uncertain mooring. We review various uses of these signifiers by territorially embedded and embodied actors (  journalists, academics and politicians), and suggest that to unreflectively label either the whole or some parts of this metropolis ‘global’ is a deeply problematic process.