Busy Fyshwick

Canberra is a planned city, and some suburbs have particular functions. Many are primarily residential, some are industrial, some have large retail precincts. Fyshwick is mainly light industrial and bulky retail - furniture, motor vehicles, building materials and so on. Unlike most of Canberra, which is a pretty well-behaved city, Fyshwick tends to be messy and a bit chaotic. Vehicles park all over the place, there's a lot of traffic, and there are large bright signs everywhere. It's also one of two Canberra suburbs where prostitution is a legal business (the other is Mitchell), so it's busy at night too.

Fyshwick was named after Sir Philip Oakley Fysh, a former Tasmanian Premier in the late 19th century. The suburb's streets are named for Australian industrial towns and regions. Collie is a coal mining town in Western Australia, while Wollongong, a city on the NSW coast south of Sydney, has a history of mining and steelworking, and is an important seaport.

This is the scene this morning out the front of Joe's Motorcycles in Collie Street, looking toward Wollongong Street.