Things Big, Yellow, and Bench-like.

The Big Yellow USU Bench at Courtyard Cafe does not love you. It begs, rather. It begs that you, love it. Big and Yellow and USU and Bench-like, it is an insecure narcissist. A greedy, gluttonous thing that only comes alive when the whole world’s attention is on it, terrified of the total obliteration that comes from being ignored, the complete desolation of being unsat upon — it desperately needs your love to live. It pleads for it. Pleads that you care about it, and post about it online; talk of it with all of your friends and become enamored entirely with how amazingly Big, how cheerfully Yellow, and how stupendously ‘Benchy’ it is. But, it does not love you back. It cannot. No matter how many times you throw yourself carelessly upon its canary-coloured boards, The Big Yellow USU Bench will never love you back. It simply does not know how.

I am not against big benches, per se. Rather, what I am against is The Big Yellow USU Bench. In truth, I abhor it with every fibre of my being. There is something wretchedly ironic about its existence, about its pathetic pleading. A big bench typically is enlarged to encourage a novel perspective of the world around you. Its lofty view might make the world seem unfamiliar and expansive as the bench encompasses you wholly, holding your legs aloft and dangling them helplessly over the edge, reminiscent of how large the world felt as a child. And I like that. I like that quite a lot actually. 

I do not like The Big Yellow USU Bench. 

It pisses me off just thinking about it. How profoundly embarrassing its desperation to be a bench is; shamefully other. Because a good bench demands nothing of you; a good bench offers a quiet place to think, it brings friends and strangers together, it binds communities; a good bench doesn’t impose itself, it is a quiet thing; a good bench does not beg. The Big Yellow USU Bench cannot be a real bench. Rather, I’m afraid, it is merely acting the part of one. 

If you’ve ever made the bildungsroman up on top of Big Yellow you probably know what I mean when I say that you start to become a bit embarrassed after being up there for too long. Because one cannot simply sit on Big Yellow without becoming a part of its Big fucking Yellow conceit. Without complying to the naïve moronicism of Big Yellow’s essential contrivance: 

“So what if a normal thing was bigger than usual — and my god! What if…what if it was – quick write this down Nigel Yellow! Like the USU! Yes! YES! By Jove, I think we’ve cracked it! Huzzah!”

To make the trip onto Big Yellow is to admit that this vulgar conception was enough for you. It is to admit that you buckled completely beneath the weight of your most limbic impulses. It is to admit that you awkwardly clambered your way up on top of a giant yellow farce — a struggle so uncooperative it's almost as if it wasn’t intended — either in the disappointing hopes of being rewarded with a particularly dour view of the courtyard cafe, or even worse, in the hope that you might meld with Big Yellow’s total conceptual audacity, become lost inside of it’s lemony-solipsism, its fruitless quest to grasp it’s noumena, and pose for it. For a ‘quick pic’.

I fear the truth of the matter is that most people never realise that they cease to exist entirely whenever they touch Big Yellow. Totally engulfed by its gimmickry, their bodies become annexed — forever muddied by a smouldering unclean piss-yellow, dyed at the hands of the insatiable desire to be a part of the Biggest, Yellowest, and most Bench-seeming thing in all of so-called-Sydney. It is impossible to sit on Big Yellow without becoming complicit in its performance, another part of the bulk-bought outdoor furniture. 

You see the tragedy play out time and time again, how Big Yellow bewitches us. It always starts small, rearing its head in the first furtive glances of an interest piqued. Then, maybe, a harmless question: “Would it be crazy if I sat on that? Would that be crazy?” Then, perhaps some light physical contact? Maybe a playful tap on the side of the backrest? A lingering brush of the front left leg? Nothing too keen, but obvious enough to signal that you’re interested in taking things further. A compliment would naturally follow — “My, how much Bigger you look from up close… And so much more Yellow too! You are a Bench, right?” Then all too quickly infatuated, “I just need to get a picture — can you hold my phone?" and you’re enamoured and eagerly swung your legs over the edge (against your better judgement, and that of your friends), willingly mounted the daisy beast; consciously committed yourself to a brief ecstasy that will only devour your love and never return it — and you’re expanding, expanding into something wonderful, towards something magnificent and truly great, something Big! Something Yellow! Something – FLASH! Something Dead. And then, you’re dead. Another notch on the proverbial backrest, nothing. Nothing at all to Big Yellow. 

A bench (a regular-sized bench) is a mundane nexus of respite. It passively connects you to all who have ever passed through its space. Within this nexus there is a powerfully adjourned feeling of community, a feeling that Big Yellow inverts entirely with its performative ego. To start, Big Yellow has no consistent spatial nexus, no real authentic community it serves beyond its own salacious need for self-gratification. This privately owned ‘public’ installation is constantly relocated from Courtyard Cafe, insisting itself upon the entire campus. As if nomadically entitled to search for where it might siphon the greatest amount of attention off of the most amount of people. You will often find it punctuating lacklustre ‘events’ on Eastern Avenue, appearing as ‘quirky’ mise-en-scène for corporate TikToks, adorning the socials of various clubs, societies, and ‘publications’ littered across social media. Wherever the repulsive scent of desperation wafts, you will find Big Yellow: yearning, pleading, and needing you in a manner that is completely unbefitting any bench I have ever known.   

Even the USU seem to know that Big Yellow is just an act. We need look no further than its new friends, The Medium Yellow and Blue USU Boxes, that now gauchely frame Big Yellow at Courtyard:

If Big Yellow begs, then Medium Yellow and Blue grovel. With their bleak QR codes and empty packaging – boldly advertising that you ‘Join USU’ – the real tragedy of Medium Yellow and Blue’s addition (a kind of Poochie, to Big Yellow’s Itchy and Scratchy) is that they leave no room for nuance. Their lack of tact eviscerates any dignity that Big Yellow might have yet eked out as ‘just a bench’. Demanding that no one ever possibly miss what the actual point of Big Yellow was: to propagate the corporate interest of privatising general public amenities. 

That’s what I disdain most about Big Yellow, the fact that it is a complete bench fiction. An unconscionable monster simulating the tacit charity, care, and compassion laden within one of the most wonderfully humble and timeless articles of architecture. A deception cannot receive honest love, only fleeting praise. Idle praise, doled out cheaply in the name of some incorporate grift, it's horrific, and I’m not sure if you can tell by now but I am barely holding it together over this whole Big Yellow thing. Let alone three. 

That’s right, my god, they got more. This year, USU adopted Big Yellow two younger siblings: A Wheely Big Yellow that lurks at Manning Bar, and it's Wheely Big Yellow Twin at Hermann’s Bar. 

Something is rotten in the state of the University of Sydney. Reader, I can’t live like this. I cannot live in a world that’s so totally, utterly, inexplicably effed up. They can’t keep getting away with it.

Let us go then, you and I,

When the Courtyard is spread out against the sky,

Like a patient etherized upon a Big Yellow USU Bench;

Let us go, where there is only one thing left to do.

Meet me at Courtyard Cafe: 30/5/25, 2:37pm.

Help me take apart this Big Yellow mess, one board at a time.