Shooting Through

"Shooting through like a Bondi tram", a saying familiar to Sydneysiders especially in the first half of the twentieth century deriving from the supposed speed of the trams that ran the line to Bondi Beach. The saying meant to move, or get away, quickly.

As a child, I was fascinated by trams and planned that I would be a tram driver when I grew up only to be thwarthed when the Government shut down the entire Sydney tram network in the early 1960s. What was once one of the largest tram networks in the world disappeared.

The Sydney Tramway Museum does its best to retain memories of Sydney's former glorious system including by its DVD, Shooting Through, that chronicles the network in detail and of which I was reminded when I read Andrew's post.

I first came across Shooting Through, as a video, in bizarre circumstances more than 20 years ago. I was at the Bodyline Gay Sauna on a very quiet weekday morning and wandered into the screening room where customers would normally expect porn to be screening. To my surprise, instead of porn, the huge screen presented me with silent images of trams travelling around Sydney. Like Nero in ancient Rome, I planted myself down lengthways on a lounge and wearing only a sauna issued towel I watched old trams silently criss cross the screen for the next hour or so.

I have no idea what possessed the duty manager to screen that video in a gay sauna but the thought occurred to me later when I learned what the video was called that he had seen the title on the cover and assumed he was screening a tittilating orgasmic movie.