Poo tubes

(Where the fuck have I been all this time?)



See that red circle at the left edge of map? Just along that road a bit are the sewerage farm and the tip (garbage dumping place). I woulda put them into the map exactly where they were but it was either do a new map with an extra bit down that side then have a nice long lay down or post this map and actually fucking update the blog already.


The yellow bits are the main road, the grey bits are the shops, the row of black dots is the railway line, the other dotty bits are the main beaches and the green bits are parks and reserves and wetlands. And the blue lines are creeks. Unless they're really straight in which case they're drains that used to be creeks.


Round the streets of Woy Woy and all the other places I walk, I see council workers fixing roads, electricity company workers getting branches off powerlines after the wind, Telstra workers putting in new phone lines and fiddling about down holes with PMG covers, the garbos in their truck picking up the bins, and stuff like that.

All stuff that makes a town tick. It happens all around us every day and we hardly notice it.

But we'd be stuffed without it. Civilisation is supposed to be 2 hot meals from breakdown. I reckon it's more like a week with the sewerage backed up. Gazundas and latrines just wouldn't cut it in urban society. We'd be rioting in the streets.

Anyways. This post was inspired by something I overheard on the train from a bloke who laid sewerage pipes for a living. He was talking specifically about Woy Woy and other local towns. This is the gist of what he said:

Where you've got yer older suburbs and towns, like Woy Woy, you've got an older sewerage system.

Under a given road there's a sewerage line and into it empties the sewerage lines from each house.

All well and good.

But then you get one of these places where some developer knocks down an old house. The old house had one sewerage line servicing one or two loos (toilets), a couple of adults, 2.4 kids and the Christmas influx of aunts and uncles and cousins. Up they all get in the morning, flush the loo and off to work and school.

Now that house is knocked down and half a dozen units are slapped up in its place. Half a dozen units each with one or two adults and maybe the 2.4 kids and the Christmas influx of aunts and uncles and cousins. That's 6 to 12 adults, 2.4 to 14.4 kids and 6 Christmas influxes of aunts and uncles and cousins.

And up they all get in the morning, flush the loo and off to work and school. Except the main sewerage line under the street, the one that carries it all away, hasn't usually been upgraded to carry the extra load.


So, in conclusion, old streets have narrow poo tubes. And there's other stuff like water pipes bringing clean water in that can be pretty old and need flushing out and replacing etc. We had that recently in Woy Woy. I escaped the worst but Stevo copped it.

The point of this post is just to say ta to all the blokes (and chicks) who fix the poo tubes and so on.


Collection of Lost Things


All my old St. John's photos

I've been collected again. Over at a fun Aunty project called Lost Places.

It's essentially my Gone set of photos writ large and with the whole country doing it. Pop over for a gander.


Local linkage

Craig wants to hear from locals about Empire House at Empire Bay.

Fabulous and fabulously named collection of Woy Woyan and Gosford area memorabilia and photos at Gostalgia. Ta very kindly for the linkage, Michael. Hope to fuck I got your link right this time.


Where the fuck have I been for the last 2 months?

Crook. Sick. Buggered. Stuffed. Bit of trouble with my own poo tubes. Gross symptoms. Let's not go there.

Spent most of it sleeping it off then, for the last couple of weeks, dozing on the sofa with the remote. Saw that thing where that guy died wheelie-bin surfing down Kingsview Drive/Lone Pine Avenue (the high steep bit is Kingsview, the long straight bit is Lone Pine) and watched 16-year-old Jessica Whatsit sail in through the heads after a lone trip round the world in a pink boat.

Still crook but managed a shuffle round the block every day this week so things are looking up again.

Okay. That's zonked me out for the day. Off back to the sofa with a blanket and a nice big cuppa tea. See you again soon-ish.

Putty Beach

Back again. How was yer February? Hot (Straylyans)? Snowy (Mericans)? Hello, Melbourne, that big hail all melted now?

New computer's buggerising around, by the way, so this won't be a very talky post.



Through the banksias and pigface to the sand.




Putty Beach is an ocean beach. That's the Tasman Sea right there.

Ettalong Beach is an estuary beach but Putty Beach is on yer actual coast proper, on the edge of the Tasman. Which is between us and Kiwiland (New Zealand) and at the bottom of the South Pacific Ocean. (Mappage at end of post.)




Anyways, it's a beach. From it you can see Barrenjoey Head, where the lighthouse is. Squint a bit and you can see it in this photo. White job with a bit of red.

You can drive to Putty Beach from Ettalong, over The Rip Bridge, along Empire Bay Road, right into Wards Hill Road, right into The Scenic Drive, round two hairpin bends, left into Beach Drive and down to the carpark at the end. You can a bus there from Woy Woy station. In the Christmas holidays, you can get a ferry there, the old Cockatoo ferry.




