I spied this from the balcony of one of my hotel rooms. It rang some atavistic bells... something from long ago... aha! I know what it is, the Australian Academy of Science! Many, many years ago I saw a picture of this building (in rather better shape than it is now) and was blown away by the fact that WE ACTUALLY HAD AN ACADEMY OF SCIENCE! I imagined geniuses working away exploring the universe and inventing things, and it was still a time when the cessation of Apollo was but a mere hiatus and we were all still going to live on the moon in pressure domes which looked just like this building.

Of course, it never happened that way, and there are no geniuses working away in this building at all. The Academy is merely a body which sets out to promote science, as discussed here. I'm sure that they do the best they can, but it doesn't alter the fact that we have a population who will, for the most part, look at you blankly if you were to ever utter the expression "half m v squared" even if in context.

I thought that the building (whose real name is The Shine Dome) had been constructed in the 60's - it had that "futuristic" look about it - but it in fact dates back to the 50's. It won a number of awards, though I have some doubts whether a dome is the best use of available space... or the most weather-resistant and enduring of designs.

And so none of us are living on the moon, we're getting an increasing number of financial "engineers" coming out of universities and a decreasing number of real ones, and the futuristic dome rusts away. There's an allegory in there somewhere...

(The building looks better from close up, though, as will be seen in shots to be loaded.)