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Sent: Wednesday, 16 September 2020, 11:18:37 pm AEST
Subject: Sun.21.6.20 daily digest

Roderick

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Wed.6.2.19 Metro Twitter. [excerpts reposted to explain the photos]
9.26 Werribee line: Major delays (a truck striking Napier Street bridge near Footscray).  Trains will be held.
- 9.42 still major, but clearing.
- 10.29 Trains are on the move, with delays clearing.
18.23 Buses will replace trains between Frankston and Stony Point (an [unexplained] operational issue near Leawarra).
- 18.32 Alternative transport:  Bus route 782 between Frankston and Crib Point
- And 776, which goes to Baxter.
- 19.25 "Operational issue", a polite way of saying 'one of our carriages detached mid way through a trip'?

Sun.21.6.20 Metro Twitter
Buses replace trains North Melbourne - Upfield until the last train (level-crossing works at Moreland and Coburg).
Lilydale/Belgrave/Glen Waverley lines: All trains direct to/from Flinders St all day (maintenance works).  From loop stations, take a train from pfm 3, and change at Flinders St.
Buses replace trains on sections of the Frankston line and Frankston - Stony Point until the last train of Sun 26 Jul (level-crossing) works take place.
Pakenham/Cranbourne lines: Trains will run to an altered timetable  Flinders Street - Caulfield from 9.15 to 19.15 today (works). All trains will stop at all stations  Caulfield - South Yarra during this time.
10.11 Sunbury line: Major delays (police near Albion). Trains may be held at available platforms.
- 10.38 The cause was a near-miss [ie near hit] with a trespasser.  Citybound services are moving, but outbound services are delayed as a relief driver is required.
- 10.50 clearing.
12.59 Pakenham/Cranbourne/Frankston/Sandringham lines: Trains operate direct to/from Flinders St until further notice (a power fault). Passengers for loop stations change at Flinders St.
- 13.15  Loop running has resumed.
Buses replace trains between Dandenong and Pakenham after 20.10, and each night until Thurday 25 June. 
Buses replace trains Parliament - Sandringham from 20.15 until the last train (maintenance works).
Buses replace trains Newport - Werribee from 20.20 until the last train (works)
Pakenham/Cranbourne/Frankston lines: trains will originate/terminate at Richmond, from 20.50 until the train, and again Mon.22 to Wednesday 24 June.  From Flinders St, take Belgrave/Lilydale/Glen Waverley train and change at Richmond.
[that kills the offered loop connection to the Burnley group; Metro's right hand doesn't know what its left hand is doing, and DoT can't keep its bastard child in control].

COVID-19 cases in Australia, 4.39pm on Jun 21, 2020
7461 cases; deaths in Australia 102; vic1836  (19 deaths); nsw 3149 (48); qld 1066 (6); wa605 (9); act 108 (3); sa 440 (4); tas 228 (13);  nt 29 (0)

Powerhouse push slammed as more 'pleasure palace' than museum June 21, 2020
Former deputy director of the Powerhouse Museum Jennifer Sanders talks to supporters of the Powerhouse Museum gathered in front of the Ultimo museum to protest the closure on June 30.CREDIT:KATE GERAGHTY
On June 30 the curtain will come down on the Catalina flying bird, the largest suspended plane in any museum in the world, Australia’s best collection of working steam engines and the train destination board that stood for 76 years at Central Station.
The heritage halls of the Powerhouse Museum are to shut, the museum's purpose-built galleries housing the Locomotive No 1 and the Boulton and Watt steam engine to close 12 months later.
A new Powerhouse is to rise phoenix-like transplanted to the arable soils of the Parramatta riverfront by 2024.
To its opponents including former and current staff, heritage and museum experts and advocates, the new Powerhouse will not be a museum at all, more an entertainment pleasure palace sucking up increasing amounts of Treasury revenue and public goodwill.
To chief executive Lisa Havilah, it will be Sydney's first example of a 21st-century cultural institution drawing record numbers of visitors to the city's second CBD.
