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| The junction of Hay and William Streets. |
My favourite constellation is Orion. You might think that’s because
it is such a distinctive stellar arrangement and that is indeed part of the reason. However, I
like mainly it because when I moved from England to Australia, Orion was one constant
in the new and strangely-patterned sky. Of course, he was an upside-down hunter when seen
from the southern hemisphere, but he was the same – the belt, the tunic, the
shield. When you’ve been unsettled by the substitution of the Southern Cross
for Ursa Major, these things are important on a personal, if not cosmological,
level.
The then-strange skies are now my usual skies (I have only
made 2 trips back to England in the last 26 years) but I was thinking recently
about how accustomed we are to our own particular celestial "landscapes" and,
even if we don’t pay them too much heed, how even a slight change can be
perceptible heighten the sense of strange.
The following series of pictures is based on changing
familiar skies – to an extreme. If Perth were in different type of solar
system, or flipped into another part of the galaxy, what would/could our skies
look like? What starscapes would there be for the streetscapes that we know so well? (They'd look a bit like the covers of 1970s sci-fi novels it seems... :) )
I started out calling the series #perthcelestial and then,
in a small homage to Buckminster Fuller, decide to change this to
#spaceshipPerth because I can’t resist a pun, however weak.
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| The old Melbourne Hotel |
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| The QV1 building |
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| An office in West Perth |
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| The heart of the city |
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| Wesley Church |
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| Central Flats, West Perth |
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