The Boomer Legacy

Computer says no: We could detect Gravitational Waves (LIGO, 2015), prove Fermat's last theorem (Wolfram, 2014) and even ridicule Wall Street's misuse of Gaussian copula functions (Wired, 2009) — but no-one could figure out the true cost of mobile-phone plans (WSJ, 2013)

Mobile phone users at Martin Place, Sydney   (Dec 2014,  320kb)

Waves don't vote: Roughly 2TW of energy was freely available in the form of coastal wave-power, but we ignored it because fossil fuel production was more important

The abandoned 2006 Oceanlinx Mk1 Wave Generator prototype at Oilies Beach, Port Kembla. In June 2017 it was eventually towed out to sea and sunk   (Sep 2014,  326kb)

∇×E: The implementation of renewable energy struggled beneath a mantle of ignorance, conspiracy and fossil fuel lobbying

Distribution cables (since demolished) in College Lane, at Stanmore in Sydney   (Sep 2012,  374kb)

Let them drive cars: How were private toll-roads ever going achieve their projected ROI if people weren't encouraged use them?

Abandoned bus at Opoho Road, Dunedin NZ   (Dec 2017,  445kb)

To deindustrialise: Wholesale deindustrialisation led to scaling back carbon-related activities, eventually

The abandoned remains of the Illawarra Coke Company at Coalcliff   (Sep 2014,  371kb)

Force carrier: Sometimes we just couldn't contain ourselves

Electrical junction box at Chippendale, Sydney   (Jul 2017,  447kb)

Never was a maths scholar: You'll never use it, so I dropped it at school as fast as I could

At the One Circular Quay construction site, Sydney Cove. At the time the photo was taken the offshore developers had run out of money, so the site had been abandoned for months   (Oct 2017,  484kb)

Together alone: Everything you could ever possibly want, via your smart-phone

Pitt Street Mall passageway   (Aug 2018,  231kb)

Linear ascension: Those who could afford to do so, raced toward an off-grid future

Cars race along the Eastern Distributor at Woolloomooloo   (Jul 2018,  173kb)

Release now, patch later: It just works

Jensen Avenue at Dover Heights   (Nov 2016,  242kb)

1918 revisited: Every expert agreed that wearing masks was a panacea

Masked commuters try to get home after yet another train network meltdown   (May 2021,  151kb)

Aerotropolis now: Cheap and easy air travel was assumed to last forever

Sunrise over the Sydney International Airport   (Nov 2017,  77kb)

The upgrade escalator: Every nine months there was always something just that little bit better

York Street escalators, Wynyard station   (Jul 2018,  282kb)

Pan Atomicus: 48 tonnes of reactor fuel blown into the atmosphere; 500 000 liquidators to clean up the mess; 335 000 evacuees fled; >6 000 deaths; >90 000 animals killed; 20-fold increase in mutations; 2600 km² exclusion zone; €2.15 billion for the New Safe Confinement; $235 billion in damages; the collapse of the USSR… The effects of 1986-04-25 are with us still (National Geographic, 2019)

Heritage locomotive at Central Station, Sydney   (Jun 2019,  126kb)

Off-line storage: Acres of tank-farms to cache our dreams

Storage tanks at Tempe   (Sep 2012,  369kb)

Edgy by order: Zeitgeist-y fresh environments were created in which start-ups could prosper

Disposable bicycles on Pitt Str, outside World Square   (Jan 2018,  143kb)

We have some planes: All this technology and yet aeroplanes could be made to disappear by flipping a transponder switch

Church Street cones at Parramatta   (Feb 2017,  478kb)

In the days of the citizen reporter: Broadcast-quality equipment was no longer required to craft good media stories and reach a global audience

Reporters at the Sydney Opera House   (Jul 2014,  210kb)

Accelerated obsolescence: Yesterday's broadcast-quality equipment was re-purposed as landfill

Tape-based off-line editing equipment in a dumpster at Darling Harbour   (Jan 2013,  148kb)

X-out & scroll: First they came for the workers, then it was our turn

Gomo Sportswear prior to its demolition to make way for Granville Place   (Jul 2017,  323kb)

The tip of the spear: The most inspiring thing about the Kamikaze was that every problem had exactly the same solution

Lockheed A-12 engine aerospike at the Intrepid Museum, NYC   (Oct 2017,  49kb)

Formalism Concrete: Move fast and break things with stable infrastructure (Facebook, 2014)

Indigo Slam at Chippendale   (Jul 2017,  105kb)

Built for comfort: Cruise control ✓ Loudspeakers ✓ Touch-screen TV ✓ Dual petrol tank caps ✓ National flag ✓ Oversized padded seat ✓

Indian Roadmaster motorbike at Mandible Street, Alexandria   (Aug 2019,  285kb)

The flipped classroom: A tremendous benefit of student BYOD was the collection of quality data to support our evidence-based focus on learning, along with informing the continuous improvement in our teaching skills and practice

At the State Library of NSW   (Oct 2014,  360kb)

Big data and the cloud: Off-line storage by the petabyte → provided your network connection was fast enough → provided your resellers didn't vanish overnight…