A few people told me that big cliffy bit there on the left is Manly/North Head but it looks way too close to me. On the other hand, I got no idea what it is so maybe they're right.

North Head is one side of the mouth of Sydney Harbour. The Manly ferry (the biggest of the Sydney ferries) goes across to the inside part of North Head, the Manly part. It goes fairly close to the mouth of the harbour and when the sea is really big the Manly ferry gets cancelled. (Mappage at end of post.)




Putty Beach, Hardys Bay, Barrenjoey Head, which way to Sydney.




Manly, North Head, Sydney Harbour and which way to Woy Woy.

More maps




American readers note that this is a thong. Now you can see why we giggle when you talk about wearing thongs on yer bums (butts).


Random linkage

Links I've been meaning to link to for yonks. Don't even remember what half of them are. Consider them a lucky dip.

Ferries of Sydney (ferries, obvs)

APSCCG (native plants photos & factoids)

The sport of A-to-Zedding (some to do with maps?)

Cactus Bones (pretty pictures)


Bloody sidebar is still in semi-exile at the bottom of the site. Fucked if I can find the code for how to get the bastard back where it was.

Snakes and snoozing

Back at last. There was computer issues and some other offline crapulence which was really boring so we won't go into it. How was yer Chrissy?




Discarded snake skin. Found it under the holiday house. Apparently it’s a diamond python’s skin.

It’s very cool. Got no idea how to turn it inside out though, without ripping the bastard to shreds.




Saw a live snake too. One like this (Wiki photo). Red-bellied black snake, Pseudechis porphyriacus. Very sexy. Not a snake to go feral and bite the cautious admirer but very sexy.


The rest of my holidays was more snoozing than bushwalking. The weather was all over the shop, pissing down one day, back to normal stinking hot summer the next. I vegged out on the veranda and watched the brush turkeys and their chicks.

Photos & factoids




This poor little bugger died not long after this shot. Thought he was going to make it for a while there but no. He kept nearly getting to his feet then collapsing again.

He’s a baby brush turkey and he was mauled by a cat or something. Cats are not native to Australia so most of the native animals have no defences against them.

Buried him under the house and put a rock on top of him so he wouldn’t get dug up again and scattered about the place.

There was a brush turkey’s incubation mound further down the hill so maybe there was another chick that made it.

Roosting in trees
Immortalised on local bus-stop
Single Brush Turkey Seeks Same


Since I got back, the weather has been shit for walkies. Up around 34 (95-96F) one day, dark as night and stormy the next.


Haiti

Poor bastards. Bloody poor country, as corrupt as fuck, war, 3 hurricanes in the last 4 years (about that) and now the place is totalled by a massive earthquake.

So it's a bit off when those christian types were refusing aid to some people on the grounds they were of the voodoo religion.

The throw-away lines on the news about Haiti being the “home of the zombie” weren't terribly helpful either. Might be a bit smarter to point out that yer actual proper Voodoo/Hoodoo/Voudon/etc. zombie has fuck-all to do with the movie zombies.

Real zombies are people willingly taking part in a religious ceremony. They are spirit-ridden. They invite a good spirit into their body for a little while for religious purposes.

They aren’t green and oozing and they ain’t interested in eating your brain.

And while we’re on the subject, the voodoo dolls are bullshit too. They sell them for the tourists in New Orleans (and fuck knows they could use the tourist dollars, poor bastards) but they’re a Hollywood thing too, whitefella misinterpretation and invention. Sticking pins in dolls was something done in Europe many moons ago.

I loved and that Big Brother/zombie apocalypse piss-take on SBS but I do not enjoy my ABC making the sort of random statements I expect to find on bloody channel 9 or 7.

Now where’s my blood pressure meds?


Zombie linkage

Proper zombies

Haitian Voudon at Wiki
Voodoo Brings Solaced to Grieving Haitians
Living Vodou (podcast)
Louisiana Voodoo
Lucky Mojo (Hoodoo, similar to Vodou & Voodoo)

Movie zombies

Shaun of the Dead (rom zom com par excellence)
White Zombie
Bloody Ian Fleming
Dead Set (Big Brother vs the zombie apocalypse, on SBS)


Right. I'm off to set up base camp on the lower slopes of Mount Inbox.

Back

(Get to the pictures already!)

I'm officially back from my annual month off.

I was unofficially back on the 8th of Feb to blog the Victorian bushfires. And thank yer on Victoria's behalf to all those readers who clicked through to the donation sites from TIS.

A couple of days ago the tally for cash donations was $138 million. The donations in the first few days were mainly up around $100 a go, so a lot of that is from us 20 million Australians. But the rest of it came from outside Australia. Thank you, world.

Blood donation sign-up (for burns victims) or ring 13 14 95. Give money online to the Red Cross Bushfire Appeal or at 1800 811 700.

If you missed the broadcast of the national day of mourning, go to ABC iView or YouTube.


