Quite a few years ago I lived in the inner west suburb of Burwood, and often head back there to do my weekly shopping (as several Saturday PAD shots can attest). (Edit August 2023: Obviously that was true when I wrote that in 2010. In 2023... I couldn't say how long it has been since I was last in Burwood. Before Covid, I suspect.)
Much has changed over the years. In the post-war years (before my time there, may I add!) it was a distinctly Anglo suburb. The main shopping strip running north -> south along Burwood Road consisted of well tended shops for about half a kilometre either side of the (east -> west) railway line and station. In 1966 one of the earliest Westfield shopping centres was built at the northern end (opposite Burwood Park) but the shopping strip itself survived and continued to prosper. A second shopping centre, Burwood Plaza, was constructed just south of the rail line in the 1970's. Although closer to the station and theoretically more convenient, it has always been regarded as a bit more "low rent" than Westfield. In the 1990's Westfield was torn to the ground and completely rebuilt. Almost twice as large as the original and including a cinema multiplex the replacement seems to have changed the game, sucking the life out of the shops at the southern end of Burwood Road. Many of those are run down, in a state of disrepair, or abandoned completely. It didn't do a lot for some of the shops at the northern end either; there were once three specialist shoe stores, but all three had closed down by not long after I moved south in the early 2010s. Some of the northern shops still benefited from the "halo effect" of the Westfield, but the southern ones saw the shoppers sucked to the north, toward the Westfield vortex.
In the meantime the demographics were changing too with a large influx of Chinese residents, many of whom can be seen doing tai chi style exercises in Burwood Park of a morning. It's unsurprising then to find this statue of Confucius (551-479BC) standing in the park.
Most westerners will have heard of Confucius but not know which religion he represented, much less that... he didn't. Nor would they know that his family name was Kong, that his title of Master was "Fuzi", and that therefore Kong Fuzi was corrupted to "Confucius" for western ears. Confucianism is closer to being a system of moral secularism than a religion, focusing on ethical and moral behaviour.
The statue was donated by a number of (mainland) Chinese bodies and individuals to commemorate the 35th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Australia and the P.R.C. in 2007. The worthies of the local council ensured that they all had their own names inscribed on the plinth, but the artist who created it isn't named. We have to keep the priorities right when it comes to assigning credit for the creation of something, obviously. I wonder what Confucius would have said about that?
I had just finished taking shots of the statue and had packed the camera into my backpack when the sun broke through the clouds and hit it. "Oh thank you very much", I muttered, getting the camera back out again since I knew that the new morning light was an order of magnitude better than what I had before. If only the clouds came with a remote control...