The difference is one of philosophy, she says: the past versus the future, traditional museum practices versus contemporary.
Lisa Havilah, CEO of the Powerhouse Museum. CREDIT:WOLTER PEETERS
This week thousands of documents were released by parliamentary order of Upper House MLC's David Shoebridge and Robert Borsak ahead of a fresh inquiry into the Powerhouse's $1.17 billion relocation - the same select committee that urged the Powerhouse be kept in Ultimo and western Sydney be given its own institution.
Together the documents show that in mission and practice, the Parramatta Powerhouse will be much different from the institution it replaces.
Email chains within the design team and consultant reports track monumental changes to the project since State Cabinet approval in 2018.
Refinement continues even as the Environment Impact Statement this month controversially recommended the demolition of Parramatta's heritage sites Willow Grove and St George's Terrace.
Missing from the 17 boxes of documents is the 2020 business plans developed by the Berejiklian government justifying the redevelopment of Ultimo and the building of the new Powerhouse.
The architectural plans confirm the Powerhouse will open with no permanent collection display, no dedicated spaces for museum exhibitions and no on-site permanent storage for its vast collection.
The collections team will be based at the museum's Discovery Centre at Castle Hill which is to be expanded for the museum's 500,000 collection items and it is where exhibitions will be built.
As many as two million people are predicted to visit in its first year, according to the EIS, driven by longer opening hours and the changing program. This is about the same number expected to flock to the Art Gallery of NSW when Sydney Modern opens in 2023.
These bold visitation forecasts were informed by a market-depth analysis and modelling of the capacity for each of the exhibition and public spaces which have yet to be publicly released and tested but likely assumes free general-entry and premium-ticketed events and exhibitions.
Artist's impression of the new Powerhouse museum in Parramatta.
Inside the lattice framework of the Parramatta Powerhouse designed by architects Moreau Kusunoki Genton (MKG) there will be seven presentation spaces stacked over the east and west wings, along with a research lab, apartments for visiting researchers, a rooftop terrace and a student dormitory.
The primary use of the presentation spaces will be to stage exhibitions, Havilah says, but they have also been designed for flexible or "secondary" use and available for commercial events, according to documents seen by the Herald.
The largest presentation space, capable of housing the Powerhouse's Museum iconic Locomotive No 1, can switch to a live music hall and venue for civic and corporate events.
Design teams are working on the broad assumption of eight-month-long exhibitions, four-months of commercial programming and bump in-and-out, leading critics to question if the museum will be in service of its collection or other financial priorities.
Havilah says the building is being designed with exhibition runs of between six and 18 months and rapid turnovers along lines of a more modern museum experience. Dynamic programming and flexible spaces will allow more of the collection, much of which is currently not available to the public, to be rotated through, she says.
A ribbon of restaurants, shops and bars, and markets, conferences, corporate launches and festivals will drive commercial revenues, far exceeding the $3 million brought in annually at Ultimo.
There is, however, unlikely to be any reduced call on NSW Treasury which supported Ultimo to the tune of $29 million in 2018-19.
In fact, the documents make it clear that the design team has been on the hunt for savings and efficiencies - anything from the number of lifts and escalators to the $1 million to be saved on power infrastructure.
Already compromises have been made around the public floor space of the presentation spaces. Shortlisted architects were asked to provide a minimum 15,000 square metres of presentation space - that now sits at 12,644 square metres, according to the EIS.
In February the design teams discussed the relaxation of climate-controls in the presentation spaces from museum standards to a proposed category of comfort AC [airconditioning], documents show. Exhibition spaces need to be controlled for temperature, humidity, dust and light with air, water vapour, dust, pollutants and pests contributing to the deterioration of museum objects.
Moist air encourages mould and the corrosion of metal. Light can cause irreversible damage to materials including photographs and fabrics. There are various grades of climate control, AA being the gold standard at which world museums will make loans.
Ninety per cent of the total exhibition space area at Powerhouse Parramatta will be ''conditioned to museum standards'', management says only.
