View from the fifties

View of 1950s Woy Woy Peninsula from Blackwall Mountain.

Emailed by an anonymous blog reader. Thank yer kindly.

Have had this photo for yonks and went up the mountain several times trying to get the same view now. Couldn't find it. It's a bit bushier up there than it was then. Got all hot and cross and nearly fell down the hill coupla times but not photo joy.

If you can't read the green print, the bottom right street is Wallaby I think, could also be Warwick. Memorial Avenue in the middle bottom. A major thoroughfare* morning, noon, and night.

Above Memorial is the bent bit at the eastern end of Gallipoli Avenue. Above it is Springwood Street. Then Trafalgar Avenue, the one with the old WWII airstrip is the top street.

The arrows are pointing at Lion Island (left) and Pearl Beach.




Bit closer. So many wee small houses back then. And Umina (most distant part of flat) is hardly populated at all.

More fifties photos at 1950s Woy Woy


Straylya Day

Had a good weekend away. Bit too warm but the beer was cold and the company was hot. Hoped to get back in time for the Woy Woy fireworks but didn't make it.

Shame because, as Michael confirms it apparently pissed down but they set the fireworks off anyways! That woulda made some interesting photos.


Storms & bushfires in the Hunter over the long weekend (Woy Woy is on the Hunter Coast, as well as on the Central Coast, in the Sydney region, the Greater Gosford, and regional Australia.)


This month I reached 2,000 uploads on my Flickr.

While yer at flickr have a decko at Michael's latest local photos, including a Tassie devil from the local reptile park.

Matt Lauder also has some spiffy local water-scapes.

Stevo has more models of old Woy Woy buildings and a link to the near-extinct Masonic Hall.


Time off for good behaviour

The dreaded February heat has well and truly kicked in here in Woy Woy. This means its my annual month off from walkies. I'll be back in March. Be good or I'll rip yer bloody arms orf.

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* A major thoroughfare by Woy Woyan standards, so as many as twenty cars an hour!

Saratoga slog

(Saratoga walkies #8)

The great lethargy has not lifted but I did manage to overcome it for a morning and drag myself round the streets of Saratoga.

It was a blue sky day. The birds were hopping and fluttering about picking up worms and rubbing their beaks together in a flirtatious manner. The sun was warm on my back and the flowers were bright. The hills were long and steep and I'd left my map at home but it was good to be out on the road again.



This shag was not hopping or fluttering. It was having a good long soak-up of sunshine. The water birds were not very active, mostly just sitting on rocks and poles sunning themselves with their eyes closed.



Mother Duck is the name half obscured on that 3rd boat back from the front.

I like this rack of boats. Technically it'll be called a mooring or summat but I like the phrase a rack of boats. This rack is on Henderson Road and that's Rileys Island, one of the uninhabited ones, in the background.



No idea what this climber is called. It had no perfume more's the pity but it was a pleasant site draped over its grey fence.



Sandwich houses I call these ones. Don't know if there's a technical name for them, but with their flat wide shape they look giant sandwiches to me. I've seen perhaps a dozen of the 1950s ones on my travels around the Peninsula and Brisbane Water and a few in the 1970s. This one was on Shaw Street.


Embiggen

Commer bus fitted out as a camper van, Morrison Street. Never seen a Commer bus before. Google tells me they were made in the UK between 1905 and 1979 by a UK manufacturer of commercial vehicles. Commer got bought out by the delightfully named Rootes company and they ended up in the hands of Dodge.

Google spat out a stack of images labelled Commer, including a rather eccentric bus looking like a double-decker glasshouse on wheels, but no image matching this model.

An identical wheel arch is visible on a Commer/Dodge here, bottom centre image and Commer later made the postal vans for the UK Royal Mail that look a lot like Postman Pat's van.

Best guess is this is a late 1950s model campervan. Fuck knows why I didn't look at the model when I saw the bloody van.


Comments & email

Pommy commenter Patty has not yet been flooded out. Good to hear.

Trainspotty & Michael suggest flu and lack of sun as a possible solution to the lethargy mystery.

They could be right (and Trainspotty's duckshit avoidance advice is noted) but Ron's answer is best: excessive gravity. Had a look at my Gravitex 3000 and the bloody gauge is stuck on 3G's! I'll have to get a little man in to fix it.

(BTW Ron, did you get my comment on bunging videos in posts?)