Skybridges
Posted: August 15, 2025 Filed under: Shops, Sydney City | Tags: piccadilly centre, skybridges, sydney city 7 CommentsGetting to know a city means getting to know its shortcuts. The back lane that cuts a corner, the arcade that connects one street with another, the pathways that extend below and above ground, avoiding the traffic at street level.
How far can you get across the Sydney CBD without using the street? It’s all the more of a challenge because there is no overall order, no masterplan. Plans arise, such as the Wynyard Walk plan from the early 1970s, and most recently, the planned underground pedestrian network around the new Hunter Street Station. Even so, the thoroughfares make up a piecemeal network. All were built at different times, and if you come to the city regularly you will likely have developed your own routes among them.
Some of these routes almost everyone knows, others are more obscure. Some of the most well-used pedestrian thoroughfares are the underground walkways that extend out from Town Hall station, connecting up with the Queen Victoria Building and The Galeries. At peak hours it can be a struggle to move against the tide of people going to or from the station, an experience reflected in the terrazzo mural of goldfish at the entrance to the QVB, which I always make sure to look down at when I walk over it.
As much as it’s a good idea to look up to notice the unexpected, it can also pay to look down. In this case, it’s to see the swirl of orange fish with glass eyes, circling and dispersing like the crowds of people that surge past daily. ‘School of Fish’ is an artwork from 2000 by Rodney Monk and Giselle Humphries – Rodney Monk is one of the muralists who began work in the 1970/80s, known for murals such as the Peace Mural on Pilgrim House on Pitt St, the mural of trees on Marrickville High School, and the mural at The Crescent, Annandale.
One of my favourite city shortcuts is through the Piccadilly Shopping Centre, through which you can travel between Pitt and Castlereagh streets. It cuts out having to negotiate the busy corner with Market Street at the edge of Pitt Street mall and plunges you into a shopping-mall atmosphere of gleaming tiles and glass. Near the Pitt Street entrance is what might be the shortest escalator in the city to convey you up to the Castlereagh Street level.
There are two exits on the Castlereagh side, north and south, and I always choose the north one which passes by a men’s outfitter with a window display of John Lennon brand shirts. Across from it Clueless International, a women’s clothing store which I imagine could only have been named in the 1990s, its name only becoming more perplexing as the years go by.
The current fitout of the centre, with its marble floor tiles and glass facade, dates from the 1990s, although it was built in the 1970s to replace the Piccadilly Arcade (which had been known, among other things, as the arcade which housed Weirdo’s Magic Shop).
Another 1990s feature of the Piccadilly Arcade are the skybridges, two walkways that extend out above street level, across Pitt and Castlereagh Streets. Both, now, are inaccessible, but used to connect the arcade with the City Centre monorail station on the Pitt Street side, and the Sheraton Hotel on the other. The one on the Castlereagh side like a train carriage, enclosed on top and bottom with a line of windows along each side. The skybridge on the Pitt St side has a glasshouse look to it, with wraparound windows, extending across the street on an angle between the two shopping centres.
As much as I investigated the corridors of the shopping centre trying to find one, there is no longer a public way to access the skybridges. If you haven’t used them by now, you may have lost your chance: both have been planned to be demolished in a redevelopment of the Piccadilly Centre. “Skybridges are no longer regarded as a positive urban outcome in the City’s planning vision and controls,” a City of Sydney report on the site from 2021 stated. But the redevelopment has now been downgraded to a refurbishment, so perhaps they will remain.
On the next block down from the Piccadilly Centre are two further skybridges, connecting Myer, Westfield, and David Jones across Pitt Street Mall and Castlereagh Street. These were first built in the 1970s as part of the Centrepoint shopping centre, and then rebuilt in the redevelopment of the centre around 2010. One of my persistent childhood city memories is going with my mother to a cafe in the skybridge that connected Centrepoint to David Jones, and looking out the windows down to the street below. It was around the time of the photo below and I like to imagine we were up there at this very moment, and I was having a glass of apricot nectar and feeling cosmopolitan.
Now these Westfield skybridges are made of glass, giving you the feeling of floating above the street, away from its noise and rush. They give a perfect view, too, back at the two Piccadilly Centre skybridges, spanning the street, unused and in limbo.
Inside the Newsagency
Posted: August 3, 2024 Filed under: Shops 10 Comments
All over the suburbs, newsagencies are changing. Many are closing down. In Croydon, at the end of the row of shops, another newsagency that I used to visit has gone out of business. First its doors were shut tight, papered over so there was no view of the empty interior. The facade still carried the signs for the newspapers and lotteries, and faded posters of magazine covers and social distancing advice sagged inside plastic frames. Then a hoarding was constructed around it, with only the end of the sign poking out to show what the shop had once been.