The Australian Institute of Conservation of Cultural Materials warns against mixing uses across the museum front and back of house, saying it risks contaminating the museum's collection from food, pests and wastes.
The Institute's NSW president Alayne Alvis is concerned no one with long-time museum experience was present on the international design jury.
"The lack of anyone to speak for the needs of a museum in this process would indicate that this process is not committed to creating a world-class museum, but having a museum as one of many changing sources of entertainment on the site."
Supporters of the Ultimo Powerhouse Museum at a protest on Thursday. CREDIT:KATE GERAGHTY
Meanwhile, expert in collection management and assessment, Kylie Winkworth, an opponent of the move, says the Powerhouse's research output had crashed over the past 15 years. Winkworth has had 40 years’ experience working with museums, collections and heritage sites, and co-authored a definitive guide to collection management.
"It's a completely porous building, open to the river, with multiple doors and access and no foyer. And no parking whatsoever, but still with the fantasy that they will have high-rotation multiple events, performances and commercial activities, plus support for 40 apartments and a school boarding house."
The Trust of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences has a legal mandate to protect and preserve its collections while sharing it with the public. Its chairman Professor Barney Glover, who is the vice-chancellor of Western Sydney University, is confident Havilah’s vision will deliver a cultural institution in Parramatta that will sit at the forefront of museum design and function globally.
"The public will have access to more of the vast Powerhouse collection than ever before both in Parramatta and the significantly expanded Museum Discovery Centre at Castle Hill – this is an excellent arts and cultural outcome for Western Sydney but in fact for all of NSW,'' he says.
"The Trust has full confidence that the MKG design for Powerhouse Parramatta will ensure the safety and protection of the Powerhouse Collection."
Bruce Lay with his rare posters by A.M Cassandre. He says if the Powerhouse goes, he will re-assign his museum gift.CREDIT:JANIE BARRETT
Heritage researcher, Bruce Lay, is among those questioning if he should donate his rare and valuable posters, classics from the 1920s period by A.M Cassandre to the Powerhouse. "They belong in a national institution either in Sydney or Canberra; not buried because of irrelevance, in storage in Parramatta. If the Powerhouse goes, we will re-assign the gift."
Sydney has to wait until 2024 to see the physical results of the planning now underway for western Sydney's Powerhouse. Havilah says it will be worth the wait.
The brief to architects references some of the most iconic cultural buildings in the world including the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, The Shed Arts Centre, New York, Shanghai's Powerstation of Art and the Grand Palais Paris. Each are renowned for interpreting arts and culture for new, often younger, audiences.
Each is at the forefront of new thinking around the management and display of collections, looking at ideas to bring the city into exhibition halls, even tossing out traditional chronological hangings. Havilah wants the Powerhouse to be a similar disruptor.
There are global precedents, too, for the establishment of publicly accessible satellite archives like that foreshadowed for Castle Hill. The Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay and London's Victoria and Albert Museum are looking at or building satellite storage solutions that may be partially open to the public.
A promotional animation by MKG hints at what is to come on the riverfront: scenes shift from fashion show to gallery, to lecture hall to children's playground and outdoor concert, and research laboratories, a public domain that is active day and night.
An artist's impression of the new Parramatta Powerhouse museum being used as a concert venue.
It silenced staff early this year. This was no stand-alone museum. There will be no compromise, Havilah says. "I have spent my career working in western Sydney arts and culture and I know first-hand the appetite in the community for greater access to arts and culture where people live,'' she says.
"We won’t just see people return visit to the Powerhouse Parramatta once, we’ll have people returning regularly as our changing exhibition program educates and inspires audiences of all ages."
The Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences grew out of the blaze that levelled the Garden Palace exhibition hall in the Royal Botanic Gardens along with some of Australia's early industrial, manufacturing and agricultural riches.
The nation's loss inspired the establishment of the museum in 1879, dedicated to the collection of Australia's material heritage and stories of Australian culture, history and lifestyle.
