I came upon Federation Square before I was aware of it.
I began to wonder as I began to pass these very asymmetrical glass shapes, windows, walls, if I had wandered into it. (How I could have just wandered into it, how it could have simply resembled … slate-grey … shops?) As I walked on to the end of the building and found the open space on the west side of the complex which led around to the river, I realized that Federation Square really was what I had come upon: the architectural wonder I'd read about on the net, four or five storeys high, asymmetrically designed in ways not possible until the twenty-first century. I was standing on, over, above, the old Jolimont railway yards.
This open space made no sense to me. The Advertiser sound-shell on the southern bank of the Torrens was my model for public event space – grassy slope shaped like an amphitheatre, the slope all but imperceptible as you stepped onto it, steeper further in, designed to tip the sightlines onto the stage; and the gentle coloured fountain in the river, lit by sequenced, rotating, water-diffused spotlights, the colours deepening as the daylight faded.
This area had no shape, no focus, no real seating; it was hung with huge flat screens, the antithesis of communal gathering, an eating area and handicraft stalls. I turned and went back the way I had come, into the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (successor to the State Film Centre, two doors down from a high-end jeweller), but had no money for the special exhibits. The seating for the short-display documentaries – museum benches – was designed to move us on; the instructions for running the films were incomprehensible. I went to the Ladies' Room, steep and deep to get to, the temperature dropped a lot – and found the dark slate and dark paint décor in narrow passageways very like entering a grave.
Increasingly angry / dismayed / disheartened, I saw another way to the river, past the lozenges of the east glass wall. Facing the river, south, I found the paving stones from the Kimberleys underfoot, every shade of red from shell-tinged beige to burgundy and maroon. Directly across the river the Rowing Club's boatshed stood, a pale, pale yellow. I suddenly wanted to be there, next to plain wood and simple lines and unpretentious dimensions.
I turned to my right and continued my circumnavigation.
On Federation Square's western side, across St. Kilda Road from the Flinders Street station, I came to that odd communal space again; walking into it suddenly, my mind preoccupied with understanding the overall layout, I registered, found myself blinking and in the act of forgetting a fugitive silver flash. Beyond a cascading brain event I shouldn't have seen a silver flash. I turned back and found I'd just stepped past a row of lightweight cardboard face-masks, some of the current Australian cricket team, mounted on the short metal posts meant to separate the food-cart area from the more Forum-like area. The cricketers were due to appear at that very spot in a few days. The flash had been underlying metal of a post glinting through the eyehole, a hungry, malign, metal god.
I recognized the kids in their 20s who were working on this publicity stunt: they work in Portland for every company staging a free film preview with quizzes, t-shirts, prizes. They're all all a-buzz, on short-term contract and a second's notice; they all want to break into one part or another of the entertainment-publicity complex; they all function on high-octane fear. I was appalled to see this kind of hyperinsecurity here; Oz had been one of the most highly unionized countries in the First World.
Walking into this space again was the last of my circle. Looking east, into its continuation, the Forum-like space was surrounded by buildings, sinister blocks of black topped by satellite dishes and microwave towers. One red lantern stood at one black window, declaring a Chinese restaurant. That seemed to be its only window. I could imagine it: interior, lacquered, stifling.
By then I'd had enough. I walked across the road and took a photo of the complex from the Young & Jackson's corner. It was the noon light, I suppose; the whole thing looked, not like concrete, but like sagging cardboard.
But it was the holes that got to me, nagged at me – the strange holes in the concrete façade of Federation Square, in the sagging skin, the fabric, the outer protective layer. The odd holes. The deliberate, constructed, odd … holes.
Holes in the banknotes. When the same friend took me to the bank to cash a traveller's cheque they gave me pieces of paper with holes in them. Plastic-filled holes, to be sure, but things with gashes in their fabric nonetheless. To prevent counterfeiting, the friend said; the new designs being so complex they're easily mimicked (the shape of the hole in the $5 note a flying bird within a superimposed circle, the design inside the circle a eucalypt flower and leaves). There were holes in the currency, in a thing where you need the appearance and reality of solidity banknotes being national PR documents, even more than postage stamps.
Holes in the facades of many of the buildings around Federation Square, in Flinders Street and Little Collins Street. They were surrounded by scaffolding, being repaired, I suppose – how much repair could all those recent-looking buildings need? – but looking in the meantime like rotting financial structures, and at their feet the overtopped and bandaged churches, the modern-looking but uncomfortable seats, the idea of public amenity.
Holes in the social fabric. A disproportionate number of poor, for a rich country… Even in 1981 the estimation for people needing government subsidy for something or other was close to 30%.... and now, just as in the U.S., a man asleep or unconscious at the foot of one of the great office towers in Queen Street is both noticed and ignored, is deftly stepped around; at his knee the puddled lake of a pale, Caucasian hand.
Hole in the ozone layer. At its most extensive stretching over Uruguay and southern Victoria. The sky is rotting, Wm. Gibson mordantly observed at Powell's, in 2000.
The allegedly porous border (imitation is the sincerest form), the hole that was no hole, was a distraction, a constructed displacement-activity and -anxiety.
The hole that didn't exist was there to disguise the holes that did, that were and are being gouged in the social, economic, and ethical structures of the country and the earth's protective skin. This hole stood in place of the rest just as banning smoking in or near all public property had come to stand in place of reducing pollution.
The hole that still doesn’t exist deflects public attention from real and urgent and desperate problems; it forestalls agitation and protest; it makes legislation not drafted by and for vast and interlocking vested interests, all but impossible.
