Wednesday 6 December 2017

Tanner the dog in Pitt Street Mall

In July I wrote twice about meeting Tanner and his owner on my walks around the place and yesterday when I was in the CBD I saw the two of them again. Tanner was making a splash and getting a lot of attention, and his owner was trying to get him to sit down so that passersby could take photos of him. He's such an enormous, shaggy animal!

I was in town to go and meet with my lawyer because I had to get a copy of my driver's licence certified. I need this document to do a GIPA application to request information from the state government. It's because of the series of blogposts about brutalist architecture that I'm writing. I'm trying to find the development application (DA) and building application (BA) files for the Sirius Building in The Rocks; the city council does not hold them as it was not the consent authority. The authority that used to own the property - the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority - has been wound up and so I have to go to Property NSW to find where the file now resides.

After the meeting with my lawyer - which took about 30 minutes because we had a bit of a chat about stuff, including my researches into the NSW BLF (which I wrote about on the blog yesterday) - I went to an event I was covering as a journalist. It was at Barangaroo at the offices there of accounting firm PwC and it was the launch of a study conducted into Asia-Pacific real estate trends by PwC and the Urban Land Institute. This US-based body contacted me through LinkedIn to cover another event that I went to back in November, and so this was the second commission for me from them.

When I crossed George Street it was very windy and the dust blew down the street from what had been the construction site for the light rail. The section of road outside the QVB has now been finished so you can go there and see what the whole of George Street will look like after 2019, when the light rail to Kensington will be completed. They have paved the entire roadway with flagstones so it looks as though traffic will be restricted, but I haven't heard anything about car access yet from official sources.

This afternoon I will be driving to Canberra to attend a talk at the Australian War Memorial about a new Aboriginal painting that was commissioned from Indigenous artists living in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) lands in remote South Australia.


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