The Lionel Glendenning-designed galleria, which opened in 1988 in the shell of the old tramways powerhouse in Ultimo, now sits in one of the densest precincts of technological enterprise in Australia, according to the Pyrmont Action Group which still wonders why the government is ready to abandon a purpose-built museum just 30-years-old.
Staff giving the last tours are asking if it has to happen: why not leave Ultimo open until there is something built-in Parramatta?
"Not one visitor has said they agree with the move," says one. "In fact, overwhelmingly it is the opposite. The museum has provided visitors with beautiful, memorable experiences for literally generations, and the next generation will not have this family experience."
There have been tears from visitors and staff, they say: "All share a common mourning. The cold and unnecessary - and preventable - death of a perfectly healthy family member."
<www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/powerhouse-push-slammed-as-more-pleasure-palace-than-museum-20200614-p552gy.html>

Government barges ahead with cultural destruction June 21, 2020 329 comments
We are about to witness one of the most shameful acts of cultural vandalism in the history of this country. On June 30, the NSW government will shut down to the public the Powerhouse Museum in Ultimo, where it has existed as both a landmark and an attraction for 134 years, and gradually demolish it to make way for sale of the site to a preferred developer. Thus, yet more of the Sydney we love is being eradicated.
The Powerhouse has earned world renown and respect. It has assembled, through acquisitions and donations, a unique, priceless and irreplaceable collection of objects relevant to the history of Australia in general and to NSW in particular. All aspects of human creativity – in science, technology, industry and the decorative arts – are represented in the collection which is now to be dispersed. Many items will never be seen again and a good deal of the collection will probably be sold off.
The $38 million Powerhouse Museum taking shape in 1986. CREDIT:ROBERT PEARCE
This operation has, in my opinion, been deliberately and falsely described as a "relocation". It is no such thing. To me, it is the wholesale destruction of a much loved institution and its replacement with another entity that will bear as much relation to the current museum as a Picasso does to a postcard. Only a miserable group of objects will be displayed in a smaller, uglier building in distant Parramatta.
Greeted with almost universal incredulity when it was announced six years ago, this absurd plan continues to meet with unshakeable opposition from the public and from museum professionals.
In 2016, more than 10,000 Sydneysiders signed and presented to the state government a petition to force the creation of a special, cross-party parliamentary inquiry committee to review the plan. That committee gave it a firm thumbs down.
The government barged ahead anyway. Not even a pandemic has been able to deflect the Premier from this disastrous, profligate course of action.
The Powerhouse Mueusm's Locomotive No. 1.CREDIT:DALLAS KILPONEN
To the current government nothing is sacred, no beautiful sandstone buildings, no open spaces, nothing that can’t be swiftly monetised. Extravagant new infrastructure projects, all inevitably costing double or triple original estimates, have bloomed like flowers in spring. Tunnels have been dug, more and more roads built, historic suburbs bisected, ancient trees felled. Central Sydney has been gifted with an astronomically costly and already outmoded light rail.
All of this frenzied activity now forms part of what is one of the worst planned cities in the Western world and one of the most incoherent traffic systems.
But these failures pale into insignificance beside the Powerhouse "relocation", which is not only physically and environmentally disastrous but also culturally destructive. What we would lose in the Powerhouse as a cultural and spiritual component of Sydney life can never be replaced.
Driven either by outmoded ideology, ignorance, bloody mindedness, political opportunism or by a malign combination of all of these: the government seems to have clung to the Powerhouse Parramatta project like a passenger on the Titanic to a flimsy raft.
An artist's impression of the new Powerhouse Museum in Parramatta. CREDIT:
Deaf to argument, blind to a need for fiscal sobriety and dumbly reciting her pro forma mantra, the Premier, Gladys Berejiklian, has declared the Parramatta move to be a project of state significance without giving a single good reason why it should jump the queue in front of social housing, schools, hospitals and regional cultural centres.
We are now up to Business Case Four and have yet not sighted cogent description of the proposal or a plausible cost-benefit analysis that might justify the risible claim of 1 million visitors a year to Parramatta. Two billion dollars are to be splurged on a plan that is not even half-baked. Shall we make that four? Or more?