Newsagencies are moving into the realm of video stores and milk bars and other once-stalwart local businesses that make up suburban memories. But it’s unlikely newsagencies will disappear completely. Some have diversified into selling gifts and gadgets, others keep up the classic stock of stationery, magazines and cards, convex mirrors mounted in the corners so the staff can watch for browsers reading magazines for too long. It is this kind of newsagency I always keep a lookout for.
Although newsagencies have been around since the 19th century, it’s in the 20th they flourished, as places to buy magazines, birthday cards, chocolate bars, exercise books or packets of cigarettes. In Sydney almost every suburb seemed to have a newsagency, and they became so much a part of everyday life as to be almost unremarkable.
Until they started to disappear. Observing this, I have made a habit of stopping every time I pass by one, and finding something inside to buy. At the front counter there is usually someone buying a lottery ticket or waiting to. Further in are racks of magazines and greeting cards, and shelves and displays of stationery goods, a museum of office and craft items. My collection of notepads, stickers, and pencils is increasing, and I’m always on the lookout for unusual and niche stationery items.
Crepe paper. Ribbon rosettes. Sheets of cardboard. Check tickets. Restaurant docket books. Telephone message pads. Rubber stamps that say ‘FAXED’ or ‘OVERDUE’, once used for invoices. Autograph books. Letraset. Teledex refills. Plastic stencils of the states of Australia, for school students to draw around, inscribed with the instruction: ‘Tasmania to be drawn free hand’.
My favourite newsagencies – and for now you can still find them out there – are pre-digital time capsules of paper goods, craft supplies, tubes of glitter and 2B pencils, and still hold the promise of all you might do with such things.
Through the Quadrangle Door
Posted: December 9, 2023 Filed under: Houses, Northern Sydney, Shops, Waterways | Tags: Cammeraygal country, castlecrag 13 CommentsThink ‘Quadrangle’ and an image might come to mind of the University of Sydney and the Quadrangle which forms its nucleus: grand sandstone buildings, gargoyles, perfect lawns and the (replacement) talismanic jacaranda tree.
Unless you frequently travel through Cammeraygal country, along Eastern Valley Way. In which case you might also think of the shopping centre that marks the entrance to Castlecrag. On the crest of the hill, at the intersection with Edinburgh Road, the half-illuminated neon sign for the Quadrangle glows on the corner, above the lichen-spotted awnings that shade a row of empty stores.
The Quadrangle has the forcefield of neglect that can only indicate an impending renovation or demolition. Indeed, this is the case, although plans to redevelop the corner have stalled, facing strong public opposition to the height and scale of the new development.
Such changes are often contentious, but particularly so in Castlecrag, which has an identity forged from the Burley Griffin’s 1920s vision of a more organic suburbia. Residents were to live in harmony, rather than opposition, to the environment. The remaining original houses have become emblematic of this dream of the garden suburb. On weekends, tour groups trail around the streets, looking out for the flat-roofed stone houses the Burley-Griffins designed in the 1920s, hearing about their designs for a more community and environment focussed way of living. No fences, flat roofs to better allow views of the harbour, twenty-percent of the land kept aside for parkland, an open air theatre for dramatic performances. The streets, named after the parts of a castle, followed the contours of the headland.
The Quadrangle appeared much later in the history of Castlecrag’s development, opening in 1979. If it features at all in the heritage tour, it is as the place to park before setting out on foot into Castlecrag proper. Underneath is a cave-like parking lot, from which you ascend up the stairs into the central courtyard. Not so long ago it was a busy suburban shopping centre but now there’s only a post office, one remaining boutique, and a pharmacy with a rack of sunglasses and a life-size Santa out the front, which activates into song whenever someone gets close to it, alarming or amusing people on their way in to buy medications.
As the name suggests, the Quadrangle is built around an internal courtyard, where once, when the cafes were open, you could sit under a marquee and drink coffee, on your way to or from the IGA (or in the 80s, Jewel Food Barn). The entrance to this area from the street has a folly on the roof: a shuttered tower with a lightning rod on the top. Underneath this is a glass door, unattached on either side to anything, as if the surrounding walls had been cut away.
I stop at the door and examine it, to the bemusement of the postal worker sitting on one of the café tables, taking a rest from deliveries on this hot afternoon. There’s a handle on one side of the door, but not the other, and I push down on it, testing to see if it is unlocked. The handle yields, and I push open the glass door and walk through, a test of the door’s absurd existence.
Is anything different now that I am on the other side?
Still as hot, still as desolate in the Quadrangle, although the nearby community noticeboard attests to some of the life of the suburb: bushcare, dog-walking services, a map of Burley Griffin sites as a self-guided tour, advertisements for books by local authors. This includes a reprint of a 1970s book that was put together of stories from residents, with photographs from Max Dupain, who was himself a Castlecrag resident. Dupain’s photographs of Castlecrag show its development over the mid-century decades, in photographs of houses, trees, neighbourhood events (including the launch of the book), plants and animals: cockatoos, flannel flowers, cats, a gecko on the curtains.