Mobile phone tower and clouds from a summer storm, at Faulconbridge in the Blue Mountains   (Dec 2012,  113kb)

Cut-through messaging: Make your mark, repeat, move on

Vandalised rail-car at the Zigzag railway, subsequently destroyed by the 2019 summer bushfires, Clarence   (Jul 2019,  325kb)

Brand garbage: 2000-08-07 purchase Omega Speedmaster Automatic watch (35105000) #56462628 $2150; 2001-01-13 repair under warranty for loud rattling inside watch; 2005-03-29 repair due to watch stopped $595; 2009-08-03 repair due to watch requiring movement replacement $655; 2017-07-20 watch gains 10 minutes every hour, Omega quote to replace movement and watch hands $1295 (+ $75 courier fee); 2017-07-25 quote declined and watch returned without repair; 2017-08-15 watch thrown into landfill at Blaxland Waste Management Facility

A wristwatch achieved its destiny as a piece of rubbish at Blaxland   (Aug 2017,  245kb)

Moving forward: Monorails; Supersonic airliners; Jet-packs; Thunderbirds; Moon-bases; Hover-boards; London to Sydney in 90 minutes; Long-range electric cars; Flying cars; Submersible cars; Cars with a KITT computer; Fully autonomous vehicles navigating suburban streets

First Lane at Hurstville, Sydney   (Sep 2016,  370kb)

Nostalgic Futurism: The Eighties didn't quite get the future right

The now dismantled Sydney Monorail at One Dixon Street, Sydney's Chinatown   (Jan 2012,  151kb)

Stasi without the politics: HD-CCTV; IP address logging; Cookie tracking; SMM Profile Harvesting; EFTPOS transaction records; Data-mining; Phone-hacking; Location-sensitive personalised marketing; Mandatory QR Code scanning; Live facial-recognition surveillance; The National Bowel Cancer Screening Program; The unassailable cult of predicting consumer demand by knowing everything possible about what everyone has ever done

Satellite, UHF and cable communications at Marrickville, in Sydney   (Sep 2012,  248kb)

Peace through superior fire-power: Build it and they will die

Vought F-8 Crusader at the Intrepid Museum, NYC   (Oct 2017,  166kb)

For a better tomorrow: Technological progress turned out to be a bit of a chimera

Dalek ornament at Wilson Street, Lawson   (Aug 2021,  475kb)

Springtime for Eloi: Everyone was amazed by the vast contraptions built by our distant ancestors

Sydney Harbour sunrise kayaks   (Jan 2019,  197kb)

Fibre nescience: Do consumers really need data transfer rates that only fibre could provide? (Liberal Party of Australia, 2013)

Mothballed satellite dishes in Rozelle, in Sydney's East   (Jan 2013,  296kb)

Retro-tech: Some Edwardian technologies weren't as hopeless as we originally thought

The pantograph of a NSW Heritage “Set F1” suburban carriage, Central station   (Jun 2019,  92kb)

Reeks & Wrecks: A sustainable future may only be found in recycling and repairs

Cardboard packaging in Blue Anchor Lane at Circular Quay, awaiting transport to an interstate landfill   (Nov 2017,  503kb)

Sci-Fi Now: Superconducting NbTi coils; Holmium magnetic flux condensers; 4°K liquid helium insulated within a liquid nitrogen jacket; A suitcase-sized helium condenser; A FFT-processing rack more powerful than a dozen 1980s mainframes… A 3T magnetic field from a machine the size of a wardrobe, to obtain non-intrusive millimetre resolution 3D internal body images. Twenty years earlier no one would have believed any of this was possible…

The 3T MRI scanner at a medical imaging practice at Penrith, in Sydney   (Sep 2013,  77kb)

Ubiquitous presence: Our phones were taken everywhere and relied upon for everything

Mobile phone users, Sydney CBD   (Mar 2015,  279kb)

Fabricating nostalgia: A lot was written about the impacts of deindustrialisation, but few missed the unimaginative and life-threatening work

Davy press at ATP Eveleigh Workshops museum   (Sep 2017,  373kb)

Meaningful social interactions: Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, WeChat, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, LinkedIn, 4/8Chan: elaborate frameworks were created to ensure you could never possibly be alone

Stargazer lawn at Barangaroo Reserve, Sydney   (Aug 2016,  506kb)

Perpetual congestion: Once the great symbol of individual freedom and personal mobility, the car has become a ball and chain. Slow, expensive, and surrounded by endless others, automobiles have taken us as far as they can (Hume, 2012)

Weedon Avenue garage at Paddington   (Mar 2017,  331kb)

Rattle & roll: With an average cruising speed of 130 km/hr, you could theoretically do Sydney to Melbourne in 7½ hours. During the trip, rock yourself to sleep to the sound of squeaking bogie springs and rumble from the turbocharged diesel-electric engines, while your 1980s XAM sleeper car jerks around on back-country tracks and occasionally becomes airborne, landing a moment later with a satisfying kaboom

XPT trains at Sydney Central terminus. After decades of service, they were due to be retired in 2023   (Apr 2019,  284kb)