I began to wonder as I began to pass these very asymmetrical glass shapes, windows, walls, if I had wandered into it. (How I could have just wandered into it, how it could have simply resembled … slate-grey … shops?) As I walked on to the end of the building and found the open space on the west side of the complex which led around to the river, I realized that Federation Square really was what I had come upon: the architectural wonder I'd read about on the net, four or five storeys high, asymmetrically designed in ways not possible until the twenty-first century. I was standing on, over, above, the old Jolimont railway yards.
This open space made no sense to me. The Advertiser sound-shell on the southern bank of the Torrens was my model for public event space – grassy slope shaped like an amphitheatre, the slope all but imperceptible as you stepped onto it, steeper further in, designed to tip the sightlines onto the stage; and the gentle coloured fountain in the river, lit by sequenced, rotating, water-diffused spotlights, the colours deepening as the daylight faded.
This area had no shape, no focus, no real seating; it was hung with huge flat screens, the antithesis of communal gathering, an eating area and handicraft stalls. I turned and went back the way I had come, into the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (successor to the State Film Centre, two doors down from a high-end jeweller), but had no money for the special exhibits. The seating for the short-display documentaries – museum benches – was designed to move us on; the instructions for running the films were incomprehensible. I went to the Ladies' Room, steep and deep to get to, the temperature dropped a lot – and found the dark slate and dark paint décor in narrow passageways very like entering a grave.
Increasingly angry / dismayed / disheartened, I saw another way to the river, past the lozenges of the east glass wall. Facing the river, south, I found the paving stones from the Kimberleys underfoot, every shade of red from shell-tinged beige to burgundy and maroon. Directly across the river the Rowing Club's boatshed stood, a pale, pale yellow. I suddenly wanted to be there, next to plain wood and simple lines and unpretentious dimensions.
I turned to my right and continued my circumnavigation.
On Federation Square's western side, across St. Kilda Road from the Flinders Street station, I came to that odd communal space again; walking into it suddenly, my mind preoccupied with understanding the overall layout, I registered, found myself blinking and in the act of forgetting a fugitive silver flash. Beyond a cascading brain event I shouldn't have seen a silver flash. I turned back and found I'd just stepped past a row of lightweight cardboard face-masks, some of the current Australian cricket team, mounted on the short metal posts meant to separate the food-cart area from the more Forum-like area. The cricketers were due to appear at that very spot in a few days. The flash had been underlying metal of a post glinting through the eyehole, a hungry, malign, metal god.
I recognized the kids in their 20s who were working on this publicity stunt: they work in Portland for every company staging a free film preview with quizzes, t-shirts, prizes. They're all all a-buzz, on short-term contract and a second's notice; they all want to break into one part or another of the entertainment-publicity complex; they all function on high-octane fear. I was appalled to see this kind of hyperinsecurity here; Oz had been one of the most highly unionized countries in the First World.
Walking into this space again was the last of my circle. Looking east, into its continuation, the Forum-like space was surrounded by buildings, sinister blocks of black topped by satellite dishes and microwave towers. One red lantern stood at one black window, declaring a Chinese restaurant. That seemed to be its only window. I could imagine it: interior, lacquered, stifling.
By then I'd had enough. I walked across the road and took a photo of the complex from the Young & Jackson's corner. It was the noon light, I suppose; the whole thing looked, not like concrete, but like sagging cardboard.
But it was the holes that got to me, nagged at me – the strange holes in the concrete façade of Federation Square, in the sagging skin, the fabric, the outer protective layer. The odd holes. The deliberate, constructed, odd … holes.
Holes in the banknotes. When the same friend took me to the bank to cash a traveller's cheque they gave me pieces of paper with holes in them. Plastic-filled holes, to be sure, but things with gashes in their fabric nonetheless. To prevent counterfeiting, the friend said; the new designs being so complex they're easily mimicked (the shape of the hole in the $5 note a flying bird within a superimposed circle, the design inside the circle a eucalypt flower and leaves). There were holes in the currency, in a thing where you need the appearance and reality of solidity banknotes being national PR documents, even more than postage stamps.
Holes in the facades of many of the buildings around Federation Square, in Flinders Street and Little Collins Street. They were surrounded by scaffolding, being repaired, I suppose – how much repair could all those recent-looking buildings need? – but looking in the meantime like rotting financial structures, and at their feet the overtopped and bandaged churches, the modern-looking but uncomfortable seats, the idea of public amenity.
Holes in the social fabric. A disproportionate number of poor, for a rich country… Even in 1981 the estimation for people needing government subsidy for something or other was close to 30%.... and now, just as in the U.S., a man asleep or unconscious at the foot of one of the great office towers in Queen Street is both noticed and ignored, is deftly stepped around; at his knee the puddled lake of a pale, Caucasian hand.
Hole in the ozone layer. At its most extensive stretching over Uruguay and southern Victoria. The sky is rotting, Wm. Gibson mordantly observed at Powell's, in 2000.
The allegedly porous border (imitation is the sincerest form), the hole that was no hole, was a distraction, a constructed displacement-activity and -anxiety.
The hole that didn't exist was there to disguise the holes that did, that were and are being gouged in the social, economic, and ethical structures of the country and the earth's protective skin. This hole stood in place of the rest just as banning smoking in or near all public property had come to stand in place of reducing pollution.
The hole that still doesn’t exist deflects public attention from real and urgent and desperate problems; it forestalls agitation and protest; it makes legislation not drafted by and for vast and interlocking vested interests, all but impossible.
Poor fellow, my country.
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