Last Day

Graffiti 1 Graffiti 2 Nicholson Building lift operator’s back and braces Elaine photographing in Nicholson Building Kaleidoscopic Retro story in Nicholson Building Sign in Nicholson Building corridor Yarra River, shadowed and sunlit Waste trap – Ian Kiernan would approve Fish sculpture The s-word is everywhere

Started day with breakfast at Rosati, an Italian restaurant at 95 Flinders Lane, which was delightful. Then we wandered across to the Nicholson Building, which Elaine had been encouraged to visit for arts and crafts activities. Weird place. Reminded me of the buildings in the novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which I read almost a decade ago on the recommendation of Tim Delfgaauw.

Fascinating to visit the Immigration Museum. Reminded us of just how lucky we are to be able to fly places, rather than having to crash across oceans in steerage. Then we went back to the IMAX theatre later in the day, where we saw two 3D films, Dolphins & Whales, by Jean-Michel Cousteau and narrated by Daryl Hannah, which struck me as worthy but very dated, the voice-over off-puttingly pious. By contrast, the Hubble telescope film made great use of 3D technology – and the voice-over, by Leonardo DiCaprio, was fresh and modern.

Flight to Hong Kong left at 23.50. Finished William Gibson’s Zero History, which I had been reading alongside a couple of other books, and which got better as it went along – and then slept for around seven hours. Hong Kong was cloudy and rainy, but we saw some spectacular views of Chinese mountains in cloud as we headed homewards. I slept another eight hours, and could easily have slept some more.

Picked up the latest Newsweek as we went through Heathrow, to see how they have presented the green company rankings we worked on earlier this year. Am quite impressed with the results, though aware – as I have been arguing throughout the Australian trip – that we need to be much more careful on how benchmarking, rating and ranking are done. This is the theme of recent work by SustainAbility, spotlighted in their latest report, Rate the Raters.