Falling seeds, flowing light

Albert Park seemed twice-lit in a glazing December sun. From beneath the gaze of the lonely New Zealand soldier who commemorates our participation in a dark, best-forgotten war, I watched a thin, gteyhaired man who stood in the space before the statue of Sir George Grey arguing with a small cluster of noonhour idlers. He spoke to them with an ungiving, flinty conviction that both intrigued and angered them. In his hands he held a cone-shaped framework of copperwire which he thrust towards his audience, jerking it back again and then bobbing it above his head. The contrivance suggested the veined stretch of a bat's wings as bits of goldfoil fastened to the intersections of the wires flashed sharply in the sunlight.