Tuesday, November 26, 2013

How did I not know about this?


Sydneysiders will know The Rocks as that older part of the city that was the birthplace of the colony. Today it is a commercial, residential and tourist precinct with preserved buildings, works and geographic features from the early convict days. The name The Rocks derives from the original buildings having been made from local sandstone.

Until the 1870’s The Rocks was a slum area frequented by sailors, criminals and prostitutes. 

From Wikipedia: 

Today the Rocks is a partly gentrified area, but still contains a significant proportion ofHousing Commission properties, and there is still a significant problem of urban poverty and street crime in this district. As housing stock becomes dilapidated, government policy is to sell the now extremely valuable public housing units to private owners, in the expectation that they will restore the properties.

The Rocks, c 1900

What I didn't know was that The Rocks has an annual festival featuring coffee, chocolate, tea and spice, known as The Rocks Aroma Festival. 


Apparently the event is deliberately kept small and low key, with a minimum of promotion.

What is of interest to Bytes is that as part of the coffee festival in 2010 the organisers created a sculpture of Marilyn Monroe using coffee and milk for the shading and tones. The sculpture used 5,200 cups, 680 litres of milk and 780 litres of coffee. The image is from Some Like It Hot (Get it? Coffee . . . )

See it created at:



The previous year’s sculpture was of the Mona Lisa. It used 3,604 cups of coffee and 564 pints of milk.





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