NAKED CITY: BAUBLE BANDITS BEWARE!

NAKED CITY: BAUBLE BANDITS BEWARE!

Some years ago Clover Moore was branded a “grinch” when the Sydney City Council decided to cut back on its Christmas spending and outlayed only $600,000 on yuletide festooning. Despite the meagre budget security guards were employed at great expense to stand a twenty four hour guard on Christmas trees in both Martin Place and the Fitzroy Gardens.

Obviously the threat of “bauble bandits” was taken very seriously and the idea that a massive oversized Christmas tree could be denuded overnight was something too hideous to even contemplate. This year the guards are again on duty and rightly so as the bauble budget has blown out to something like $1.6 million and the Council’s Xmas largesse is there for everybody to see.

Admittedly it’s not just baubles and the Christmas spending extends to a range of activities like illuminations on the Town Hall and free kiddie concerts. It’s all good stuff but frankly we would love to have seen a bit of innovation and less an emphasis on the Anglo centric portrayal of festive cheer.

Clover  may well have looked to the recent highly successful Paramassala Festival and introduced a South Asian theme to this year’s Christmas celebrations. Local Hare Krishna members could have been encouraged to take on the role of roving carol singers, delighting shoppers and office workers with songs like Deck The Halls With Boughs Of Bolly and Hark the Herald, Angel Singh.

With water conversation a hot issue we would have much preferred a more eco friendly Christmas cactus with the giant succulent towering well above the old GPO and requiring little or no watering. Needless to say the protruding barbs would deter any would be bauble bandit and immediately dispense with the need for costly security guards. Once Christmas was over the cactus could be put through a series of industrial blenders with free unlimited nopales (i.e. cactus juice) for New Year’s Eve revellers.

Travel to the outer suburbs of Sydney and you’ll witness whole streets where the residents have spent thousands of dollars decorating their humble suburban bungalows with a glittering array of Christmas lights. Sure we have a bunch of fairy lights sprucing up the Sydney Town Hall but what about the boroughs, Clovers much loved “villages” where the only things flashing these days are traffic lights.

Let’s light up those areas of the Council precinct that seldom get a look in like Woolloomooloo’s godforsaken Walla Mulla Park, the monstrous Goulburn Street Parking Station, the Devonshire Street Tunnel and our perennial favourite – Gilligans Island at Taylor Square. Gilligans would be the perfect plateau for a living Nativity Scene where out of work actors, buskers and assorted backpackers could be employed to act out a twenty four hour non stop recreation of the birth of Jesus – complete with a sixty four can light show and an enormous mirror ball – and not a bauble in sight!

You May Also Like

Comments are closed.