rucker's drone hill

There’s a sweet spot on Rucker’s Hill, not far off its peak at the Town Hall, adjacent to the metal stairs which lead down into the residential scene below on the flat, where there is one of the better vistas of the Melbourne CBD on offer in its surrounds. [There are not that many vantage points close to the city]. Rucker’s, eight clicks out, is barely a couple of hundred metres high; though bike riders are red in the face by the time they have climbed it, this is not San Francisco or Cusco we are talking about. Nonetheless, at this point, couples often stop to take a picture with the vista of the city’s growing number of skyscrapers as a backdrop. There is a pleasing extent over Fitzroy and Carlton and Brunswick. After walking past this point every day for three years, I stopped and took my own photograph. But I almost left out The View - I was most captivated by the empty sky. Sometimes there would be a helicopter, or an aircraft not landing at the main airport nearby at Tullamarine, but just as likely, like this day, the sky, abundantly available, would be populated by nothing but clouds and birds.

After all the reading I had been doing, I knew that this would soon be a quaint anachronism. Soon people would not believe that the sky was something not used, filled, exploited, busy. Soon, a generation would grow up used to this scene being crowded with thousands of objects at many levels, buzzing, evading each other, rushing. Traffic of the air, with rush hours, but unceasing.

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