The chosen site in Parramatta is manifestly unsuitable. It is flood prone. There is no room for expansion as none is contemplated. When throughout the world, cultural institutions are expanding into satellite spaces, repurposing old buildings or creating new homes for expanding collections – we are shrinking them.
No thought has been given to alternative sites such as the White Bay Power Station. Just grab a bit of existing state land – carve off a slice off the Botanic Garden for the wretched Sydney Modern, which is not a gallery but a function centre in drag; level a prime site in the heart of Chinatown for whoever puts their hand up for it.
Gladys Berejiklian is said to have found the Powerhouse Museum boring.CREDIT:NICK MOIR
According to staff, the Premier has only set foot in the Powerhouse once. She is said to have found it "boring" – which is perhaps why she left the running of the Parramatta folly to her quondam minister for the arts, Don Harwin.
Harwin actually took the job seriously. But duchessed by a handful of powerful figures in the cultural world and ever willing to lend an ear to any scheme that might dilute general opposition to the Ultimo eradication, he became a prime target for the self-interested vultures who descended on the site at the prospect of dismemberment.
A lyric theatre, a fashion museum, a centre of baroque excellence, these and many more claims were made for a piece of the corpse. The public still has no idea of what is imagined for Ultimo or, for that matter, for Parramatta where the current chief executive – whose expertise is confined to the world of contemporary visual arts and who has no significant experience with museums - paints only the fuzziest picture of her vision. Which is perhaps why it is shaping up to be another Carriageworks.
The inescapable fact is that apart from Berejiklian and the Mayor of Parramatta, there is little or no support for the scheme. There is however unequivocal enthusiasm for something in Parramatta that does not involve the obliteration of the Powerhouse in Ultimo.
Female elephants have long pregnancies but in the end they bring forth something beautiful and noble. The gestation period for the Parramatta scheme has also been long. In six years the government has flung millions at it – $14 million alone in consultant fees! – in a doomed attempt to produce a plausible business case. It has laboured long to bring forth another kind of elephant. A white elephant.
Leo Schofield was a trustee of the Powerhouse for 10 years. He is a former member of the executive of the National Trust (NSW) and a former chairman of the federal government’s committee on new uses for its heritage properties.
RELATED ARTICLE Former Powerhouse Museum director Peter Denham in front of the Boulton and Watt steam engine in 2017. Powerhouse Museum will run out of puff in Parramatta
<www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/government-barges-ahead-with-cultural-destruction-20200619-p5543a.html>

Perth's five new Metronet stations on the Morley-Ellenbrook line revealed June 21, 2020
The construction of five new train stations in Perth’s north-eastern corridor is expected to create thousands of local jobs to help support the state’s economic recovery from COVID-19.
The state government on Sunday revealed a contract to build the new stations on the Morley-Ellenbrook line would be awarded in November as it announced details for the $1 billion project.
Ellenbrook will get one of five new train stations as part of Metronet.
The construction of stations at Ellenbrook, Whiteman Park, Malaga, Noranda and Morley will be the state’s biggest public transport project since construction of the Mandurah line.
The new stations will connect 21 kilometres of rail line in the north-eastern corridor to a redeveloped Bayswater station and onto the city.
More than 3000 local jobs are expected to be created and supported across the life of the project while more than 11,700 passenger boardings are anticipated on the line from the first day of operation and up to 18,070 daily boardings by 2031.
Transport Minister Rita Saffioti said the contract would be awarded later this year and that the government was conscious of delivering the project at the budgeted $1 billion.
Malaga station.
“We're working to the budget that we set of around a billion dollars but we'll be releasing the final budget at the time of last contract signing,” Ms Saffioti said.
“We've been very careful in this market to negotiate the best outcome we can with the contractors.”
Two proponents have been shortlisted for the main construction contract Ellenbrook Alliance (CPB Contractors and Downer EDI) and MELconnx Consortium (Laing O'Rourke Australia Construction), with the main contract expected to be awarded later this year.
