June 2020
Morning walk in autumn
Snake
May 2020
From the same outing as the pretty autumn leaves, a suburban snake:
Snakes aren’t as common as the Australian mythos in which we fight a Sisyphean battle against them daily, armed only with our teeth and in some cases our Irish ancestry, but they’re also not as rare as some folks would like to be assured either. I’ve never run into one in a suburban backyard, but seeing them on farms or in the wilderness is not a surprise, and this is the second black snake I’ve seen in a botanic garden; evidently botanic gardens are just big and wild enough to sustain some non-curated predators.
This one in Auburn was definitely the most active snake I’ve ever personally seen though, it was absolutely gunning it across the path and up the hill on whatever hunting mission it was on. I wouldn’t have backed myself trying to outrun it. We paid a lot less attention to the canopy and more to the forest floor afterwards.
Auburn Botanic Gardens
May 2020
This album comes via a quick detour to update Wikipedia so that I understood how school reopenings worked in New South Wales in 2020, specifically:
From 11 May [2020], students returned to school one day a week with a plan for a phased return over several weeks. From 25 May, the phased return was replaced with full-time schooling.
Wikipedia: COVID-19 pandemic in New South Wales (2020)
I had decided in advance that when school went back — it was remote for seven weeks, and two weeks of Easter holidays — that my spouse and I would then immediately take a week off work. Thus, the week of 25 May, we went somewhere each day in Sydney to explore, of which the most photogenic was Auburn Botanic Gardens in late autumn colours.
Bondi to Bronte
October 2024
There were whales, plural, but I didn’t bring a telephoto lens.
All photos. (2018, 2015.)
Vivid’s crowd control
The crowding last night at Circular Quay for the Vivid Festival for the 9pm drone show has attracted some attention (9 News, news.com.au, someone on Reddit with the same Cahill Expressway vantage point as someone at The Age). Some people mention the Seoul Halloween crush, also at night, also on a festive occasion, in comment threads.
I was there, not for the drone show but trying to get out after a Vivid harbour cruise that finished at 8, which meant walking upstream to Wynyard against the flow of people trying to get to Circular Quay for the show, in a group of seven adults and six children all under 10. It’s the second time in my life I’ve worried about being hurt in a crowd crush.
The first time was also at Circular Quay, it was the closing night of the 2000 Olympics and fireworks were scheduled. We knew to get there early for 10pm fireworks and so sat grumpily on the footpath in the sun with others, including families, from the afternoon onwards. And it filled, and it filled, and after a while there was no sitting room, and after a while children were crying and crying, and after a while the crowd swayed back and forth in waves while people shouted “stop pushing, stop pushing”, and after a while people having panic attacks were being crowd-surfed backwards to paramedics who couldn’t get into the crowd.
There’s good coverage of crowd crushes in this 2015 article, Hajj crush: how crowd disasters happen, and how they can be avoided:
It was sunny and there wasn’t really a plan, other than to wander the streets and enjoy ourselves. Towards the end of the day, we came to a crossroads flooded with thousands of people[…] A few police were stationed behind crash barriers at the side shouting helpful things like, “Keep moving, please!” At one point I remember asking one of them how much longer this would last, only to be yelled at angrily[…] The idea that I was in danger seemed silly, and indeed some people were laughing. We were outside. There was no urgency. How could anybody die from lack of space beneath this empty sky?
Crowd crushes are often created a long way away from the disaster, by people who can still move relatively freely and are trying to get somewhere, or even being yelled at to keep moving keep moving. They aren’t aware that somewhere ahead where they can’t see, they’re pressing people into each other, or into a dead end, and if they become aware they can’t stop because of the crowd behind them.
If there had been a crowd crush last night, it might have been created by our group, trying to walk south on George St against the crowds moving north and trying to stay together despite the best efforts of children who are small enough to dart clusters of adults, or it might have been created by the sheer volume of people flowing flowing flowing out of Wynyard and heading north even when Circular Quay was already swaying body-to-body. Past a point, crowd control at events like Vivid is specialized and can be counter-intuitive (for example, you can place strategic barriers to achieve certain effects on the crowd’s movement). But there were several basics that really would have helped:
- Information for the crowds beyond “check social media” as the organisers are telling the public to do today ahead of the second drone show. Social media isn’t an emergency communications channel; both Twitter and Facebook are actively hostile to logged out site visitors. No one is going to create a Twitter account to find out how whether Wynyard is open. There needs to be easy to find up-to-date safety updates on Vivid’s own website, on the Transport NSW website, on the City of Sydney’s website, at the train stations, and on crowd control signs in the actual area.
- Some (sign-posted! discoverable!) side streets or paths held aside for people trying to go upstream. There were many people who were trying to leave either because they saw the lights earlier or because the crowd was too much for them. In particular, there were loads of prams with infants last night, that’s not going to go well for anyone if the density reaches the swaying phase. Give people a safe way to get out while there’s still the possibility.
Hideous Sydney, 2023
That One New Year’s Day
January 2020
On reflection, it makes considerable sense why I am more than two years behind on comprehensive photo processing.
The last golden hour of 2021
Ending on a high.
First dawn
October 2021
The 11th was the date when NSW stopped having a 5km travel limit, so I left home before sunrise and drove to The Gap to watch the first far-from-home dawn.
Of course, it was damp and cloudy and dark, no dawn to be seen. There’s more variety in the transforms on the photos than I usually do, because the light was so average.
It was great.
