Mass vaccination - an inside view

This somewhat reluctant vaccinee was one of several thousand to turn up today at NSW Health's mass COVID-19 vaccination centre at Olympic Park. We followed her progress through the system. And it was all rather smooth and impressive.

You make your online booking and turn up somewhere near the selected time. It's a short walk from either the train station or Car Park 3. You negotiate a small maze and a check-in stage.

Then there's perhaps 5 minutes before your number comes up.

 

 

 

A very pleasant nurse then runs through a whole lot of health questions, before running a needle into your arm. So maybe 5 minutes there.

And of course there's the obligatory 15 minute post-jab sit-down, so you can solve the Herald's Target puzzle.

All quite impressive really. Well done Gladys. If the federal government had been in charge of this place, they'd still be holding meetings about what colour direction signs they should put up, and which donor company should be given a few billion to run it.

For the record, you can get either AstraZeneca or Pfizer there, and the eligibility rules are rather more flexible than publicly stated, if you have a cooperative GP and knowledge of the 'special' booking site.

Back to the bike

The bicycling bushwalkers were out in force the other day, negotiating the in places alarmingly crowded cycle tracks of Olympic Park and thereabouts. A nice day out.

Extreme postcodes: 2127

Which Sydney suburb is the deadest of them all? My vote is for Wentworth Point. It's part of Homebush Bay, and has easy access to Olympic Park, pleasant water views, and in theory quite a good lifestyle. But gee, what a dead, soulless place.

Admittedly some of it's still being built, but some parts have been fully built up for a few years now. And where's the life? Where are the people?

There's a bit of a shopping and cafe centre, but how they survive without customers I couldn't see. Streets are narrow, there's no available parking, and it looked like most of the high rise apartment blocks had no off-street parking either. There wasn't much evidence of public transport, though it's reported that there is indeed a bus service, and there is the ferry I suppose.

Could it be that most of these apartments are in fact unoccupied? Could it be a ghost suburb, in reality just another tiny part of China's property bubble?

And speaking of property and real estate agents, I was quite taken by the photo signboards up on the Woo-la-ra lookout place. The one looking east across Wentworth Point shows the view across the suburb, and above and behind you can see the city and the Harbour Bridge. Well guess what? In real life the buildings completely block out these desirable expensive views. The usual estate agents' Photoshop distortions apply! Who knows what the poor investors in the concrete jungle down there thought they were buying!



Salvation might be at hand though. There's a pedestrian and bus-only bridge being built, which will connect Wentworth Point to Rhodes, which has a vibrant shopping and commercial area. Train station too.





Perhaps it will all come to life one day?