Following the main road, I pass by a couple of the Burley Griffin houses, low stone buildings with long narrow windows, humble in appearance compared to many of the houses that were built after them. Most of these original houses have been modified or added to over the years, since they were built in the 1920s, and stood starkly on the cleared ground.
As well as the lots for housing, the plan for Castlecrag included a network of reserves, parks connected by pathways that run in between and behind the houses. The pathways are narrow and easy to miss or to mistake for driveways, but if you follow them they will lead to a small, hidden reserve of land. Each has a different character. Lookout Reserve expands into a stretch of lawn, with a bench under a tall Hoop Pine, looking onto a paperbark tree, said to have been planted by Marion Mahony Griffin, with Spanish Moss trailing from its branches.
Down steep steps from The Bastion is a path leading to a network of reserves (Embrasure, Gargoyle, Oriel) that follow the line of a rocky ridge, making for a cooler environment of tree ferns and moss under the rock outcrops. Long strips of bark shed from the trees are underfoot, glimpses of the bay in the distance appear through the gaps in the trees and roofs.
No one is in sight apart from the occasional posse of builders working on a house, and I can hear their music coming across, mixing with the sounds of the cicadas, and lawnmowers from further away. Some of the paths are so narrow, so close to the backyards of the houses, that I feel the urge to walk with soft steps, as if I were trespassing. But there’s no one to see me, just people’s washing hanging out to dry, and a quiet brown dog that looks up at me with a quizzical expression. Air conditioning units huffing out hot air are the clues that if anyone is around, they are sheltering inside.
The streets in Castlecrag, like the pathways and the reserves, follow the shape of the land, forested and steep with large boulders, leading down to the narrow, mangroved inlets of Middle Harbour. It is urban bushland, where the pipes and manhole covers hide among the rocks, stepping stones have been laid out to aid navigation, and houses and backyard pools are never far away, but the pathway feels secret nevertheless.
As I follow the hill downwards, via some more castle streets, the Citadel and the Bartizan, I stop at the Haven Amphitheatre, the open-air theatre which was created by Marion Mahony Griffin and locals, for performances by the Haven Valley Scenic Theatre and the Anthroposophic Society. Rows of terraced seats have been constructed following the hillside, looking down over the small circular stage. Today, the wind puts on the performance, making the trees sigh, moving shadows over the ground, over the further patterns of leaves and stones.
The pathway to Sailors Bay starts at what looks to be a driveway, but at the end of it I can see the start of the bushland path and its arrow marker. There’s a person in their garage beside the driveway, looking inside their overflow fridge, but they don’t turn around when they hear my footsteps, or maybe I’m too quiet to be detected. I hurry by. At the start of the path I walk through a thin skein of spiderweb, which snaps like the ribbon at the finish line, evidence that no one else had walked this way for a few hours or more.
In some parts of the suburbs, particularly areas of bushland, there’s a sense of people being all around, but they’re just far enough away that the other life of the place is more present than the human one. At Sailor’s Bay, after I make my way across the shore – littered with the usual packets and plastic, but also odder things, a plastic shuttlecock, a Santa Pez dispenser – I wade out between the oyster shells and the mangrove roots, feeling the soft sandy mud underfoot.
The water is warm in the shallows. It has absorbed the heat of the day, and now it is the hottest part of the afternoon, and I know I will have to walk back up the hill to the Quadrangle eventually. But I won’t think about leaving just yet.
Two Journeys with the Putney Punt
Posted: April 30, 2023 Filed under: Sydney Harbour, Technology, Waterways | Tags: breakfast point, city of canada bay museum, mortlake, mortlake ferry, putney punt, Wallumedegal country, wangal country 8 CommentsOn display in the City of Canada Bay Museum is a model of the car ferry that crosses the Parramatta River between Mortlake and Putney. Although officially known as the Mortlake Ferry, it is more familiarly known as the Putney Punt. The service has carried traffic across the stretch of river between Mortlake, on Wangal land to the south, and Putney, on Wallumedegal land to the north, since 1928.
Among the varied collection of the museum, the model of the ferry can be found in between a glass case with a wedding dress inside of it, and another with a model of one of the gasometer tanks that used to dominate the Mortlake peninsula when it was a gasworks. The model of the ferry is long and narrow, bracketed by a wharf on either end, with a track between, on which the ferry moves once you press the green button on the side of the case. It’s meticulously made and specific in its details, the little round lifebuoys labelled with DMR (Department of Main Roads, which became RTA, now RMS) and a box of life jackets, as well as some very 70s-looking Matchbox cars parked on the ferry itself, and little reflective road signs at each wharf showing the timetable.
