Location: 35.29880° S, 149.14206° E

The Canberra Carillon is a 50-metre-high tower situated on a small island on Lake Burley Griffin. It supports some 57 bronze cast bells ranging in weight from 7 kilograms to 6 tonnes.

Seated at a large wooden keyboard that is connected via cables and pulleys to the belfry above, the carillonneur can ring out their art, both popular and classical.

I have childhood memories of stuffing old stockings with meat and hanging them strategically among lake shore rocks to catch yabbies¹. If successful, and we usually were, we would cook up our bounty in a Sunday cheese fondue (fondue was all the rage back in the 70s). Once the traps were set, I would smuggle a stash of paper planes up in the Carillon elevator to a viewing platform where I would conduct various aeronautical flight experiments. Nobody below was safe.

The Carillon has not changed much over the years, but I am pretty sure the yabbies have gone.
I took a sunset walk around the island and lake foreshore and snapped these photos. It was a beautiful quiet sunset. People walked or jogged along the shore wearing headphones completely missing the soundtrack or the possibility of connecting to the consensus appreciation.

Anyways, I thought these pics would look magnificent in colour. But on reviewing them, they seem to speak more in monochrome. Weird.

1. The Australian Yabbie (Cherax destructor) is a small freshwater crustacean. ↩︎