Premier Mark McGowan said this year the government had seven Metronet projects under construction, which was a significant transformation to the state’s infrastructure and public transport build.
Morley station.
Mr McGowan said the thousands of jobs created from the projects would support local jobs and the state’s COVID economic recovery.
The project will be made possible with a federal government investment of $500 million that was allocated in the 2018 budget.
The new stations will include parking for a total of about 3,300 cars, four bus interchanges, universal access, cycle facilities, toilets and shared paths connecting them to the surrounding networks.
The Perth CBD will be as close as 15 minutes when boarding at Morley and just 30 minutes from Ellenbrook - making it the quickest transport option available for nearby residents.
Whiteman Park.
The state government also announced on Sunday that it had awarded the $400 million Tonkin Gap contract to the Tonkin Gap Alliance, fast tracking the project with works expected to start in September.
The Alliance, which includes BMD, Georgiou Group, WA Limestone, BG&E and GHD, will work with Main Roads and PTA to deliver the project, which is expected to fix a major bottleneck on Tonkin Highway through Bayswater which carries more than 120,000 vehicles per day.
The project includes additional traffic lanes, five new bridges, upgrades to Guildford Road and Great Eastern Highway interchanges, and a shared path and underpasses for pedestrians and cyclists.
It is expected to save 17,000 road users who use this section of Tonkin Highway up to six minutes during morning peak and up to 11 minutes during afternoon peak.
Noranda.
<www.watoday.com.au/national/western-australia/perth-s-five-new-metronet-train-stations-revealed-20200621-p554pe.html>

Teenage girl robbed, threatened at notorious Lyall St bus stop in Cranbourne
Cranbourne Leader June 21, 2020
A bus stop near Cranbourne Park Shopping Centre dubbed the “most dangerous” in Casey has lived up to its reputation yet again after a teenage girl was threatened and robbed during a frightening daylight incident.
The Lyall St bus stop dubbed the “most dangerous” in Casey. Generic picture
A teenage girl has been left shaken after a group of thugs threatened her and stole her phone and house keys at a bus stop locals have dubbed the “most dangerous” in Casey.
The Lyall St stop, near Cranbourne Park Shopping Centre, has been the site of a string of violent incidents in recent months.
A mother, who asked not to be named, said her 16-year-old daughter and her boyfriend were approached by a group of youths — described as Sudanese in appearance — a 5pm on Saturday, June 20.
“They threatened my daughter and her boyfriend before forcing her to hand over her phone, house keys and details,’’ the mother said.
“They did the right thing and handed everything over, my daughter is devastated though by the whole incident and she only got her phone in April after saving up ages for it.”
Cranbourne police Sergeant Roger Child said the incident was being investigated.
The two alleged offenders were wearing black clothing.
A teen, 13, pictured, was left “traumatised” after a gang of 12 youths bashed her at a Cranbourne bus stop last year. Generic picture
Earlier this month, a 14-year-old boy was approached by three youths — described as Sudanese in appearance — on Monday, June 8 at 5.30pm.
The boy’s father said the group demanded his son hand over his phone and a new Kathmandu jacket that he had purchased hours earlier from Fountain Gate.
“They threatened him and said they would hurt him if he didn’t unlock his phone and hand it over. He also just purchased the $220 jacket, which he bought with his savings,” he said.
In March, one mother told Leader her 12-year-old son had been left terrified after youths approached him on Tuesday, February 25 and demanded his phone.
And in October last year a 13-year-old girl was punched in the back of the head by a gang of older girls who tried to steal her phone and jacket at the bus stop.
The girl’s mother, April Pearce, who started a change.org petition, calling for the council to install CCTV cameras around the area, said the bus stop was still “plagued with issues”.
Anyone with information is urged to contact Crime Stoppers.
<www.heraldsun.com.au/leader/south-east/teenage-girl-robbed-threatened-at-notorious-lyall-st-bus-stop-in-cranbourne/news-story/7c9b546569c1866bf089d289ea1e55f5>