I press the button and the motor starts up. The ferry begins to move across the painted river, slowly advancing towards the Putney side. The motor hums as it makes it slow way, before stopping with a click once it reaches its destination. At first I had thought the model had been built specifically for the museum, but in fact it had been made by the DMR for display at the wharf, alongside where the actual ferry plies its route across the river. It had been housed inside the waiting room on the Mortlake side as a curiosity, demonstrating the ferry’s mechanism – how it operates by two cables, one which pulls, and one which guides, conveying it from one side to the other.
When the model was displayed at the wharf it was thought the ferry would be decommissioned. By the late 1980s, when plans to remove it were afoot, the punt was regarded as a relic of Mortlake’s industrial past, in operation as it was for the convenience of the employees at the gasworks, who would come across from the north side to go to work.
It was the last of the car ferries in metropolitan Sydney: others, at Ryde, Tom Ugly’s Point, and The Spit, had all long-before been replaced by bridges. Recognising the Putney Punt’s significance, there were protests about its removal and about the proposed $1 toll if it did remain. The National Trust listed the ferry and although the gasworks was redeveloped into the residential suburb of Breakfast Point, the ferry has continued to operate. The model did not fare quite so well at the time, falling into disrepair, before being retired to the museum. Here, it was restored back to working order by the local Men’s Shed.
Mortlake is only a slip of a suburb now, a mixture of houses, apartments, and a few remaining small factories along the road that leads to the wharf. After the road passes by the factories and apartment buildings, all of a sudden there is a sharp turn to the right. Then there’s the unusual sight of the road extending all the way to the edge of the riverbank, beyond the boom gates where cars wait to cross.
It is a quiet day, a public holiday, and there are no other cars waiting behind the stop sign. I’m the only one, and I get out to step closer to the gate, to look across at the ferry, which is over on the Putney side, with a few cars slowly driving onto it. To either side of the wharf the headlands curve in and out around the water, which is a pale silvery blue on this overcast day. In the distance, over in the east, the city skyline looks smaller than I expect it to, its high-rise buildings more spread out from this vantage point.
The ferry is making its way across now, painted cream and green, familiar from the model, slowly advancing and enlarging as it draws closer. It reaches the wharf and stops with a thunk as the lip of the ferry aligns with the road, and the cars drive off. Then it’s my turn. The ferry master beckons and I drive forwards, stopping in the front middle of the three lanes. It doesn’t feel unusual until the ferry gets going, away from the wharf and out across the river, and I have the sensation of the car moving while being stationery, a more fluid, buoyant motion than driving.
It’s fun to traverse the river this way, a change of perspective, suddenly afloat, in what was described in an article about the punt from 1954, as ‘a moment of leisure’, and ‘four minutes of enforced inaction, as refreshing as a summer shower’. At that time, in the 1950s, with industry in full operation, the river was polluted and its beaches choked with piles of rusting debris, and the water, so the article describes it, was a ‘drab maroon with the noisome effluent from the gasworks’. It has come a long way towards repair since that time.
For all its shift in perspective it’s only a quick journey, and after a couple more minutes the punt comes in at an angle to the Putney wharf, working with the resistance of the tide. It swings into place at the last minute, pulled in by the thick metal cables. The boom gate opens and the ferry master beckons me to drive forward, and suddenly I’m on the north side, among the suburban streets, driving past houses with bright purple tibouchina flowers in their gardens, back on solid ground.
Penrith Museum of Printing
Posted: December 4, 2022 Filed under: Western Sydney | Tags: letterpress printing, penrith, penrith museum of printing, print museum 12 CommentsThe jacaranda trees are in flower around the Paceway, and a carpet of mauve petals surrounds the unassuming green shed that houses the Museum of Printing. Apart from the row of flags which announce the museum is open, swaying in the wind, and the magpies pecking at the lawn by the racing track, all is still. It is Sunday morning and, apart from the sound of the traffic on Mulgoa Road, it would seem like not much is happening in this quiet corner of Penrith.
Inside the museum it is a different story. At first I’m not sure what to expect from the sign that promises I’m about to meet the Linotype machine, the Eighth Wonder of the World. I am not quite able to imagine what lies behind the folding doors with a print of woodcut of a 15th century printing workshop on them. As an introduction, a display cabinet in the lobby has a display of various pieces of printerly ephemera: an invitation to the Copy Boy’s Picnic, instruction manuals and samples of type. I’m looking at this when the doors open and one of the museum guides welcomes me in.
It is busy in the print museum: every corner of it has a volunteer working away at something. One man has the top of one of the machines open and is cleaning it with a strong-smelling solvent, dipping a paintbrush into a saucepan, then leaning down into the mechanism to apply it. In the back corner, two men work with trays of type, and on the other side of the room, another operates a printing press. There’s a whirring, rattling sound as the press operates, which resounds through the room. It is as busy as I imagine print shops were when machines such as these produced anything printed: newspapers, books, office stationery, leaflets, everything before printing technology changed and these kinds of machines were thought to be redundant. Many of them were scrapped, but others, like these machines in the museum, have been saved by the efforts of printers who worked with them for decades, cared about their historical significance, and wanted to see them preserved.
