Updated, September 2023. I had originally written that this is "An unexceptional picture, I grant you. Its sole purpose is to explain the context of one of the entries in my Show and Tell Personal Edition gallery..."

That gallery is now dead, though perhaps not quite as dead as the PBase competition that inspired it. The image that linked here has been given its own description.

I thought so little of this image that I had placed it in a gallery called the Salon des Refusés, but upon further reflection while it's not a great image, it does have a slight historical significance looked at from 16 years into the future.

It shows Metcalfe Park in Pyrmont. To the left we have some wooden sculptures on which there is very little information readily available. Apparently they were created by a landscape architect and artist named Anton James.

This area was once surrounded by working docks and wharves. The sculptures symbolise those wharves.They represent the kinds of buffers that you can still see at the end of some docks to act as a buffer between ships and the land beyond.

The historical significance part is in the background on the right. A new (at the time) office building was being constructed, and those cranes were delivering material to the site. That would become 48 Pirrama Road. I thought it had been there for the whole of my time in Pyrmont but I can see now that it wasn't. It would initially become the headquarters for the computing consultancy firm Accenture, which was once part of Arthur Andersen though I'm sure nobody mentions that these days. (Arthur Andersen was the accounting firm that went down with Enron in the early 2000s after... well, look up the case for yourself, if you wish.)

I usually think of the principle "nothing is forever" when I'm documenting places that might disappear... but shots like these remind me that "nothing HAS BEEN forever either", however much a part of the environmental furniture a place may become.

As mentioned in other shots from this time period, a lot of these shots were done at lunch time; not the best time (light-wise) to be out there, but you take what you can get. In summer, the heat and the haze from the humidity should be clearly visible in many of the shots. You can see the way it helps obscure the buildings in the CBD, far beyond, including the towers of Darling Park (directly in front), where I once worked.