onetonshadow

It was March 2005, somewhere near St Kilda. I was sitting in a room, on a sofa propped on milk crates, staring at the ceiling. Around my neck was a Philadelphia collar and in my hand was a bottle of gin. The collar was the only sign that I had recently broken my C1, 2 & T1 the gin was to stop me thinking about it. I was staring at the ceiling because it was reasonably tricky to stare anywhere else. I sat quietly contemplating my future. Next to me was a chap called Christopher Lansell, Crispy to his comrades, whom I’d known about 8 minutes. He started talking about some things, wild, imaginative things, I started to reply, and back he came with more, this went on quite successfully for a while. One of these crazy things was an idea he’d been playing with to install a 1:1 billion scale model of the Solar System somewhere in Melbourne. It seemed quite a good idea to me.

Almost without any warning at all it was 9am on December 10 of that year, my return ticket to the UK forgotten in the back of a drawer somewhere, and 6 months out of date, my neck visible to all who cared to glance. I’m crouched at the door to our St Kilda studio, attempting to drill a hole into Pluto, except this Pluto is only 2mm in diametre, which makes it very tricky. And in half an hour it’s meant to be on a plinth somewhere near Port Melbourne.

Building the Sun

Having drummed up some media interest through an interview on ABC radio and an article in The Age and spent a few months constructing the Sun and nine planets by hand we were actually within minutes of taking our disjointed conversation live.

Painting the Planets

Planet bases

Pluto

Mars

Neptune

Saturn

Jupiter

Having finally secured Pluto to it’s stand, we threw all the models in the back of a trailer and hightailed it to the beach, as we roared along the approach to the marina there was a sudden, and slightly sickening crunch. Crispy braked, we looked at each other in silent fear, then out through the back window of the Toyota. Rolling down the road in the vague direction of Acland Street was a 1.39m golden ball of plywood and satin. Hmmm. We exited the car at speed and, to the amusement of the residents, sprinted off after the star. It was not entirely unscathed, but it was still presentable, and anyway, we were out of time.

The weekend was long and disgustingly hot, but the model was a success, large numbers of families turned up on their bikes, with their children, The Age article folded in their pockets, planning to ride the full 6km route to Pluto. And being mid summer the beach and passing traffic was plentiful. Seeing kids stand under the 1.28cm hand painted sphere that was Earth (I even managed to dust the Himalayas with some snow) and point out Australia before running 150m to the Sun and smacking it with their ice cream stained hands was quite rewarding.

Earth, a man with a beard & the Moon, which is as far as Man has ever actually travelled, allegedly. (But not the man with the beard, he may have been no further than Geelong, I don’t know)

Mars

The Sun

By Sunday night we were knackered but content.

Then things started getting interesting. Tony Wheeler, co-founder of Lonely Planet rang us up, said he’d heard about the project but had been out of the country and wondered if he could come and see the models, we, unsurprisingly said yes. Then the council rang us up and said they’d had a lot of calls from the general public asking when they were going to do the project again. They said they hadn’t done it in the first place. It was about this point that words like ‘permanent’ began to appear in conversations.

We found a sculptor, Cameron Robbins, an eccentric and extremely talented man based in Collingwood, and commenced talks with the council. It was estimated at costing around $70,000, and so the tedious process of money raising became the focus, Tony pledged a large sum of his personal finances, as did some universities. Things looked good. Then the university pulled out, and we experienced our first wedge of bureaucratic council red tape. Things look bad. And that high and low was a microcosm of how it progressed for the next two years. With a hefty focus on the ‘This is just never going to happen’ line of thought.

But now, three years and six months after a conversation on a sofa in St Kilda, there are some people down at the foreshore tidying up the metre high bluestone plinths the planets rest on, and no doubt someone polishing the 360kg of bronze that makes up the Sun, in preparation for the opening on September 21. And I’m going to miss it, because I’m in London, so if you have nothing better to do please pop down to the reserve north of the Marina at 4.45, take some photos, get yourself an epic sense of how fragile and unique Earth really is and give Crispy some support for the endless phone calls and meetings and rolls and rolls of tape he’s deftly sliced through.

Pouring the bronze Planets

Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus cooling off

Half of the Sun

All of the Sun

Polishing the Sun

The sculptor Cameron Robbins next to polished Sun

Saturn

Venus, Mars, Earth, Mercury & Pluto (yeah it’s not a planet anymore, but it was then)

Pouring concrete base for the Sun

Diamond saw cutting bluestone plinths for the planets

Plinths being lifted into place

The Sun being moved into place

Model Location

And if you ever see anyone chasing an enormous shining sphere down a road, go and give them a hand.