Sydney Morning Herald columnist, author, architecture critic and essayist
Elizabeth Farrelly wrote an interesting article recently about Sydney’s lock out laws.
Elizabeth talks about how the buzz from our infamous Kings Cross has died and left bar -and nightclubs owners out of business.
She writes:
“You might not yearn for late-night clubbing. I might not. Irrelevant. Killing the Cross to pre-empt violence is like draining the ocean to prevent a shark bite, or razing slums to end poverty. It’s crude, short-sighted and ineffectual. Plus, if it continues, we won’t have a city. We’ll have a ring of day-dead suburbs around a night-dead CBD.
Maybe this is what they want. Australians have long hated cities. Many still regard this day-night model – a city zoned like flu tablets – as what “city” means. Even our terminology betrays us. Almost all Australians still call any residential precinct a suburb, and any city centre a CBD. Sub-urb. Central business district. Think about it.
Cities go back millennia. These terms, suburb and CBD, are blow-ins, modern neologisms invented for the flu-tablet city. Except, it wasn’t flu germs they were killing. This new, sanitised city was purposed to kill nightlife, strapping us all into our obedient nuclear-family straitjackets”
She also questions why the casino was so carefully spared the lockout, despite Pyrmont being one of the few places to show rising violence? Elizabeth writes : “Is the Baird government dressed as Nanny while servicing the Big End of town? Is Casino Mike the Baird nickname that truly fits?”
Read the full article here