Engineering new pathways to wealth: Our society became culturally unbalanced: BScs and BEs were rapidly displaced by BAComs, CPAs, LLBs, MPsychs, FRACGPs and BA(Hons)MT

Sand-blasting and repainting the Sydney Harbour Bridge to replace the decades-old lead-based paint   (Jul 2011,  221kb)

Rust-belt agriculture: I'd rather put my trust in looking at the sheep and seeing how it performs, than in some number dreamed up by some scientists on a bit of paper (Merriman, 2012)

Farm sculpture, Cathedral Street Woolloomooloo   (Jul 2018,  616kb)

Think small: The opera house refurbishment went exactly according to plan

Domestic fountain at Church Street in Croydon   (Sep 2016,  397kb)

Orderly exodus: When we were finally done, we got into our white vans and disappeared

Toyota HiAce vans await delivery at Penrith   (Apr 2017,  310kb)

Streaming fermions: Everything depended upon the action of wave-particles which two hundred years earlier no-one could imagine existed

33kV AC transmission tower outside the Penrith Transmission Substation   (Jul 2011,  193kb)

Congestion busting: High speed rail was forever on everyone's agenda

Bushfire wreckage, Zigzag Railway Clarence NSW   (Jul 2019,  478kb)

Accidental monuments: Civil engineering the hard way: build it cheap and then completely rebuild it later to solve problems which should have been addressed the first time

Zigzag Railway upper viaduct, Clarence   (Jul 2019,  596kb)

Interconnected loose-ends: Sprawling cities were serviced by deliberately substandard public transport

Southern Cross station, Melbourne   (Apr 2019,  274kb)

Orphaned success: A visionary but impractical architect; Engineers constrained by 1960s tech; Conservative politicians who inherited the project and regarded it a pointless extravagance… The greatest achievement about the SOH was that it was ever completed

Sydney Opera House, Concert Hall exterior.

(BTW the true colour of the shells is off-white cream — which was done to help reduce glare from reflected sunlight)   (Dec 2018,  321kb)

The imperfect panopticon: One nation under CCTV, but who was watching?

Apartment courtyard surveillance cameras awaiting connection at Victoria Park

The location was revisited in Nov 2018 and the cameras were still not connected…   (Sep 2014,  112kb)

Chariots of freedom: You were what you drove

Custom license plates, Sydney   (Nov 2018,  263kb)

Project attention deficit disorder: Every Prague Spring had its tanks

Construction cranes at the Central Park development at Broadway, in Sydney   (Oct 2012,  228kb)

Faisal's gambit: The engine warning light came on in October 1973, but we covered it over and kept going

Abandoned shops (since demolished), Parramatta Road Homebush   (Jun 2016,  172kb)

The well-connected domicile: LCD in the bedroom; OLED in the lounge-room; Playstation, XBox, iPhone, Galaxy, Note, iPad, Touch, Android and iOS scattered everywhere else

Home entertainment in suburban Kingswood, in Sydney's West   (Sep 2010,  415kb)

Well maintained infrastructure: In order to sustain our vibrant economy, continuous work had to be done

New Canterbury Road Lewisham and Light Rail construction Sydney CBD   (Jul 2016,  372kb)

Lifespans & outcomes: Longer lives no longer needed to be a problem

Anzac Day marcher, Liverpool Street Sydney   (Apr 2018,  98kb)

Option V for victory: Upon the assumption that postal services were a universal right, the UPU Terminal Dues System was adjusted to ensure developing countries were generously subsidised whenever they exported small parcels to the west (Swiss World Cargo, 2019)

Airport Drive, outside Sydney International Airport   (Oct 2019,  129kb)

All our tomorrows: We loved you more than our children. We held you aloft in parliament and laughed and cheered. For you were our greatest and most cherished asset, an organic talisman that gave us light and warmth and windfall profits, and glistened so beautifully in the dying sun

Anthracite in Lithgow, NSW   (Jun 2019,  140kb)

Deferred consumption model: As we grew older we could finally afford the things we wanted so much when we were young

A mint green 1977 BMW 633 CSi at the Classic Throttle Shop showroom at Milsons Point   (Dec 2020,  102kb)

The spam massif: We facilitated a global network of unsolicited urgent messages

Sydney University public noticeboards   (Oct 2017,  525kb)

Your privacy was taken extremely seriously: The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner; The Information and Privacy Commission of NSW; The NSW Information Commissioner; The NSW Privacy Commissioner; The Privacy Amendment (Enhancing Privacy Protection) Amendment Act 2012 (Cth); The Australian Privacy Foundation; The Cyberspace Law and Policy Community; The NSW Council for Civil Liberties; The Law Council of Australia Business Law Privacy Sub-committee; The Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) Serious Invasions of Privacy in the Digital Era Inquiry; The Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) to replace the National Privacy Principles and Information Privacy Principles; The drone "roundtable" inquiry by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs; The Royal Guide Dogs of Tasmania Privacy Officer

A Menckenesque kaleidoscope ensured that everyone in Wollongong could see you taking a bath   (Feb 2011,  290kb)