The Star

For a suburb that measures only a single square kilometre Pyrmont has an almost embarrassing number of light rail stations.  The third is called The Star after the casino of the same name which sits on top of it.  Casinos aren't really my favourite places but its hard to get too annoyed with this one since its presence is pretty much the only reason we have the light rail at all.  The original line ran from Central to the casino and was only extended as far as my home as a sort of afterthought.  It can't be said that the light rail station presents a particularly appealing first sight for would be gamblers.  The station is essentially in the basement of the casino and looks like it was built in the underground carpark of a not too successful supermarket.

There is a flight of steps that will lead you up to the casino itself or you can make your way across the gloom to where daylight coyly beckons you into the great outdoors.  I chose option B and found myself looking at a park that led down to the water.  This is the east side of Pyrmont which used to be docks and still is technically for ferries and the occasional pleasure craft.  The great thing about coming out on this side of the casino is that you can't see it.  Instead you see Pyrmont Bay and beyond that the vast new constructions of Barangaroo including a semi completed tower which will apparently house what will be The Star's competition in the casino stakes if it ever gets finished.

The Star sprawls over an entire block and when it was first completed the main entrance was on the other side of the building complex, presumably so that potential gamblers wouldn't get distracted by having to look at parks and harbour views.  Some time later they decided that was stupid and did a major facelift which reoriented the entrance towards the harbour with a frontage described as "iconic".  Iconic is a developers term that means "we spent far too much money on this to risk anyone calling it ugly".  It isn't actually ugly, I might have preferred that if it was ugly in an interesting way.  It's actually bland and mediocre but on a very large scale.

The whole point of a casino is to hoover the contents of its patrons wallets as comprehensively as possible but because "driving the entire population into poverty" doesn't look good on a development application the casino is actually part of a vast network of shops, nightclubs, restaurants and a theatre where I once went to see Legally Blonde with a friend of mine.  Perhaps unsurprisingly it also has more automatic teller machines than I've seen in the entire rest of the City of Sydney.  Thus it is an "entertainment complex".  Actually its more of an entertainment simple; shop, eat, drink, see a show and gamble away your house.

Striking out from the casino I decided to see what the fringes of Pyrmont had to offer.  The first thing they had to offer was the Darling Island Water Recycling Factory.  I walked around the immediately accessible part of this factory in about thirty seconds, presumably there's more underground.  I peered in through a window and saw words like "membrane" and "gas filter".  The factory taps Sydney's sewage system to provide waste water for all sorts of purposes that don't include drinking because apparently we still have a bit of an issue with that.  When you consider that the amount of water on the planet is and always has been finite and that we've been using it for a very long time the likelihood that we're all drinking recycled sewage is probably in the region of 100% but we still don't like having it pointed out to us.

The immediate enjoyment opportunities of the water recycling factory having been exhausted I set out to circumnavigate the casino.  I hadn't got very far when I got sidetracked by a narrow path that turned out to provide access to several large apartment blocks housing some of Pyrmont's burgeoning population.  The path was a little steep in places but was certainly easy to walk for anyone young, fit or not me.  This widened out into a narrow park gouged into, well it might have been a cliff, a quarry or a dissected hill.  Suffice to say there were flats all around except for one side where there was open space and a view down to the roofs of buildings I'd been walking past a couple of minutes ago.

I made my way to a road behind the park and got a reminder of exactly how small Pyrmont is when I came onto a bridge overlooking the self same tunnel that had been the subject of an adulatory council plaque that I mentioned in the last entry.  As I watched a light rail train trundled past and into the tunnel without a hideous, casualty filled impact.  I saluted the wisdom of my ancestors in digging a hole just there and wandered on.  Basically I wandered back to the casino not because I was interested but because it had air conditioning and, more importantly, down in its gloomy basement was the station that would allow me to leave.