It was a windy old corner once upon a time, before a silver, glowing creature took up residence outside the National Gallery of Australia in 2025.
Ouroboros, the $14 million commission by artist Lindy Lee, is now Canberra's biggest conversation starter, in more ways than one.
It's now a beacon, a place to meet, to visit, to mark the time. The highly polished surface of Ouroboros - which is made of 13 tonnes of scrap metal - reflects the world around it throughout the changing day.
At night, it glows with thousands of tiny pinpricks of light. It's hard to pick a favourite face, but if you live here, you don't have to.
And that's how Lindy Lee herself wanted it.
"What people have said to me is that they've embraced it as a placemaker, as a destiny, and as a beacon, which is just really fabulous," she says.
"When [National Gallery director] Nick Mitzevich first took me to that corner, he said, "Everybody drives past the NGA not knowing that the NGA is there. We want you to create a beacon. So that's what I've tried to do, and it's been pretty successful, I think."
And that's after just two years. It took many decades, on the other hand, for Canberrans to truly appreciate its bus shelters.
The brutalist, 1970s concrete structures designed by architect Clem Cummings dotting suburban streets throughout the capital are unlike anything anywhere else.
No one liked them much in the beginning, but they have, over the years, become a distinctive, even endearing part of Canberra's urban landscape.
But for anyone who's grown up here, they symbolise something close to a time warp - the kind you get from sitting for long minutes waiting for a bus, in something that clearly hails from a different era.
The Canberra Times cartoonist David Pope sees the synergy here with Ouroboros, which symbolises eternity and the vast cosmos - a snake eating its own tail, and the countless worlds within the circle.
Incorporating a bus shelter into the distinctive form of Ouroboros is a perfect blend of Canberra's twin identities - a national capital filled with local communities. A city of icons and symbols, where people live out their lives.
It's also, in another light, a more prosaic observation of time.
"I know the old bus shelters have become a bit of a local artistic cliche, but I seem to remember, as a kid, plenty of long waits for the bus sitting in one of those, contemplating the nature of eternity," Pope says.
"Which is kind of what Lindy Lee's beautiful sculpture is also about."
It's too big to fit into just one image, so just like the real thing, Pope's version of Ouroboros has two faces - the reflected sunlight of daytime, and the shimmering stars of night.
