Category: Sydney

Posted on

Poorly-handled rabbit incident at Circular Quay library

Customs House (Detail)Earlier today I saw something which shouldn’t have happened. Rather than walk away, I said something about it. And rather than leave it there, I sent this email to the City of Sydney. I also tweeted it. I’ll let you know how it goes.

[Update: On Thursday I received an email from the City of Sydney’s security operations manager, saying there would be “an internal investigation into this matter”.]

This is a complaint.

Two hours ago [at the time of writing] I saw an older man chucked out of the Circular Quay library for the heinous crime of trying to take a photograph with his pet rabbit. It was poorly handled. This is not on.

I’ve already discussed this with the staff member involved, but I could tell he just wanted me to go away. So I’m putting this on record, and I’m hoping it’ll lead to actual change rather than a boilerplate bureaucratic response. Please don’t disappoint me.

I’ll start at the beginning…

Around 4.45pm on Tuesday, I was leaving the library when I saw a man set down his rabbit on the corner of the 3D city model. It was a big rabbit, clean and well-behaved, with smooth orange-brown fur. It was a good rabbit, a rabbit that anyone would be proud to own. I stopped to watch.

As the man stepped back to take a photograph of his bunny friend with the model city in the background, a staff member approached. The security guy. I didn’t catch the beginning of the conversation, but the security guy stood close in front of the man, a metre away with the rabbit between them, in a stance which said “I am in control and you will obey me”.

It was clear to me that the man was confused, if nothing else because English wasn’t his first language. Was the problem walking on the glass floor? There were signs indicating it was wet, and a hazard. Was it photography? Was it the rabbit?

It was also clear to me that the man was being compliant. He was trying to understand the request and, once he understood that he had to leave, to leave at his own pace, keeping the rabbit calm while he moved to collect the bag in which he’d been carrying it.

Each time the man paused, however, the security guy stepped forward into his personal space. His body language was aggressive, the tone of his voice ever more assertive. This continued as the man slowly left the building, the security guy continually pressing forward into his personal space. It was clear that the man was frustrated by this constant pressure.

If I had to paraphrase the conversation, it would be like this:

Man: OK, I’m leaving.
Security guy: You have to leave now.
[repeat]

As the man stepped down onto the plaza, he turned, and for the first time in this entire encounter he raised his voice in frustration. “I’ll never see you again,” he said, not understanding why he was being pursued, then a few words I didn’t hear.

“Fuck you,” he finally said, before walking away.

The rabbit expressed no opinion.

Here’s what I think is wrong with all this…

There was simply no need whatsoever for aggressive policing by the security guy. He disagrees with me on the word “aggressive”, but stepping into the personal space of someone half your size, and staying there, is an aggressive act.

Once the man had finally understood what was required of him, and he was walking from the building, there was no need for close pursuit. The security guy could’ve just stood back and watch him leave. He didn’t seem to have anything else to do at the time.

I decided to confront the security guy about this. I spoke with him near the front desk. Two staff members witnessed it, but they said they didn’t see the incident itself.

The security guy pointed out that there’s a no-animals policy. Fair enough. But one brown rabbit is hardly an existential threat. There was no need for this situation to be rushed, let alone dealt with so aggressively.

It was just a rabbit, for God’s sake!

He also said that the man was intoxicated. I have no idea whether he was or wasn’t. That hadn’t been part of the conversation between them. But even if he was intoxicated, so what? Yes, he should be asked to leave, but why add pressure to an until-then harmless situation?

He also said that the man had been abusive. Yes, but only once, and only after he’d been under continuous pressure.

I wonder how this all might have gone if the person with the rabbit had been a child or tourist, rather than an older man with limited English.

I wonder whether a better way of handling this might have been to say, with a smile, “Mate, you can’t have a rabbit in here. Take the photo quickly, but then you’ll have to take the rabbit outside.” It would have made a cute photo, and it wouldn’t have harmed anyone.

To be clear, the security guy was nowhere near being violent or even abusive. I’m not making that kind of accusation.

But far too often we see an escalation of aggression in situations which present no risk of harm, or even of inconvenience, to anyone but the police or security personnel involved. These are the situations which turn a simple eviction into a fight, or an arrest into a fatal shooting.

The causes are usually a lack of patience, and a personal need by police or security personnel to feel that their commands are being obeyed promptly, rather let the situation unfold at its natural pace.

This was one of those cases. A tiny one, to be sure, but it’s still something that I think we should speak out against.

It was just a rabbit, for God’s sake!

Thanks for your time. I look forward to your response.

Stilgherrian

[Photo: Customs House (Detail). The facade of Customs House at Circular Quay, Sydney. This building houses the Circular Quay branch of the City of Sydney Library, amongst other things, photographed on 14 February 2018. Note: This version of the text corrects a some typing errors.]

Posted on

Sydney Harbour “giant gambling den” bullshit reportage

Map showing "giant gambling den in relation to Sydney Harbour: click to embiggen“Is A Billionaire Former Scientologist Shaping Sydney Harbour Into A Giant Gambling Den?”, asked the headline in an email this morning from The Global Mail. Is he? Let’s see!

The story in TGM, the philanthropic media project of Graeme Wood, also a key investor in The Guardian’s forthcoming Australian edition, is obviously about plans by James Packer to build a casino at Sydney’s Barangaroo development.

