Guesswork

 

One minute at the red lights escalates into hours of waiting, over time, for them to change. Today’s one minute converts into six hours wait per year, once we start thinking about it. Conveniently, three sculptures have been installed near the corner of Heidelberg Road and Chandler Highway to help pass the time. Peak hour is transformed, now that we spend time guessing what they could be. Ice-cream cones is an immediate idea. Isn’t it normally? The sculptures’ colour and triangularity lend themselves to ice-cream cones. UFOs, thinks someone aloud, spontaneously, unclear as to whether the Objects are taking off or have just landed, or are perhaps just waiting like the rest of us for the lights to change. Dustbins, says another passenger. This dismal dismissal is not without warrant. The developers have indeed positioned three works that are shaped like rubbish receptacles in the middle of the footpath. Furthermore, sizable works, capacious enough to take any number of chip bags and hamburger boxes. This is the western corner of what was the Great Wall of Alphington, the gigantic whitebrick four-storey wall of the papermill demolished a few years ago to make space for a new riverside suburb of apartment buidings. Paper planes, proffers one of the passengers, warming to the name game and probably thinking of the vanished papermill and its generations of outgoing paper. Someone else suggests they are three origami, a fitting memorial to times gone past. Perfectly fitting, in fact. Three cubist origami folding eternal flames to another era. The Magi maybe, we three kings of Orient are, someone says, winding down the window to get a closer look. Or the three wise monkeys, which honestly is an improvement on the three dustbins. Trios occupy the sound waves briefly. The three musketeers? The three stooges? The three little pigs? The lights go green on Heidelberg Road and we’re off again towards Clifton Hill, leaving the next guesswork for another day. We are reluctant to go googling to find out their actual name, or names, conjectures being much more fun than literal facts. Google however proves unforthcoming about the three amigos. Or the three tenors. Or the sculptor, for that matter. We find that the 326 apartment, four-storey building replacing the Great Wall has the astonishingly unimaginative name Home by Caydon. Why not Papyrus? Or Diamond Sutra? Or Paperbark, maybe? Caydon is the developer of this property, or rather was the developer, now that Google also tells us Caydon collapsed in July leaving hundreds of unsold apartments all over the place, so perhaps the building will be Diamond Sutra after all, the earliest book printed on paper. Though a Wurundjeri name would be fitting. Birrarung, for example, after the nearby river.