Lord Of The Flies - Koolewong #3 - Brisbane Water Walk #4

The breeze didn't come up until the last bit of my walk and the flies drove me barmy. It was pretty warm too, only a few cirrus and cirrostratus (wispy & high clouds) in the sky and the sun beating down already at 8AM.

Anyways, apart from the flies and the heat it was a good walk and a decent length and had great views. Looking at the map of Brisbane Water the Finger (AKA Point Frederick) doesn't look close to Koolewong and Tascott but while I was walking it did. It made a very pleasant view with Point Clare in front of it and Ironbark Point behind it. The tide was running out and the sun sparkled on the water here and there. The reflections of the hills and ridges were dark green and the rest of the water was a light blue. The streets I walked today weren't high enough to get above the big old paperbarks and gums along the railway line but the view was good all the same and I managed to find a spot for a bit of a panorama photo.

There was only one place on my hist list to look out for today : "House 'Sunny Haven' 154 Glenrock Road Koolewong ... c.1920". It's still there. A small white wooden house with a veranda set way back from the road. The block slopes so it was visible above the garden. Nice cottage garden, lavender, daisies, wistaria (I think) on the frame over the front gate, nasturtiums and an orange tree. I love citrus trees. The house was in pretty good nick with the original window frames by the look of it. I hate to see a nice old cottage wrecked by those graceless seventies aluminium windows.

There were a couple of dozen more cottages from around the same era scattered along Glenrock. They mixed in with the clumps of forties houses between Koolewong station and Berala Avenue and up near Thomas Street. There were three fifties houses and one or two sixties ones, but other than then it was lots of seventies then eighties, nineties and noughties, including a whole street of nothing but seventies. The same mix as the Peninsula.

Because the roads are up on the foot of the ridge, there's a bit of bush every now and then. One minute you're wandering along in suburbia then you come to a bit of road where it's too steep on both sides for houses so you're in the bush. I've caught the bus along today's walkies route and never noticed today's bit of bush. Normally I'm gawking out the other window at the view.

The bit of bush was between two sharp curves and cut off visually from suburbia. The down side of the road was cut off from the view and the traffic noise by trees. A car came round the bottom curve too fast and came fairly close to collecting me but it was the only car. It was pretty quiet except for the bush sounds. A whip bird sounded only a few metres away and there were others further up. There was a short bird sound that might've been a kookaburra deciding not to laugh. No twitterings and screeches from the rainbow lorikeets so not many flowers they like were blooming there.

I slowed down but it still only took me five minutes to walk from the bottom curve to the top. Then I popped back out into suburbia again. But while I was in the bush I soaked it up.

Half an hour later I was at a park at the end of my walk. It's on the corner of Murrumbooee and Glenrock near the station. There's a creek there and a small monument that neatly sums up the history and the naming of Tascott:

"To honour Thomas Alison Scott 1.7.1777 - 16.10.1881 who arrived in the colony in 1816, pioneered the sugar industry in Australia, he lived and died in this vicinity, this village bears his name T. A. Scott, unveiled by his great grandson Donald Harold Scott 18th Oct. 1981".

Technology in Australia 1788-1988 says "sugar cane was introduced to the Sydney Botanical Gardens in 1817 and that the crop was grown experimentally at Port Macquarie from 1823" and "there T. A. Scott refined the first sugar produced in Australia". As far as I know, it's all grown in Queensland now. It's not tropical enough down here.

After the park I marked off the last bit of my walk and crossed over the station to the bus stop. Tascott station is an eighties job by the look of it. Two short steel and concrete platforms and a footbridge over them, not old enough or the right style to be seventies. The shelters they made new last year. Steel roofs with a curve and steel mesh walls.

Beyond the station there was a seventies house up on Melaleuca Crescent and a dozen more houses visible on two other streets. Above them was a low stretch of the ridge, green with gums. A goods train thundered and juddered past. Two loud bangs on the track just before it came. Small charges laid to warm the guys at work on the track. They stop and stand aside in their blue shorts and orange fluoro vests then go back to crowbarring the rails.

My bus came and I soaked up some ground level views of the water. I was bloody warm and looking forward to taking off my shoes. Gotta find solutions soon to beating the heat and the flies so I can walk all but the hottest days of summer. Lately it's felt like 10AM at 8AM and the sun is up at 5.01. Daylight saving starts on Sunday and the clocks will go forward so the sun gets up at six. That'll help.