O’Connell Street developer’s poetic dig at city planning
High-profile North Adelaide developer Jamie McClurg has unveiled an artwork and his own poem taking aim at O’Connell Street’s history and the city’s perceived slow-moving planning process.
Commercial and General executive director Jamie McClurg’s artistic debut is on show on level two of the recently launched 88 O’Connell Street development, with a sculpture and poem that warns against wasted time.
The bronze sculpture depicts sand oozing from a shattered hourglass and is accompanied by a poem that Jamie says he got some help from AI to perfect.
“It’s emblematic of the 36 years of wasted time and community prosperity that could have happened in that particular site,” Jamie tells CityMag.
In 2022, Commercial & General broke ground on the site which was previously vacant for 33 years after furniture retailer Le Cornu sold the property in 1989 and a string of subsequent development proposals failed to kick off.
The artwork dubbed ‘Waste of Time’ was unveiled at the mixed-use development’s official opening last week, where Jamie acknowledged the work might be controversial.
“It was the one thing in the project that I didn’t get a planning approval for, just to see if people would waste their time on that,” he says.
“I said in my opening speech, I hope I haven’t embarrassed myself, I thought I’d give it a try and put a lot of heart and soul into it, because I thought it was important to really identify the fact that these things do have an effect.”
The developer says he’s “always been accused of being a creative type” and conceptualised the work three years ago, around about the time work began.
“My issue is just about the logic of being scared of change and the fact that that can affect generations,” Jamie says.
“I think that not having 88 O’Connell Street finished created many social and commercial issues, particularly on O’Connell Street and in North Adelaide.
“Over its time, it was a site that was a missing tooth of O’Connell Street. You saw the erosion of O’Connell Street as a place where people would shop and interact, and we don’t need to lose that time.”
Jamie says while he thinks the Adelaide City Council was “partly responsible for its dragging” it would be unfair to place the blame there entirely.
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“We tend in Adelaide to listen to a loud minority at different points in time, and we’re probably quite thankful that we’ve now got a government that is not doing that. They’re making decisions, not all decisions I agree with, but decisions that move the state forward,” he says.
“I think it’s individuals that knowingly or unknowingly play a part in the delay of things or distraction.”
Accompanying the sculpture is a poem, which Jamie says he wrote and edited with the help of AI to “get it right”. Read the poem in full:
Waste of Time
In the rhythm of progress, threads should be spun,
Of vision, of purpose, beneath the rising sun.
But silence reigned where voices should have grown —
Years lost to ego, seeds never sown.
Thirty-six years this land lay bare.
Not for lack of need, but due to those who wouldn’t dare.
Whispers turned to walls, and reason to stone —
While generations waited, unheard, alone.
Time was squandered — by hands that held it tight.
Guarding their power, resisting the light.
They masked delay as care, dressed stalling as grace.
While the hopes of a city eroded in place.
Do not defend the comfort of delay.
When boldness could have cleared the way.
What legacy is built on standing still.
When the world cries out for urgent will?
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Each hour hoarded, each plan denied.
Was not just lost — it quietly died.
Ideas, connections, futures deferred.
By those who feared action more than the absurd.
Beware the saboteurs in polished guise.
Who preach in circles and paralyse.
Their mischief cloaked in careful debate —
Yet all it breeds is a longer wait.
But time does not wait for the fearful few.
It favours the builders the ones who push through
In thirty — six months, what lay broken was raised —
By hands that served, not sought to be praised.
So waste not the day on self-serving pride.
Join the many — not the few — on the forward side.
Collaboration is the only true might,
To turn what was wrong into what is right.
Let your story be one of rising above —
Of purpose, of courage, of hard — earned love.
For in the hours reclaimed, and actions aligned,
We find a future not wasted, but wisely designed.
