This year’s Biennale Artists and Supporters Party at Cockatoo Island — panorama — featured a large installation of “exploding” cars hanging from the roof — by famous Chinese artist Cao Gu0-Quiang.

Stephen Wiltshire is an autistic savant artist with phenomenal drawing/memory skills … he is in Sydney at the moment  …   panorama.

The crowd at the Opera House at dusk … panorama.  The fireworks at midnight … panorama.  The 9.00 pm fireworks from the Botanic Gardens … panorama.

As part of a food-oriented festival the Sydney Harbour Bridge was laid with turf overnight (real grass!) and 6000 picnickers (who had won a kind of raffle) assembled there for breakfast. Panorama. Loudspeakers with  bird noises (kookaburras) augmented the rural feel.

One of the Sea Shepherds’ fleet — the “Steve Irwin”  – is in Sydney at the moment as part of a short tour of Australian cities before they head towards Antarctica for another summer foray with the Japanese whaling fleet. On the bridge –panorama.  In the galley — panorama.  Here is a view on the bow — panorama.  You can see last year’s actions on  the  ”Whale Wars” show.

Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi turns civic monuments into weird interior features of temporary “rooms”. In Sydney currently he has created rooms over two large equestrian statues that stand outside the state Art Gallery — you can go up ramps to view the rooms. Here is one of the rooms — panorama, and here is the other — panorama.  Here is what this latter statue looks like normally.

A large scale dance party at the Olympic Regatta Centre near Penrith - west of the city on the weekend — Defqon 1. Spectacular staging and lighting effects!  Panorama.

“World’s biggest running event” the official website says — about this mass run this morning from the city to Bondi Beach. You can see about a quarter perhaps of the 75,000 runners — waiting to start —  in this panorama.  The race starts quite early in the day and it is often chilly — whence the tops you can see discarded on the hedges in the panorama.

In the Blue Mountains to the west of the city the townships keep to the central plateau and north and south there are enormous thickly forested valleys with sheer cliffs … panorama. Being  a landscape of ancient tropical seabeds there are coal seams here and small scale mining went on  until the 1930s. Mining is blamed for the landslide you see here — where a large hunk of cliff tumbled into the valley in the middle of the night in early 1932. For a year crowds gathered at a large crack in the cliff top hoping to see some action but in the end it fell unwatched.

At the Opera House last night, projections from across Sydney Cove, onto the sails … panorama:  Quicktime version, Flash version.