No new year is good new year?

The Year of the Ox has started. And as ever, a good place to find out more was Chatswood.

 

What I found in Chatswood the other day was that Chinese New Year is being marked, but there's not going to be that much happening. The Council and business-sponsored displays look to be on a rather smaller scale than usual. It's nothing like when I checked out the start of the Year of the Pig in pre-COVID 2019. See here: Year of the Pig, Feb 2019

Don't want those crowds after all.

'Social distancing' made easy

The Covid-19 Coronavirus pandemic requires that we practise 'social distancing'. This presented no problem today at the normally bustling Chatswood Westfield shopping centre!

I kept away from the supermarket toilet paper aisle though. It's a different story there.

猪年 - Zhū Nián - (Year of the Pig)

This post is in red because there's an awful lot of red around at this time of year, especially in suburbs blessed with a large Chinese presence.

It's about to be Chinese (Lunar) New Year again, and this year will be the Year of the Pig. Not just any pig, but the golden pig, the one that comes only once every 60 years. Babies born this year will grow up to be extremely prosperous.

I went along to Chatswood to get a feel for it all.

There were lots of pigs around, red ones and gold ones, and there was an excellent little concert going on, with music and displays of traditional dancing.

Every shop in the Westfield Shopping Centre was taking part in a well-coordinated New Year's discount campaign. I noticed this shoe shop was offering 88% off any shoe purchase. I think that may be something to do with it's bad luck to buy shoes during this period (but if you do, 8 is always lucky, and 88 more so).

You also need to wear red undies (I bought mine today), and you mustn't wear black or white (the colours of death). It's a difficult time if you're superstitious. Here's a guide, courtesy the Sydney Morning Herald: SMH Chinese NY guide
 

We're invited to a New Year's party next weekend, so we're researching all this carefully. The shopping centre had lots of helpful tips in this informative zodiac-specific display. After all these years on the planet, I learnt what my lucky colours are: blue, grey, and orange. I went off and bought myself an orange shirt straight away.

Extreme postcodes: 2067

Chatswood is at the extreme end of what a Sydney suburb can look like, and still be a suburb rather than a major city in its own right. In fact when overseas visitors have been confronted with views like that on the right, they have invariably assumed it was Sydney CBD that they were looking at.

It does have a certain vitality and colour, and lots of shopping opportunities, and I like to drop in now and again.

 
What's happened to Chatswood, architecturally speaking, is much discussed. When developers pursue their rezonings and height limit changes in other suburbs, they promise, and their detractors warn against 'another Chatswood'!

Norbert the Nautilus and his vivid Chatswood friends

Sydney's Vivid festival comes round at about this time every year. It started as a light show, then a sound-and-light show, and this year it's billed as a festival of light, sound, and ideas!

I even went to one of the 'ideas' events the other evening. It was a talk at Sydney University about the 'inhuman' photography of the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. His pictures were OK, but the 'art-appreciation' bullshit that got spoken by the presenter and by the handful of enthusiastic questioners remaining in the much-dwindled audience - gosh, not an ounce of meaning could I find in any of it!










So let's get back to the good old light show! It's expanded this year, and now takes in several new venues. One of these is Chatswood.





I went along last night to check it out, and yes, it's not a bad little light show. You don't have to be pretentious if you're just a light show. It seemed to be all about aquariums and marine molluscs like the nautilus. A nautilus called

Norbert was featured prominently, and he had friends who were jellyfish, or were young ladies in brightly coloured lycra costumes.

All very colourful, and all good fun. It got the crowds out in Chatswood on a cold Saturday night, and there should probably be more of it!