Wurrungwuri - On the side of the water

Wurrungwuri was officially installed this time last year. It is a gift from a private citizen, to the citizens of Sydney, and is located along the fence-line of Government House in the Royal Botanic Gardens.


It is composed of two, apparently separate, but conceptually cohesive, components. The sandstone blocks are a cascading wave heading towards Farm Cove. The monolith consists of about 16,000 quartz pebbles.

The sign, built into the monolith, is duplicated from a rare shield of the Cadigal peoples, the original inhabitants of the area, pre European settlement.


I have included, after my photographs, an animation from the Wurrungwurri web-site. It is amazing to see the concepualisation of the sculptor, Chris Booth. It is available on U-Tube, so I figure no copyright is being breached. Do watch this animation. The engineering is astounding.

This is my contribution to the Signs Signs community.

Don't even dare breathe ...

Many of these little symbols are meant to be 'universal'. I am not sure whether they are the same all over the world, but they are universally bossy!

The top photograph is in the underpass at Broadmeadow Station, Newcastle. The lower photograph is on the shores of Catalina Bay, Lake Macquarie.

This is my contribution to the Signs Signs community.

A sign of affirmation!

Quite keen to get their contact details across, thought I. So they must be on the lookout for new members, if not of the swim club, then of the drink club!


The Bondi Icebergs Club commenced in 1929. They pride themselves on being a 'winter' swimming club. When my grandmother moved to Bondi in 1956, this end of the beach was referred to as 'the bogey hole'. The club was there, but not as dominant as it has become of late. Their junior swim club is the Bondi Icecubes. That is the Pacific Ocean we are gazing out upon!

This is my contribution to the Signs Signs community.

People make the world go around

Whilst mooching around waiting to have coffee with friends who are down for the week from the North Coast, I headed over to the old Camperdown Cemetery which is huddled around St Stephen's in Newtown. I think this intersection could be called 'busy' even with no human activity whatsoever! Not sure I would have a lot of confidence riding a bike around that corner.

Public domain reading

Reading is an instinctive habit, bordering on the subliminal. Advertising, by its very nature, takes advantage of this. Everywhere one goes in a city, a person is reading all the time. It is not just the noise of a city that is tiring, not just the hustling pavement, the on-again, off-again of lights and heaving traffic. It is all the reading that one has to do.


Reading is interpreting marks on a myriad of surfaces. And nowadays, not just the marks themselves but the font those marks are printed in. Take the noble 'ampersand'.

I was stooging around waiting for 4pm one day last week, when the Angus & Coote ampersand font sowed the seed for this post. Beautiful, isn't it? And Wikipaedia tells me that this mark is a ligature of the letters 'et' which ingratiated itself into the English language around 1837. Interesting the use of around to describe such a specific year.

Here are a few 'and per se and's in assorted fonts.