‘From this epoch derive the arcades and intérieurs, the exhibition halls and panoramas. They are residues of a dream world.’

— Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (p. 13)

Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building is a bizarre Byzantine bazaar, a constantinopolean cathedral consecrated to commerce in the grand nineteenth century tradition.  Through the great rounded arches of its windows at dusk, it gives the flâneur a fortuitous glimpse of a world of light and colour, like a movie painted in the monochromatic darkness of a cinema…