Everything here works, the guide tells me, gesturing to the printing presses and the linotype machines. One tall iron press at the back of the room is painted green and has a gold eagle on the top: a weight, the guide tells me, not just a decoration. It is a Columbian Press, which was used to print the Carcoar Chronicle and then had another life on display in the foyer of Fairfax: the first copies of the Sydney Morning Herald had been printed on a similar press.
As we move around the museum, parts of the story are taken up by each of the volunteers. A compositor tells me how you could handset type as small as 2 point, so small it was barely readable, just by knowing the location of it in the case. He asks my name and, quick as a flash, hovers his hand over a tray of type and my name is set, upside down and back to front, in the composing stick. For posters they would use big blocks of wooden type, to print things like headline display posters, the kind that would be put outside of newsagencies. Another compositor tells me that, when Elvis died in 1977, they had used the largest letters of all to make the headline announcing this, as if that didn’t happen very often.
On to the eighth wonder of the world: the linotype machine. The man with the saucepan and brush pauses his cleaning operations and turns to show me how the Intertype – a tall and complex metal cabinet with a small keyboard at the base – operated. It had been invented in the 1880s by a watchmaker, he told me, who applied the mechanics of watch movements to devising a typesetting machine that would cast text out of molten lead, line by line.
The typesetter sits at the keyboard and types out a line of text, activating the machine, which rattles into life. The matrices – the metal pieces used to cast the type – drop down from a cabinet above and move through the machine with such precise, swift action that, by the end of the demonstration, I agree it is indeed a wonder. The typesetter had worked in a room that had 136 of them, noisily churning out the daily news. You were paid by the line, he told me, and if the machine malfunctioned you had to ring a bell that would bring the mechanic over to fix it. All major newspapers had rooms of linotype machines, like this one from around 1930, at the Sydney Morning Herald.
So I continue around the museum, seeing each of the machines in action. The largest of the presses, the Wharfedale Press, had begun the museum’s collection, along with other machines that had printed the Nepean Times, a local paper that had ceased operation in the 1960s. The inventor of the Wharfedale, the printer told me, would, when he was devising it, wake up in the night and sketch out ideas for the mechanism on his bedhead. Printers, I note, are drawn to details and idiosyncrasies. They seem to have a great respect or even love for the machines that they operate: feeding in sheets of paper, typing out lines of text, activating the foot pedal that drives the press to make its impressions.
The museum has been here, in the green shed at the corner of the paceway, for over twenty years, and is unique in its status as a working print museum. A few days before visiting I had been alarmed to hear that, with a proposed new sports stadium development in the planning, they are threatened with eviction. While known and loved in the printing community, the museum has a quieter presence in Penrith than other attractions: the prominently signposted Museum of Fire, or the ever-growing Panthers. The museum faces an uncertain future, but for now, the machines print on.
Thank you to Stephanus, Graham, John, George and all at the Penrith Museum of Printing.
A Telex from Bankstown
Posted: July 6, 2022 Filed under: Technology, Time, Western Sydney 20 CommentsTo the north side of Bankstown station the rows of shops are under a cloak of rain, with a grey sky above. It has been a few years since I’ve last been over this way, and through the gloom of the rain I look for some of the details I remember: a ghost sign for curtains and home linens, ‘Optical House’, and the inscrutable facade of the Telstra Museum. As long as I’ve known it to be there I’ve wondered what is inside, the building’s plain appearance only heightening its mystery.
This time, I go up to the entrance, and seeing that it’s a Wednesday and the sign indicates it is open, I press the doorbell. Nothing happens for a little while, but I wait. There are few clues to it being open from the street, the windows have frosted glass and heavy grilles, which make it difficult even to see if the lights are on inside. But after a minute or so the door opens, and a museum guide welcomes me in.
Never have I been in a room with so many telephones. Immediately it is clear this is a comprehensive and loved collection of telecommunications objects, arranged by type and category, in aisles signposted ‘telephone exchanges, public telephones’, or ‘morse code, teleprinters’. Soon I’m examining a row of public telephones, pointing out to the guide the ones I remember: ah, the gold phone, phone of my teenage years.
Telephone technology has undergone constant change since its inception in the mid-nineteenth century, progressing from contraptions of wires and bells and plugs, through a series of advancements towards digital systems, a narrative documented here in the Telstra Museum through objects and ephemera.
My guide, like many of the museum’s volunteers, had worked for PMG, the Postmaster General’s Department, which handled post and telecommunications before the services were split in the 1970s, into Australia Post and Telecom. He shows me how the switchboard exchange mechanisms worked and we take up a bakelite phone each to role play a phone call as he guides me through the operation of the pyramid switchboard. Switchboard operators were generally women, who were thought to be more patient and polite for a job which required continual conversations with callers: my fumbling attempts were once actions conducted with great speed and precision.
