Light's Vision - Different From Ours
2nd July, Adelaide, Australia
Light's Vision? Sounds like one of those sound-and-light extravaganzas, doesn't it? No? Well, that's how it sounded to me, but this particular tourist must-see is definitely not a multimedia experience to behold - it's a statue of a bloke pointing.
OK, so I've somewhat reduced one of Adelaide's most famous people with that last sentence. Colonel William Light is said to have stood at this spot back in the 1800s (excuse the lack of exact date) and looked down below at what would one day become the central business district of Adelaide. The truth, however, may be very different. In one of the free Adelaide newspapers was a feature dismissing him as the 'founder' of the city, claiming that he had no visionary skills, that he was merely handed the title of 'Surveyor General', coming "forth place in a competition that only had three prizes", and that the real visionary was an entirely different man. Naturally, the current city folk are not keen on undoing history; officials have not dismissed the research but neither have they sought to confirm it or address it in any way. Besides, it would mean knocking down this perfectly good statue.
The view that Colonel Light (or some other chap more deserving of the honour) had would have been very different from ours. The view of Adelaide from this spot is not as good as I'd hoped, having read that it is a 'city of churches'. There is no outline of spires like you might see in Oxford or Prague, and no impressive skyscrapers like we'd seen in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. In short, the view was quite ordinary. Apparently, the view from The Oval (cricket ground) is pretty good, described in Lonely Planet as having the most picturesque setting of any cricket ground. But we were on the outside looking in.
Adelaide's ordinary-looking skyline.
I spent some time in the afternoon wandering up and down North Terrace, alternating between using the digital camera and the camcorder as I pointed them at the various buildings that line this street. If you felt so inclined, you could easily spend a day on this street going from museum to library to war memorial and so on. Much of it costs nothing (always good for the financially-challenged traveller), but I wasn't really up for chin-rubbingly good cultural enlightenment. I just took photos. What a tourist!
A view down North Terrace, Adelaide.
The favourite photo I took today, though, was an odd one - it was a sign that read: 'Et Begna with S Raimi'. Sam Raimi? The director of Spiderman and Spiderman 2? And what is Et Begna?
A look at the other side of the sign revealed what it should have read: "It begins with a dream". A perfect example of irony - to rearrange the letters on a sign advertising language tutelage into almost plausible complete nonsense!