Cavenagh Shade Structure: Not so vine after all

The not-so-shady shade structure. Photo courtesy of the NT News.

I used to be a fan of the Cavenagh St Shade Structure.

I thought the concept and logic behind it stacked up. We live in a hot CBD and cooling it down makes sense, right?

It also started to look quite pretty as those vines began to take off. Well .. I could certainly see its potential anyway.

But I drove past it the other day, and now I kind of feel like the joke is on me.

The vines, um, don’t appear to be growing anymore.

The structure was put up in 2018. 2018!

FIVE YEARS is how long these sloth-like vines have had to grow a few meters long and wide.

Over in neighbouring Cullen Bay, its vine leaf structure – which was only put up a couple of years ago – is booming. It even has fairy lights on it!

The travesty!

So, to mark the almost-five year anniversary of the not-so-shady shade structure, here is a compilation of 10 things that have grown faster than these super obstinate vine leaves in that time.

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 1)      My daughter. She was five years old when this thing went up. She is now in her second last year of primary school and about 30cm taller.

2)     My parent’s lemon tree. It was a teeny baby tree in 2018. We are almost at cutting lemons stage.

3)     My age. Argh.

4)     My neighbour’s mullet. He shaved his head to a number 1 in 2018. He looks like Billy Ray Cyrus now.

5)   The new CDU building in the City. Construction on the new university campus began 18 months ago and it will be complete by the end of this year - looooong before those bloody vines even get half way around the structure.

6)   The Bunnings in Palmerston (aka Disneyland for adults). Hello, it was just a block of barren land in 2018.

7) Covid. It has been created, spread its tentacles around the world, sparked a race to find a cure, shut the entire world down, and was eventually mostly suppressed back in its box.

8) Interest rates. They have absolutely grown stupidly faster than those vines.

9) J-lo's number of marriages.

10) The number of movies Tom Cruise has been in. He was approached, a script was written, all staff pulled together, everything filmed, edited and publicly released. And then I went and watched it (it's Top Gun 2 by the way) TWICE.

Where’s all the shade?!