Gosford walkies



A weekday morning in the heart of Bustling Downtown Gosford. Looking south along Mann Street from the footbridge that goes from the railway station to an arcade with a bookshop down the bottom and offices up the top.

The wee bit of grass you can see on the edge is the wee park outside the station and any sunny weekday will find half a dozen drunks there. The blokes in the green shirts are council workers not drunks.

The squat brown brick building at the end of the park is the tourist info thingo. You can get a nice map or three there.

That very tall pam looks like a Cabbage Tree Palm which is a local native plant.

Just before those matching tower blocks in the background is Jephson's Corner. (You can't actually see it here so don't strain yer eyes trying).

Also on Mann Street are the sturdy Hotel Gosford, the lovely Art Deco funeral parlour, the yummy little old sandstone church, and the pleasant war memorial across from the Blackett and overlooking the wharf.




Gosford is at the northern end of Brisbane Water.




Couple of old shops in the main street of Bustling Downtown Gosford. The one on the right is dated 1934.




Gosford Wharf on a weekday morning. The ferry is the Lady Kendall II. It's the biggest ferry on the estuary. It does tours with a lunch thrown in. Popular with the tourists and a nice ride from what I hear.

The Lady Kendall II is not to be confused with the Lady Kendall, the wreck of which was raised at Koolewong in 2007.

That's Iguana Joe's on the left edge there, of Iguana-gate fame.


Footy* ferry

Ferries to Mariners games at Bluetongue.

Departs:

Empire Bay (on request) 6:15 pm

Davistown–Central Wharf 6:20 pm

Lintern St Wharf 6:30 pm

Saratoga– Veterans Hall 6:35 pm

Woy Woy (on request) 6:45 pm

Arrives Gosford Wharf app 7:15pm for a 8:00pm game.

Other ferries timetables

Lady Kendall II tours


Local linkage

Nice old local photos and stuff at the Mahony family history. Scroll to the bottom for more photo links.

Nicked the link off of Our Steve who got it off a bloke who read his local history piece in the local rag. (3 degrees of bloggfication.)


* Footy at the Ducktionary

Back

And I didn't get washed away neither.



On the right is Woy Woy (upper dot) and Sinny (AKA Sydney). On the left is Perth, capital city of Western Australia. The blue line is the airbus.



"Fremantle Hospital
Princess of Wales Wing" it says.

One of Freo Hospital's newer bits.

It's a fairly comfortable bit. Good thing too. My mother's in there dying of cancer.

She's been sick for a long time but she suddenly took a turn for the worse and it looked like she had days so all of us ships came back to the shore.

She's stable again now and as comfortable as you can be under the circs. But she's running out of time. Six months left maybe. Next I disappear suddenly that'll be why.


(Old photo)

The Knowle building still stands in the hospital grounds. It was built in 1852 from local limestone (sandstone) and stood on a bit of a rise. Would've had goods views out to sea then. The parts of the hospital on South Terrace still do.

Photo taken from a corridor somewhere. Your guess which corridor is as good as mine. Bloody labrynth Freo Hospital.



Alma Street from Freo Hospital. Quiet little street in old Freo. Or it would be quiet if ambulances didn't hurtle down it at all hours.


(Massify)

View from Freo Hospital out over South Terrace to Gage Roads. Gage Roads is the holding pen for ships waiting to come into Freo Harbour.


Storm damage



Bottom arrow is Sydney, middle arrow is Woy Woy. Top arrow is Maitland & the Hunter, where the floods and the main damage was done. The fallen bit of highway that took out the car is maybe 15 kays above Woy Woy.

The pictures on the news were bloody alarming. Ships beaching themselves (Nobbys at Newcastle), bits of the Pacific Highway dropping off and a carload of peeps plummetting to their doom, ferries stopped in Sydney, flash flooding up Maitland way, and all that sort of thing.

Rang one of the Dear Old Things. She said it was a bit blowy but everyone was all right and she could see my place was all right from her window so I wasn't too fussed.

Nice big map showing major incidents on Suzanne's walkies blog. Thanks, mate.

Cold showers and crosswords by candlelight for the Maroons (Queensland Rugby). They were in town and had to bunk down at Woy Woy Leagues overnight. (Sadly this link contains no pictures of footy players showering.)

Clean up could take yonks says the SES (State Emergency Service, those peeps in orange jumpsuits). Maitland and thereabouts, particularly Hinton, has taken a terrible thrashing. Flooded up to the Khyber Pass and wading in their own shit, poor bastards.

Had a look around outside this morning when I emptied my bulging letterbox. Checked the Dear Old Things had no broken windows and missing roof tiles. Didn't talk to them yet. It's fucking freezing today and they'll be tucked up in front of the telly with the cat and their fluffy slippers on.

There's fuck all damage in my street but I got home in the wee hours and haven't been out for a look at Woy Woy yet. Tomorrow.