We examine exchange equipment, morse code machines, teleprinters, and the Muirhead-Jarvis Picture Transmitter, which relayed news photographs by telegram, in a machine housed in a cabinet something like a piano, that prefigured the fax machine and the photocopier. One aisle is dedicated to domestic telephones, including a rotary dial phone in gold, which is, I see when I go up close, ‘the one millionth telephone manufactured by STC’.
Other phones have tapestry covers, or are wall mounted and in a range of colours (Powder Blue, Maize Yellow, Cinnamon). A photocopied illustration shows the Dolly Vardin cover that was fashionable in the early 1900s with those who found the sight of the telephone unattractive, a doll with a long lacy skirt, tall enough to cover over the telephone underneath.
These phones and communication devices were once regarded as new, then became everyday items, then were outmoded, to finally became museum pieces. In one section are the first mobile phones and car phones, big clunky bricks that cost many thousands of dollars in the 80s and 90s. I’m drawn to an earlier innovation, an alternative 1960s design for landline phones. The Ericofon, the guide tells me, came to be popular for use in airport operations, but they weren’t so popular in homes, because if you needed to put the phone down mid-call you had to remember to put it on its side, or else you’d hang up on the caller.
In the last row of the museum, beside a radio studio and ‘television operations centre’, is George the Speaking Clock. You have George? I ask, with a growing sense of excitement. In 2018 I wrote an essay for the Powerhouse Museum book Time and Memory, and researched 20th century methods of time keeping and recording, of which George was one. I draw closer to the machine which had once announced the current time to callers, from a series of three glass discs on which was recorded the voice of a radio announcer named Gordon (not George) Gow. One disc held the hours, one the minutes, and another the seconds, and the machine selected the correct combination of numbers according to the current time.
In the essay, I had described a call to George: “Upon calling B074, callers heard Gow’s voice cycling through the 4320 announcements that made up one day’s worth of time. At the hour, when the time announcement was followed by ‘precisely’, his voice seemed to relish the crispness of the word — indeed, the speaking clock was advertised as being accurate to within one-hundredth of a second.”
In his heyday, George attracted many thousands of calls a day, but here, in the Telstra Museum, he reads the time just for me, as the guide wakes him up for a solo performance.
Telegram stationery, pneumatic tubes, post office memorabilia, Beepa the Owl (the 1980s Telecom mascot), Telecom-patterned tableware… there was seemingly no limit to the technical and cultural ephemera of communications, and I vowed to return, another day, for a morse code demonstration and further investigation of the collection.
Like George and the Goldphone public phone, the crockery was familiar to me too. Many years ago I’d bought a Telecom teacup from an op shop, and so after navigating the wet, potholed streets back home, I settled down to warm up with a cup of tea in my own piece of telecommunications history.
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With thanks to Jeff and Bob for their museum tour and demonstrations.
Ten Years of Mirror Sydney
Posted: May 20, 2022 Filed under: Announcements | Tags: Mirror Sydney 9 CommentsTen years ago, in May 2012, I pressed ‘publish’ on the first post on this blog. With Mirror Sydney I wanted to turn a reflective eye onto the city and the suburbs, and record observations of places that were in some way out of step with the more rapaciously-changing, exclusive version of the city.
I started with a place that had been emblematic to me when I first moved into the inner city, the Camperdown Velodrome. When I came to know the velodrome, in the late 1990s, it was disused and overgrown. A few years afterwards it would be remodelled into a park and would cease to have a hold over me, but for that in-between time it carried the promise of the kinds of places I was drawn to, ones outside of the ordinary, where there was a stronger sense of the layers of time that make up the city. In its abandonment it had a sense of possibility, one shared by many places I have written about since. Such places suggest through time, and into the many versions of Sydney that co-exist, clashing and interweaving.
Mirror Sydney has become a view of the city that brings attention to what is just outside of immediate perception. This might be places hidden in plain sight, that hold some kind of resistant or subversive force, or anachronistic places that meddle with the illusion of now being only the present moment. Many of these places might be considered vanishing, or disappearing, but Mirror Sydney is as much about endurance, and persistence: what remains around us in our daily lives, in our memories, and in the stories we tell about the places that mean the most to us.
Thank you for reading and supporting Mirror Sydney in its various forms – blog, book and podcast – over the last decade, and I hope it has gone some way to inspire your own thoughts and connections with the city and its places. The Domain Expressway still runs, the ghost platform still fascinate, new contenders for the city’s ugliest building regularly arise, and there is always more to notice.
