It was yet another of those Sydney Autumn days today. Just warm enough, a slight breeze keeping the air clear of gunk (and seagulls aloft, as we see here), and a cloudless, deep blue sky.

One of those "good to be alive, bad to be at work" days.

In some ways a shot of nature might be an appropriate theme, but I wasn't in nature; I was in the middle of the largest city of one of the most urbanised nations on Earth. There is a certain "people-vibrancy" to a city that you won't get in a rural area. But also there is also often an antiseptic harshness that Edward Hopper or Jeffrey Smart might recognise, and which we see to some extent here. However this is slightly tempered by the presence of at least one living thing; indeed that's why I chose this particular shot out of a group of similar ones.

The grey "tube" behind the Western Distributor fly-over is the exhaust stack from the Cross City Tunnel, a public-private partnership (PPP) where private contractors build a road or tunnel, and the government gives them a concession to run it and charge a (usually exorbitant) toll. Like most of the PPPs conducted by this state, the Cross City Tunnel has been... does everyone remember Saving Private Ryan?... "fubar". Invariably PPPs feature (a) merchant bankers / advisors who reap millions up front for making "the deal", (b) hyper-inflated forecasts of traffic, (c) "Commercial In Confidence" contracts to keep the people from seeing the real cost of the thing, (d) the Government agreeing to close roads that we've paid taxes for to "funnel" traffic into the tollway in a desperate attempt to match the forecasts and (e) the tunnel operators eventually going into receivership because even that's not enough.