The proposal is controversial, certainly. But Sydney Harbour becoming a “giant gambling den”? FFS! If it’s not immediately obvious why this is complete bullshit, I’ve drawn a picture for you. A special kind of picture called a “map”.

The black bit is Sydney Harbour, traced from Google Maps. The red bit is the entire proposed casino complex, assuming this report in the Sydney Morning Herald is still roughly correct. You might have to click through to the full-size map to see the red bit.

Sydney Harbour is clearly not becoming a “giant gambling den”. Sydney Harbour will be changed in a way that will be barely noticeable, at least if your global perspective manages to make it any further west than Glebe Point Road. And I’d have thought that the intelligent, well-educated people at TGM would be able to figure that out for themselves.

We were told that The Global Mail was about “quality journalism”, but apparently it’s just another in a long series of comfortable colour supplements for Sydney’s whining middle class, with bonus points for waving the good ol’ Scientology scare-stick.

The story itself is by Nick Bryant, whose work I like. He’s got a biography of Packer coming out, so I assume the article — which I haven’t read yet — is an extract from that book and somewhat better than the promotion it’s been burdened with suggests. I’ll let you know once I’ve read it.

Posted on

Wankitecture Sydney: why bother?

These architectural features on Cumberland Street in The Rocks, Sydney, look quite lovely I suppose — until you stop, look and think. Then you’ll realise they’re completely pointless. They’re an architectural wank. Wankitecture.

The things with the red canopies look like they’re some sort of, well, canopies to protect people from sun and rain. But they’re positioned such that they offer no protection whatsoever to the benches and picnic tables. No, the benches and picnic tables sit fully exposed to the elements. The only things the things with the red canopies protect are bleak patches of pavement.

Continue reading “Wankitecture Sydney: why bother?”

Posted on

Mix 106.5, fuck off your sky spam!

Skywriting has to be one of the lowest forms of advertising, no different from an attention-seeking teenager scrawling his tag over every flat surface within reach. So I guess it’s only appropriate that the low-brow arsehats of commercial radio reckon it’s a good look.

I’ve met commercial radio executives. They’re not the sort of people you’d want to have dinner with, let alone leave with your pets unattended. Like so many who’ve congealed into the uppermost scum layers of the broadcast media cesspool, they’re arrogant beyond belief, filled with their own sense of self-importance.

Writing in The Observer yesterday, John Naughton reckons this attitude is understandable, if no longer acceptable.

What always struck me about [TV’s] senior executives — in both the commercial and public sector — was how smug and self-satisfied they seemed. In a way, this was understandable: they were masters of a particular universe, rulers of a medium that dominated the information ecosystem, dictated the political agenda, and determined the daily habits of a large chunk of the population. At that time, the most powerful apparatchiks in the BBC and ITV were the schedulers — the planners who designed ways of holding the attention of a mass audience. Their craft included tricks like not scheduling some things against stronger competitors; making sure that one had a follow-on that would keep audiences from switching channels over the 9pm watershed; winning the ratings war over the Christmas period and so on. Watching them at work, one realised that effectively they were playing chess –– and that the pawns in their arcane games were the viewers.

Embedded in the corporate DNA of push media like broadcast television is the assumption that viewers are, if not exactly idiots, then passive consumers. The deal is that they receive gratefully what we, the broadcasters, decide to create.

The same for radio. The same tricks to keep listeners from changing that dial before the next 15-minutes ratings measurement slot starts. The same arrogance.

And double same for Australian commercial radio, whose executives grew fat and lazy through the 1990s as they traded metropolitan broadcast licenses for tens of millions of dollars and their testosterone-filled 4WDs cruised the suburbs handing out largesse to the proles. The rumbling and whooshing and laser zaps and deep booming voices of their station promos underlined their self-image as intergalactic heroes.

Broadcast radio is threatened, of course, especially that which does little more than play music now that everyone has a gadget in their pocket that can play whatever music they want, when they want.

It’s becoming even more threatened now that those gadgets are connected to the grid, where they can figure out for themselves what new music we might want to listen to and download it automatically. Or hook into any audio stream on the planet, including those that we and our friends create for ourselves without the help of the music director’s computer-based music scheduling system. You know the one, the one that says it’s 8.50am so we must therefore listen to an up-tempo track from 1996 with a female vocalist, because in the last hour we’ve already had 75% male vocals and instrumentals.

How much are we paying that music director, anyway, when iTunes does the same job for free?

So in the face of this challenge, what is Mix 106.5 FM in Sydney doing to shape its future?

Smoke-pissing its frequency across the sky of one of the world’s most beautiful cities. Ruining that beauty, not just for those vast migrating commuting herds who might conceivably want to listen simultaneous to exactly the same sequence of songs by Diesel, Rihanna and Nickelback as everyone else in the city — yes, that’s what they’re playing right now, inspiring eh? — interspersed with forced cheerfulness, lowest-common-denominator inanities from a B-list comedian and, of course, advertising. Advertising that for the most part hasn’t thought of a more sophisticated strategy to grab our interest than shouting at us.

This sky spam, this moronic vandalism on a glorious summer’s morning just makes you look even more out of touch, Mix 106.5. Just fuck right off. And no, I’m not linking to you.

[Photo: More sky spam by sylmobile, taken just a few minutes ago.]