A lo fi visual diary
Whilst we have been holidaying at Victor Harbor, South Australia, Ari and I have been wandering around the streets of the town on our early morning poodlewalks. The early morning light in winter lightens up the town’s architecture.
When walking around this coastal town I can see it changing from a rural/holiday town to a tourist one. It is kept very clean and tidy by the council and it wins tidy town awards.
The household has been based at Encounter Bay, Victor Harbor for the last week or so whilst Suzanne is on holidays. We’ve been making the occasional trip to Adelaide. It’s a reversal of what we normally do, and a precursor of what will happen when we sell the townhouse and shift to Encounter Bay in 2015. We’ve been living in the CBD for 10 years or more and it is time to shift to a different mode of life.
So the poodle walks in the CBD have been limited.
We are leaving at a time when the area around Sturt St/King William St is starting to be redeveloped with new office blocks and a high rise apartments. The city is finally starting to look different.
When Ari and I were walking Adelaide’s CBD last week I couldn’t help but notice the asylum seeker street art of Peter Drews scattered around the city. I only saw about 4-5 of the 36 that Drews had put up over a period of two weeks in early June. Some property owners were not pleased.
The posters are simply constructed around the individual stories of refugees and asylum seekers, both in detention and on bridging visas, that subvert the politicised stereotypes in the “stop the boats” narrative in main stream media.
Ari and I are at Victor Harbor whilst Suzanne is in Brisbane for a week. The southern coastline of the Fleurieu Peninsula and Adelaide has been hit by storms from the south west. It has been wet and cold.
The early morning and late afternoon walks have been between the rain squalls. We have to be quick as the fine weather (no rain) doesn’t last for very long.
In the last week or so Ari and I on our afternoon poodle walks have been wandering around the north western part of Adelaide’s CBD near the western campus of the University of South Australia. This is an area of the CBD that is marked for substantial re-development flowing from the new Royal Adelaide Hospital and the associated buildings that are currently being built.
There is little sign of the promised residential re-development happening:
The theory is that people will want to live in the area when they work in the hospital/university precinct. More people in the area leads to small businesses to provide services for the residents, workforce and students. All I can see is lots of car parks not high rise residential towers.
Ari and I wandered around Port Adelaide after I had coffee with Dani McLean at the Red Lime Shack. The Ball of Light exhibition by Denis Smith at the Forge Warehouse wasn’t open so I took the opportunity to see what was happening with the redevelopment of the Port.
The Sawtooth building has a photo by Dani of its interior stuck on its outside wall:
Nothing much has happened in terms of redevelopment.
Many of the gracious old heritage builds in the Port stand empty with no tenants. Urban Construct, the developer of the new apartment buildings along the river, has gone leaving the redevelopment unfinished. The government had stripped Urban Construct of its contract to develop the Newport Quays precinct in October 2011.
As Ari and I wander around the CBD I cannot help but noticing how lively the city of Adelaide is becoming as a result of the state Labor government and the Adelaide City Council’s attempts to make the CBD a more vibrant place to live.
So it is with some dismay that I read the two Liberal candidates for Lord Mayor–Mark Hamilton and Michael Henningsen— are intent on rolling back the gains because we have lost our pride in Adelaide.
Between them these two candidates want more cars in the city; they want to do away with bike and bus lanes; they are opposed to high rise apartments; see the attempts to make the CBD a more vibrant place (eg., the upgrade to Victoria Square) as flawed and self-indulgent; and they want to return council to refocus on repairing the streets i.e. to focus on the traditional roads, rates and rubbish.
On a recent poodlewalk Ari and I stumbled upon a trail of pavement art that started from the Sturt St Community School. We followed it along Wilcox St to the children’s playground on South Terrace in the southern part of the Adelaide parklands. I would expect that the trail of brightly painted insects would be very popular with the local community.
Since Sturt St was where the trial of a separated bicycle lane was a failure it was good to see something to liven up the neglected south western corner of Adelaide.
It was quite foggy in the Adelaide early this morning when Ari and I went walking around the CBD. As most of the car parks are closed early on a Sunday morning it was difficult to find an elevated view of the CBD. We eventually found one with the lifts working, and I was able to take a few snaps before the fog lifted.
The fog didn’t last that long once the sun rose above the Adelaide Hills.
Adelaide’s traffic congestion has been steadily increasing over the past decade and it will continue to do so over the next decade. The problem is that there are too many cars on the roads. The RAA’s solution is to build bigger and better arterial roads whilst the Property Council’s main policy appears to be to not have a car park tax. Adelaide’s city property sector often ties cheap car parking to successful commercial and retail models.
Both solutions increase Adelaide’s dependency on cars and ignore how congestion would be a disaster for the city economy and social well-being of its residents. It is often quite unpleasant to walk around the city on a poodle walk.
The city of Adelaide supports a heavily car dependent metropolitan workforce, in fact it is one of the most car dependent in the western world whilst its car parking is the cheapest and most plentiful by far of Australia’s major capitals.