A group of sightseers have awoken the fingers of Sydney’s keyboard warriors, incurring the wrath of Reddit’s r/sydney community by posing for photos on Wedding Cake Rock.
Wedding Cake Rock is a bleached-white rock platform in Sydney’s south, which was fenced off after a 2015 report said it could collapse at any time into the ocean.
The National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) has threatened fines of up to $3,300 for those looking to get frisky with fate.
Before Wedding Cake Rock’s closure, a French student died in 2014 when a piece crumbled. In 2015, two guys had to be rescued after one fell off and landed onto the ledge below.
Now though, one Redditor in the r/sydney community has claimed that tourists are back to their photo-snapping habits, writing: “Tourist season: ON” and uploading a photo of three individuals #werkingit on Wedding Cake.
The post was met with comments like “‘It won’t happen to me’ vibes are big” and “‘They just put those signs there to discourage too many people going on it’ they said. Probably.”
Another Reddit user got philosophical, asking: “If a tree falls in the woods and it wasn’t put up on insta, did it happen?”
Yet another wrote: “Jesus. A lady literally died at the pink caves [a spot on the Central Coast] this weekend. How important is a photo?!”
“People are willing to risk their lives for a good insta” another grumbled.
“If you assume the rock would fall at some random time in the next 10 years, then 5 minutes there give you a one in a million chance of death,” said yet another.
Other points of view were less critical of tourists. One wrote: “It’s weird to single out tourists like that. Yes, those at Wedding Rock are tourists, because the locals have gotten their photos years ago before it was fenced.”
The same Reddit user added: “A few km down the road, you got Wattamolla, where there’s a rock ledge that’s also fenced off, which does nothing to prevent a huge queue of people lining up to jump into the water from that ledge. And in that case, those ‘rules don’t apply to me’ people are definitely mostly locals.”
Others questioned whether the individuals pictured were really tourists. One wrote: “Very little chance they are influencers. Probably just teens wanting a cool picture.”
“Come on everyone,” said another. “100s of people take a photo there every day. They can’t all be influencers.”
“If you hang around near the rock on a sunny weekend day, you’ll see well over a hundred people do this through the day. Often there’s a queue to take turns posing on the rock. Seems like a prime revenue-raising opportunity.”
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