This is Rhodes at 6:00 AM, early Spring, when it was still hot. Hard to believe it's a post-industrial wasteland. That water is so toxic they won't allow fishing in it. If I rotated the camera 180 degrees you'd see a shopping mall & office block with no redeeming architectural merit. Truly, happiness in life is the product of tunnel vision, partial blindness and the ability to see the world like a salesman desperate for the first commission of the month.
The dawn haze is probably dust & fumes from the out of shot freeway. Still looks nice though, doesn't it.
More selective viewing from the Tempe Motor Boat Association moorings.
No sign of the airport, the Princes Highway. It's a beautiful piece of the world, strangely. Hard to see, but unmistakably there once seen. Because Liz and I are
down here regularly, I like to find new things to see. The red is quite striking, in contrast with the white, and the surface of the water belies the famous Cooks River toxins. There's no wind, and that makes the reflection particularly appealing.
This has apeared at Garrison Point recently (which I think I've mentioned elsewhere, and was the location of my second cycling video). It's a very striking piece about the relationship between indigenous and colonised; it looks like it is intended to appear kinetic while not actually moving - certainly the wind was strong enough to make any reasonably balanced and bearing'ed windmill turn, and this has an interior that looks like an axle. However, it's is seriously solid. Maybe it needs a hurricane (Hornsby had tornado recently, so it's not impossible). Maybe it need a wind strong enough to evict the colonisers...
Also seen at Garrison Point was this guy, stalking around somewhat tentatively. It's a masked lapwing, so far as I know. Part of the chain of reserves along the Georges river through this part of Sydney is Lake Gillawarna, which is an extraordinary reserve, densely packed with a few species of the larger water birds. Ibis, mainly, which are a bit of a pest although you can't blame them for adapting successfully to techno-urban living. It's not like it was their idea to invent garbage bins and concentrate all the water is limited areas. But I'm sure they make it tough on smaller birds. (Speaking of which, I took a bunch of the students along the TVT from Bardwell Park to Tempe Station; we were luck to see a
couple of red-browed firetails - although they were moving too quickly for photographs, so I wouldn't argue with anyone who said different).
Finally, a tap. I may have finally got the manual aperture to work on my way-too-automatic camera, because this has the exact shallow depth of field I was looking for. I like taps. I took a very similar picture at Tallowa Dam, as I recall. Below is the opposite shot, although this was an accident with the auto focus. I'm sure there's art in the combination of them, somehow.
