Sydney Ice Bear was an ice sculpture of a male polar bear that was located in Custome House Square this week. British sculptor Mark Coreth carved out the life-sized melting ice sculpture of a polar bear on Friday (top). By Monday, the sculpture had melted away to reveal a bronze skeleton (bottom). The display was timed to coincide with World Environment Day on Sunday, as a metaphor for the human impact on our environment and to create awareness of climate change. This is the sixth Ice Bear Project carving following on from those in London, Copenhagen, Montreal, Toronto and Manchester.
Bench on the grounds of Government House overlooks the Royal Botanic Gardens and out towards Mrs Macquarie’s Chair and across Sydney Harbour.
This house, now magnificently restored, has quite a history – from glamorous high society home, to a school operated by early Sydney philanthropist Caroline Chisholm (she previously appeared on the Australian five dollar note), through nearly a century as a home run by Catholic Good Samaritan nuns for women judged to be in “moral danger”.
In the past few decades it has been in danger of total dereliction, the gardens and grounds overgrown and inaccessible.
Unfortunately, the only way the house has been able to be restored has been in conjunction with a major high-rise housing development. While I haven’t got an issue with the flats themselves, I do feel they mar the line of sight of and divorce it from its context of expansive grounds. It has also meant the excision of a part of the rocky knoll to one side, called “Mount Olympus”. This part of the grounds has also been restored as a garden, for the private use of the apartment dwellers.
On the positive side, the vast lawns down to the Cooks River have been rehabilitated.
The house was built for a wealthy and successful Scottish émigré, Alexander Brodie Spark. He had travelled extensively in Europe, having undertaken the classical gentleman’s Grand Tour of classical sites, and named the estate “Tempe” after the Vale of Tempe in Greece, and the rocky hill he named “Mount Olympus”.
In 1834 he commissioned colonial architect John Verge to design an arcadian villa with resemblance to a Greek temple. Behind the house there was an orchard, greenhouse, shrubbery and gardener’s cottage. On the river he constructed a rococo bathing house.
Kenilworth is a heritage listed house in Allen Street, in the western suburb of Harris Park. It was built around 1900 in the Victorian style of architrecture. In recent times it had been used as a school by the Australian International Conservatorium of Music and since 2005 forms part of the Australian International Performing Arts High School.
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