A Day in the Life: Rocks in the City

Look at them ... just a pile of rocks around a nice shady tree.
You'd know all about it if you stubbed your toes on them, let me tell you!
Which I nearly did ...
And which made me think ...

What does a pile of Rocks tell you?
Especially a pile of rocks in the city centre?
All neatly arranged around a tree trunk, and every tree on the pavement with its own community of pet rocks?

Rocks

Well now, these are granite rocks, Crushed to size after being blasted and brought up from the depths of the gold bearing reef, deep below.
mini Boulders really, as you would quickly tell if you tried to pick one of them up.
Stop you dead in your tracks if I tossed one at you!
Yet you wouldn't notice them, just to walk by, so tastefully arranged around their trees.
The Pavement runs the length of an office block, and fronts a residential hotel in the heart of the City's business district, right around the group of buildings which the Anglo American corporation owns and has its people in.
... and a short walk from the Johannesburg Magistrates courts, where unruly crowds have been known to congregate. Although, not so often any more.

So, maybe the Building owners don't want you to walk too close to the trees?
Possibly, they like the artistic effect of the stark granite against the bark?
Maybe they are aligning themselves to the mining activities which they service?
Maybe all, maybe nothing at all.
Certainly, it would have taken a pick up truck to deliver the payload. There's more than a wheelbarrows worth there, and they would've been carted quite some distance!

Rocks around trees ...

So what should we read into that pile of Rocks?

Progress.
That's what I read:
I read progress.
After all, whose going to stack piles of granite-hard rock in handy sizes if they thought -
if you thought for even one moment -
that someone might pick them up and chuck them back at at you.
or your nice plate glass windows!
or cars, or ... or ...
Ah.
So is our uncivilised, dangerous, scary city centre being tamed then?

(truth to tell ... it never did feel that scary to me, but, well -

 - you know -

tourists and the media do know best ...)

They do look rather nice, though - don't they?
All we need now is a flower box or two ...

All images copyright (c) the author