Hornsby Water Clock / Man, Time and the Environment
This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
33.70401° S, 151.10058° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Twenty tonnes of moving water, brass and stone in a suburban shopping mall, and a claim to a world record.
Hornsby Shire Council describes the work as an eight-metre, twenty-tonne water sculpture and identifies its pendulum clock as the largest water-driven pendulum clock ever built. The piece is properly titled Man, Time and the Environment, incorporates several oversized water-clock mechanisms and a carillon, and remains a major Hornsby landmark following Council revitalisation works.
A water clock is a genuinely old idea – the clepsydra predates mechanical timekeeping by millennia – and building a monumental kinetic one in a 1990s suburban mall is an ambitious and slightly improbable civic decision. Most councils commissioning public art at that scale reach for something static.
The sculpture has had a difficult public life. It is technically complex, water and moving parts need constant maintenance, and it has spent long stretches switched off while repairs were argued over and funded. That is the standing hazard of kinetic public art: a sculpture that does nothing is merely unloved, while a machine that has stopped looks broken. Hornsby's has been both celebrated and resented locally, and the revitalisation works were the resolution of that.
The title is the key to it. Man, Time and the Environment is a statement of intent – timekeeping driven by water, in a place built over a creek system, in a shire that markets itself as the bushland shire.
The unanswered questions are the maker's name and the date.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
Hornsby Shire Council currently describes the work as an 8 m, 20-tonne water sculpture and identifies its pendulum clock as the largest water-driven pendulum clock ever built. The sculpture remains a major Hornsby landmark after Council revitalisation works.
ACCESS
Public pedestrian-mall attraction. Approach on foot through Hornsby Mall; do not treat the sculpture itself as a vehicle destination.
