sydney

Wednesday, April 28, 2004



Sydney is a city of conrasts. Like most cities, it has the very rich (living around our famous harbor), the very poor living in depressed areas, and the middle class, doing ok, but more often than ever before, working part time. Our society has been changed from being friendly and generous, to tending to be mean spirited and insular. This is an unhappy time in our history, as we are being shaped by a brutal, dishonest, uncaring, inept and reckless government. We have long past the times of voting in a popular government. With our compulsory voting system (an anachronism which ensures a high voting turn out) we vote out a government which is judged to be not in our best interest, whatever we think that is. Good government, thoughtful environmental policies, generous funding to health care, education, and the arts are talked about by the opposition parties but in a country which has high unemployment despite what official figures indicate, homelessness at epidemic rates, (including many street kids) many people understandingly approach our coming election with 'fear and loathing'. Our Prime Minister is no doubt choosing from his speech writers, a fitting speech to deliver when we have our first major terrorist attack. Also a speech to give when we suffer our first casualties in Iraq. These situations, if handled correctly, might help him scrape in at election time. Our government cares not about its citizens nor their declining standard of living and suffering. It's all about holding on to power at any cost, and selling out to the US.

ETERNITY
As a child, when walking through the city or King's Cross, I would often be struck by the word "Eternity" written in neat copperplate running script on our footpaths. Far from having biblical overtones for me, it would take me to a thoughtful state of mind where I would contemplate the enormity of the concept. It still has that effect on me.
I remember, also as a child, that our uncle told us a story in which a mystic gave an example of eternity. Every day, a man (well it was the fifties) would walk up to this huge granite rock and give it a cursory wipe with a silk scarf. "Wow" I though. "That would take forever."

The story stuck with me, but as I grew older. I thought, well one day, it would eventually whittle the rock down. I decided that the rock should be a hundred mile cube. And that he would wipe it only once a decade. That seemed an awful long time, but as I grew older, It still bothered me that one day this mammoth cube would be gone. What would the world be like then?
I remembered this the other day and decided to make eternity harder to attain. The rock would be made from Naxos stone, and it would be case hardened with uranium, and it would be the size of Tasmania. Not only that, but the luckless guy would only get to wipe it once a millennium. Ok I hear you say, why not make it the size of Australia, and he could wipe it once in a blue moon?
The point is that having it wiped once a millennium would make it a ceremonious occasion. A huge rock concert would be given , and Bob Geldof could sing "I don't like Monday"
I guess even this would one day be worn away. But what would the world be like then? Would we at last have peace and happiness, would religion be gone? The hippies who promised us that in the sixties, are now running corporations and rather than being part of the solution, are part of the problem. Well I'm still a hippy, and I like to think I'm no longer a problem, by way of not being such a threat to our eco system.

I'm not going to dwell on the rock analogy anymore, but I will always be in awe of the word 'ETERNITY'



Google turned up this info on Arthur Stace:

Arthur Stace was a loser, a no-hoper, an alcoholic -ö and completely illiterate. He lived in the streets of Sydney, regarded by many who saw him as a lost cause.

One Sunday night in 1932 he entered St Barnabas' Anglican Church on Broadway, Sydney, and heard the Reverend T C Hammond preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. Arthur was convicted by the Spirit of God. He left the church, crossed the road, and sat under a tree in Victoria Park where he committed his life to Jesus Christ. He became a new creation.

Later that year he was at the Burton Street Baptist Tabernacle on the corner of Palmer Street, Darlinghurst when he heard the evangelist the Reverend John G Ridley preaching.

In his urgent, commanding voice, an excited John Ridley thundered out: "Eternity! Eternity! Oh, that this word could be emblazoned across the streets of Sydney!"

Arthur Stace the little man who still could not read or write left that church, took some yellow chalk and, only under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, bent down and wrote one word on the footpath. And throughout the night for the next 40 years, while Sydney slept, Arthur would take his chalk and write in immaculate copperplate handwriting the word "eternity" on footpaths, entrances to the train station, and anywhere else he thought it would catch people's attention.

Sydneysiders would alight from their commuter trains of a morning and see this word as they walked to work.

In Sydney today, you can still see the word in three places...

1) On his gravestone in Waverley Cemetery, commemorating the life of Arthur Stace who had become known as 'Mr Eternity'.

2) Inside the huge bell in the GPO clock tower which had been dismantled during the second world war. When the clock tower was rebuilt in the 1960s, the bell was brought out of storage and as the workmen were installing the bell they noticed, inside, the word "eternity" in Arthur Stace's chalk. (No one ever found out how Stace had been able to get to the bell, which had been sealed up, to add this mysterious entry to Sydney's folklore.)

3) In Town Hall Square, between St Andrew's Cathedral and the Sydney Town Hall. When the area was redeveloped in the 1970s, a solid brass replica of the word in Stace's original copperplate handwriting was embedded in the footpath near a fountain as an eternal memorial to Arthur Stace.

And the big news is that this coming Friday, as we bid farewell to 1999 and welcome in the year 2000, the word "eternity" in Stace's famous copperplate handwriting, will be emblazoned NOT across the streets of Sydney as John Ridley had wished, but across the face of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and, thanks to modern technology seen around the world.

Of all the words that have been spoken during the first two millennia, the one chosen by otherwise-godless people to be featured on the Harbour Bridge at the dawn of the year 2000, is the one that was used to remind so many busy Sydneysiders of their impending appointment with their creator.

Because Sydney's fireworks display is the first of the international celebrations to be telecast around the globe, people in every continent will witness the miracle that God performed when he touched the life of one little, 'insignificant' man -- Arthur Stace -- a man who heard the voice of

God and responded by committing his life to 'preaching' his one-word sermon.

Heaven only knows how God will continue to speak to the hearts of so many people around the globe, using the work He started back in the 1930s through one illiterate 'lost cause' no-hoper Arthur Staceand his inspirationally simple use of a piece of yellow chalk.

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posted by alexx at 2:11 AM