If you've ever played Sim City 4, you'll be familiar with the early medium density developments. "Celia's Taco Bar". "Small Shops". "Bob's Grease Pit".

Canterbury Road, which cuts through the inner south west of Sydney, is a bit like that for most of its length. Low rent auto dealerships (though just to confuse the issue there's a gleaming chrome and glass BMW dealership between Canterbury and Campsie), fast food outlets, tyre and brake shops, car washes, lawn mower dealerships, building material suppliers, the odd low margin computer store, garish lighting warehouse showrooms... and an awful lot of businesses that have closed down over the years and are now just abandoned and decaying shopfronts with "For Lease" signs on them. Most of the strip malls have closed, having been picked off by people travelling to the larger regional shopping malls. Amazingly one major shoe factory still appears to be operating along the road despite competition from near-slave-wage Chinese imports, though some smaller industrial places like furniture manufacturers have given up and faded into the sunset. There are some residences along the road as well but given the traffic volumes most days I'd rather not live there if I had a choice, which thankfully I do.

But although it may not be the most affluent stretch of road in Sydney, it is nonetheless the central artery along which an extremely sizeable chunk of the population lives. Its look and feel deserve documenting for that reason alone, just as Hopper did for many similar places in mid 20th Century America. Not that I would compare myself to Hopper, but I'm certainly prepared to try to follow his lead given the way many of his images speak to me.

This may indeed just be an illuminated 7-11 store, a cluster of power lines and a set of traffic lights as the night gives way to a new dawn. But it sets the feel of the time and the place that forms the background to life for a large number of people, and is, I feel, worth a shutter release for that.

(And you can tell that it's the Easter weekend from the petrol price. $1.479 (and that for a 10% ethanol blend, no less) is about $US1.54 (I'm still not used to our dollar being worth more than the US one), GBP 0.93, or 1.05 Euros. I don't know how that stacks up with the rest of the world but around here we call that "pricey.")

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