Cultured Views

The picture below is the symbol of my home town – the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Sydney Australia. Look at word blazing across…‘Eternity’. This is a photo of the bridge on New Years Eve 2000 and the bridge was alight with pyrotechnics for the huge celebrations that make, in my opinion, Sydney THE place to be for New Years Eve. Each year a different word lights up across the bridge and in the year 2000, our Olympic year, it was ‘Eternity‘ and it was a tribute to a man who, for many years, was an enigma to the people of Sydney. That man was Arthur Stace. For 37 years, beginning in the 1930′s, a word was scrawled in elegant copperplate writing in chalk on the pavements around the city of Sydney. It appeared all over the city, at various times of the day…‘Eternity‘. Just that one word. No-one knew who was writing the word and for years newspaper editors, writers, Sydney people, speculated over who the mysterious writer was.

In 1956 the mystery was solved when a Sydney Baptist minister noticed an elderly man writing the word in chalk on the footpath. Arthur Stace was born in 1884 to impoverished alcoholic parents. His childhood was one of neglect, hunger and frequent run-ins with the law. As an adult he was homeless and alcoholic, and during one of his many appearances in front of a magistrate he begged the Judge to put him away. He had lost all sense of being, he was losing his mind due to the years of alcohol abuse and had lost all hope for himself. But the Judge refused and gave him one more chance. One day Arthur called in for a free meal at one of the soup kitchens that were set up for the many homeless people in the 1930′s and he saw a group of well dressed men, on asking who they were he was informed that they were Christians. Something struck in chord within him, he was impressed, he felt hope and decided to give their way of life a try. From this point his life changed. He attended an evangelical sermon soon after and one word stuck in his mind – ‘eternity’. He could not get the word out of his head and claimed that God was now directing him to spread this message…‘Eternity’.

Arthur Stace - 'Eternity'

So, for the next 37 years he set out before sunrise everyday and proceeded to write his one word message anywhere and everywhere across Sydney, with God directing him. He and his simple message of hope became an enigma that remains to this day even though the man and his word are widely known. He died in 1967. A simple plaque was erected in his honour in Sydney, but I feel the greatest tribute to this humble man came on New Years Eve in the year 2000 when his simple message of hope was emblazened in letters of fire across the Sydney Harbour Bridge for all the world to see…

‘Eternity’.

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