Docklands: Site interrogation

In the lost hours of the night, the Docklands is like a set of long, cold fingers searching a deep pocket for food, water, warmth and companionship. Security guards - solitary figures in solemn contemplation - provide protection for fleet footed gangs of rats to forage and fill their ample bellies from the exhuberant leftovers of their human inferiors. Footsteps are compressed by the singularity of their sound, as if the ground is covered in fresh snow. The lights in apartment windows are on, night and day, making it hard to judge whether people are sleeping or merely waiting patiently for the sun to rise. Certainly many buildings idle quietly, echoing the distant flight paths and car passings from people living their lives elsewhere. Liquid constellations waver slowly on the satin-black surface of the still-waters, hugging the ramparts of buildings like a snake calmly asphyxiating its prey, revealing nothing of the life that keeps its cold blood circulating. In the dark open spaces, words and syllables from the day’s conversations hang about, re-organizing themselves into more intelligent, less impulsive responses, righting the wrongs of passive minds and lazy tongues. Sculptures - ‘public art’ -  appear out of the silence like coy somnambulists invading someone else’s dreams, neither lost nor at home, uncomprehendingly enduring. If there was a time and place for people, objects and spaces to dissappear, be forgotten, merge with the night, then it would be here beneath the hunched shoulders of hastily erected buildings whose silhouettes fall haphazardly on empty pedestrian crossings. Traffic lights keep each other company, beating contrapuntal melodies that distort the tuning of ‘real’ time. Embattled phone-booths breathe in the frugal glitter from random stars. A cigarette glows but the face remains veiled. In the wandering  hours between late-night and early-morning, the Docklands resembles a sensory deprivation tank: the hallucinations of the blind, the deaf, the lonely and the hungry, emanating across the infinite depths of a black serpent whose belly will soon swell with the ill-conceived structures of the whole city.   

Come, my little ladybug

let us court the perfection of geometry

music is light and windows are the eyes:

eyes that sing.

Business is the beating heart,

the middle-man

the active woman,

filling in the shadows of darker freedoms.

Burning the script/unshivering the past,

saving for the future and selling our dreams;

rainbows of electricity,

children are the colours that make modern architecture

    Proposed Public Monuments for Docklands

#1: "Every man must have his Master"

   #2: "The Crash"

#3: "Time will leave its mark"

"More food, less wind, no football dickheads, no more malls!"

"We fish here pretty often. We caught 4 or 5 bream. Its alright. Sometimes you catch eels, but they say you can only eat one a month, you know, mercury poisoning. In Croatia you can't catch fish anymore, they eat them all. There's no birds there either, they eat them too. I been here 45 years, more than in Croatia. One night I was walking m dog and the young kid calls me a fucking wog. I tell him I've been here longer than you, I am more Australian than you."