This will hurt me...

I grew up in a town. As a little-un, I even thought that it was a decent-sized town. When Australia's Bicentennial year finally arrived, the bustling metropolis of Burnie - located in the stunning north-west coast of Tasmania - boasted an impressive TWENTY-FOUR THOUSAND people, and a figure no less impressive than [deep breath] By the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize, Antigua and Barbuda, and Saint Kitts and Nevis; Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith [exhale] Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth the second officially pronounced Burnie a genuine, bona fide, one hundred percent dinky di CITY . It doesn't matter that the harsh realities of the post-industrial economy has driven a retraction the hugely impressive n...

I thought that today would be little more than a mundane companion piece to yesterday’s photograph . Walking through Parliament Lawns as I usually do of a weekday morning, I noted the two council workers clearing off all of the leaves that I posted yesterday. Naively, I had assumed that this would be achieved with huge rakes and good old-fashioned muscle. Alas, I was wrong. I should have known that bulky (and extremely noisy) leaf blowers are all the rage these days. They were corralling the poor frightened leaves into the centre of the park, where a truck was waiting to haul them off to oblivion. That was that (I thought), 'a slice of Hobartian life for the world to peruse at their leisure'. As noted, I thought that this was the end of the story, I would post the photo and be done, but in the act of resizing it to make it more user-friendly, I noted something odd in the background. Like David Hemmings in the classic film Blowup , there was a strange character lurking in the ba...