In Bexley North
Posted: May 8, 2022 Filed under: Gardens | Tags: 1964 olympics, bexley north, Gardens, the cure, Wolli Creek 18 CommentsAt the main intersection in Bexley North, traffic snarls by, lurching towards or away from the M5 on-ramp on the far side of the Wolli Creek valley. On one side of the intersection are shops, built in the 1930s, when the East Hills railway station opened and the suburb with its rows of red-brick houses came into being. On the other side is the Bexley North Hotel, a supermarket, and a row of shops with a wide carpark in front of them, hidden behind a screen of trees, lawn, and overgrown garden beds. This, a sign indicates, is Nairn Gardens.
I wasn’t paying Nairn Gardens particular attention, apart from noticing it had a substantial sign for a small, nondescript park, but as I continued on the path through the gardens, something else caught my eye. A round bronze plaque with a colourful insignia on it, on the side of a concrete structure that enclosed a row of benches. From this, I learnt that the Gardens had, in 1966, won second prize in the Sydney Morning Herald Garden Competition. I looked up, across the overgrown rockeries, a tangle of rosemary, foxtail grass, and tall conifers leaning askew, and tried to imagine the prizewinning garden hidden somewhere within it.
In 1966, it was described by the judges thus: “Much thought has been given here, with a rather difficult terrain, to produce a delightful effect which will improve even further as some of the subjects mature”, and further, “Several young poplars form an attractive background to an Olympic torch fountain, while an outstanding soulangiana magnolia and crotalaria added their charm. A well designed rock garden, with rosemary, hebes, dwarf conifers, nandinas, goldfussia, diosmas, mesembryanthemums, sedums, and alpines, gave a great permanency to the display.”
The rocks were still there, in terraced rows leading down from street level, and the rosemary and the conifers had matured into unruliness. Essentially, though, the winning garden had disappeared, apart from the plaques that commemorated the prize. It felt something like coming across a trophy in an op shop, engraved with a name and achievement, but disconnected from its champion.
The fountain had been installed with great fanfare in 1964, in commemoration of Bexley North’s Olympic medallist, the swimmer Robert Windle, who had won gold in that year’s Tokyo Olympics. The fountain had a prominent position on the corner, instantly noticeable to anyone passing by, whose attention would have been captured by the sight of a giant metal tulip, with a curtain of water cascading down from its stem, rising up out of a concrete dome into which slabs of stone were set. I like to imagine that when, in August 1980, The Cure played at the Bexley North Hotel, Robert Smith might have wandered across the carpark to contemplate the fountain’s lonely prominence on the corner.
Vanished fountain, unruly garden, the mesembryanthemums long gone. In 1995, the fountain was removed, and replaced by lawn and a row of flagpoles, and the garden’s flowers were replaced by hardier species. I sit on one of the benches and look over a palm tree in a hexagonal concrete planter, set in the cusp of the park benches as an object of contemplation. The wind blows big dry leaves from the plane trees and wisps of trash across the lawn and the path. Occasionally someone comes past, carrying a bunch of Mother’s Day flowers or a bag of shopping back to the carpark. The sky is a bright blue, with big mottled stripes of clouds cutting across it. I sit on the bench in the late-afternoon sun and watch them move and disperse, slowly changing into different shapes altogether.
Liner Notes: time travel in Five Dock
Posted: March 12, 2022 Filed under: ghost signs | Tags: five dock, ghost sign, QE2, the concorde, travel agency, wangal land 15 CommentsSigns go up in shop windows, announcing relocation, or the final sale, then the buildings stand empty. Nothing happens for a while, and it seems like maybe nothing will. But one day the demolition team arrives and begins to take the buildings down. The first thing they do is take off the awnings, so the buildings have a stripped look, pared back to the bricks. Where the awnings used to be attached a stripe of plaster, or brick, or sometimes the old signs of former businesses are revealed.
In Five Dock the strip of shops on the corner of Great North Road and East Street is the site of the new Metro station. The shops have been vacated, and the awnings removed to begin the process of demolition.
Above 163, a stretch of blue-painted sky is revealed, under which a cruise ship sails and an aeroplane lifts off. Not just any aeroplane: its distinctive wing shape and beak-like nose identify it as the luxury supersonic passenger jet, the Concorde. A trip on the Concorde was a journey like no other. Travelling at twice the speed of sound you would nevertheless be in perfect comfort, sipping French champagne. Smoked salmon and foie gras was for entree, lobster Newberg for main, and heart of palm for dessert, as you flew swift and supersonic over the ocean.
Mostly the Concorde flew the transatlantic route, between London and New York. But in 1985 the Concorde made a special record-breaking flight from London to Sydney. This was the second time a Concorde had made this journey. The first time had been for a publicity tour in 1972, when the jet was met by aviation enthusiasts as well as protesters, who carried signs that read ‘Ban the Boom’, ‘Doomsday Plane’ and ‘Atomic Fart’. Powerful jet engines and its distinctive shape gave the Concorde the ability to travel at such high speeds, but created a loud, startling sonic boom in its wake. As peaceful as it was for the passengers, on the ground below windows shook with a sound as loud and startling as an explosion.
