Did you hear that there was a dust storm in Sydney on Wednesday? Everyone got very excited about the whole thing and I have to admit, it was a potent reminder that yes, perhaps we do live on a planet. Such a visceral, visual event, is the kind of thing that the internet responds to with abandon and Flickr, facebook and twitter rapidly filled with orange photos of backyards, opera houses and roads and status updates about mars and the end of the world. Beside the excitement of experiencing an alternate atmosphere, some observations of the morning that resnoated:
City of Sound has a typically thorough run down, and of all the posts I have seen is the only one that tracks the storm after about 10am, when the photogenic orange glow had desaturated to a less romantic grey-brown haze.
The big picture, among the number of dramatic shots of Sydney icons rendered red, shows the storm from above showing it for what it actually was, an enormous cloud of airborne dirt.
Simon Wright observes a decidedly un-Sydney scene: dirty 4WDs. I like to think that Sydney’s absurdly large population of city bound 4WDs were too important to make it out to the desert, and istead made the desert come to them. And I wonder if 4WDs owners will be the longest to hold out on washing their cars to prolong the illusion of off-road credibility.
And finally,of course, there is already a magazine of the six hour period available to purchase from MagCloud. Unable to be purchased in Australia though, ‘Strange Light: Photos from the Great Australian Dust Storm‘ collates imagery found online in one handy publication two days later.
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