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Sydney’s Highest Hand Sanitizer

The utter banality of the Sydney Tower Eye

B R

B R

— 3 min read

12 April, 2023 | Sydney, Australia

Upon a rereading, I realized it’s possible readers might have been left with the notion I wasn’t enjoying Sydney. Nothing could be further from the truth. Generally speaking, I’ve had a blast. But I wanted to add this preface because I’m about to be pretty scathing about the Sydney Tower Eye.

There are a couple more major experiences I wanted to talk about in my time in Australia and I’ll just preview them quickly:

  • Sydney Tower Eye: garbage
  • The Easter Show: insane, good, would not do again
  • Some pub crawl I signed up for: good but generally avoid pub crawls
  • The State Library of New South Wales: gay as hell and good
  • The Bad Movie Night at another library: wish it existed in Seattle

I’m going to try to blast through these in three posts. This one will be short because all I’m gonna do is make fun of the Sydney Tower Eye because it sucks (sorry Sydneysiders).

You kept this name. You kept this name after your cousins to the east helped produce a movie where an eye in a tower was the principal, horrifying, otherworldly villain trying to consume all hope and joy in the world.

I guess the first thing I should mention with the Sydney Tower Eye, or just Sydney Tower on Wikipedia, is it’s relative size because they can’t seem to shut up about it in the copy on the walls. It’s shorter than the Auckland tower, but is the tallest thing in Sydney by about 30m, only in real competition with the Crown Sydney, which is actually popular because there is gambling.

Are we inside you? Can you feel us, animophized Sydney Tower Eye?

I guess my real beef here is that they shuffle you into a room where you watch a brutally headache inducing commercial for the attraction you already paid for. It’s billed as a 4D experience and requires glasses from the 1950s.

After some particularly pointless security theater where underpaid staff half-heartedly look through your bags, a short elevator ride puts you on the observation deck. And the views really are pretty good.

Here’s that ANZAC memorial park from my first day here I blogged about either seven months ago or 11 days ago.

After looking around, you’ll catch there are…odd additions to the observation deck that you wouldn’t have reasonably guessed would be there.

These additions range from awful:

Sure yes you already ascended up the tower, but don’t you wish you were also in The Metaverse about it?

To just kind of strange:

There are like four other mundane objects like this.

To messages that raise more questions than answers:

Okay, do they mean the city at night? Or does this whole thing invert some days and we get to see the mole-person anti-Sydney underground? Is this an invitation to a remarkably open and thrifty Eyes Wide Shut party?

I’ll close this with the gift shop at the bottom of the tower, which had a four foot Lego cop for some reason.

Unfortunately this was under near constant observation and the Legos were glued. He looks anxious. Good.

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