In 1985, soon after landing, the crew were photographed on the boarding stairs holding bunches of flowers and a giant cardboard pocket watch, displaying their arrival time of 4pm, commemorating their record-breaking 17-hour flight. While this was happening, the Concorde’s passengers were transported to the harbour to start the next leg of their journey, on the QE2 cruise liner. This liner was the slow-going but sumptuous ocean equivalent of the Concorde, then the grandest, as well as one of the largest, cruise ships in the world. Fireworks and a lavish Valentines Day ball awaited them.
In Five Dock, I imagine the artist who painted the sign above the travel agency on Great North Road, up on a ladder, carefully at work, perhaps with this event in mind, and all that it promised for the future of luxury travel. The artist paints in a pale blue sky, and clouds trailing like streamers above the cruise ship. Birds flock around the ship’s hull and silhouettes of people cluster on the deck, looking over towards where the Concorde ascends. They were not to know the Concorde would only ever visit Sydney occasionally, before a devastating crash in France in 2000 would put an end to supersonic passenger travel. The skies were clear, the ocean wide.
North Sydney and the Expressway Tree
Posted: January 8, 2022 Filed under: concrete, Northern Sydney, Sydney Trees | Tags: Cammeraygal land, casuarina, north sydney, offices, trees, warringah freeway 17 CommentsWith the festive season over, decorations have almost disappeared from shop windows and front gardens. Suburban frontyard light displays have been packed away, and the dry, dead remains of Christmas trees protrude from green waste bins. The decorations that are still up seem stubborn or stale, behind the times, which have churned on into an already stressful new year.
Driving through North Sydney, I’m not yet thinking about Christmas decorations or anything much except making sure I’m in the right lane for the Arthur Street turnoff. Berry Street splits in two like ram’s horns, left to go north, right to the bridge. Choose wisely, for the Warringah Expressway awaits below. There’s an intensity to this intersection, perched as it is at the edge of the North Sydney high-rises. Here the view opens up towards the sky and the harbour and the far shore of the eastern suburbs. Below is fifteen lanes of surging motorway traffic although this is, from this high vantage point, out of sight.
I turn into the lane closest to the edge, which is hemmed in by a barrier and a railing. Beside the lane is a narrow strip of concrete, which runs the length of the road. Something glittery catches my eye. A short way along the roadside, from a crack in the concrete, against the odds, a tree is growing. It is a casuarina tree, about two metres high, roughly the shape and size of a Christmas tree. Evidently someone had noticed this, as its lower branches had been decorated with glittery plastic ribbons. What a tenacious little tree, there amid the concrete and the traffic, thriving where no tree is meant to grow.
I might have noticed the tree and keep going on my way, but instead I change lanes and travel back around the block. I park the car in a laneway between two rows of office buildings, where the mood is concrete, security cameras, and garage doors with ads for Magic Button (featuring the cheerful mascot of a magician figure in a tuxedo with a button for a head, pressing down on the top of it to release a shower of sparks).
No one much is around, a combination of it being the first week of the year and the recent huge upsurge in Covid infections. This means there’s less traffic, too, which is helpful as I dash across the road, to the siding just before the strip of pavement with the tree. Here it’s wide enough to stand to take a photo, though I feel conspicuous as the cars go past. Like the tree, here by the precipice of the motorway, I stand in an unlikely place. For a moment I take in the view of the lanes of traffic below and then the harbour, before dashing back across to safety.
Later, I look up the slices of time captured by Google Street View to follow the tree’s growth. It’s not there in November 2017, but then by the next image, October 2018, it’s a small, sturdy sapling. By November 2019 it’s up above the railing. I watch it get taller over 2020, then 2021, until the last capture in May, in which it looks much like it does now in its decorated form. I think of it growing these last four years, nourished by the sunlight and the rain, as the skies filled with bushfire smoke for months, and then the traffic dwindled as the city went through lockdowns. Maybe it was during lockdown that the person who decorated it had noticed it, in that time when local details were our comfort.
I walk the long way back to the car, deciding to look around North Sydney a little bit. My mental map of it is outdated by decades: going past on the expressway I still look up expecting to see the clock/temperature that used to be up on the side of the Konica Minolta building (then the Sunsuper building). I had a childhood association with it, where it represented for me both the high rise world of business and something closer to home: the orange numerals resembled a bedside alarm clock. A few years ago the view of it disappeared when a new gleaming glass office tower was built in front of it, but I could see it was still there, a black box high up in the top corner, visible in the gap between the buildings.
All was quiet around the offices buildings, apart from a few construction sites and removalist vans. The smokers’ courtyards were empty, and few people waited to cross at the street corners. I watched my reflection move across mirrored glass that sealed off the views into office windows. Only real estate signs gave a sense of what might be inside them.
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