Blue sky cold day

(Random walkies in Koolewong)



Cycle path at Koolewong.

Lovely avenue of trees along this part of the path. A long stand of casuarinas whispering in the wind on the park side, mangroves with the water slapping about their roots on the water side.

(Kept typing root instead of roots. Wonder what I'm thinking about!)




Koolewong from Koolewong.

Koolewong is a shallow bay. This is taken from one side of the bay looking at the other.

Well, okay, technically it's two bays. This bay and Murphys Bay.




Shade on the ridge and the soft filtered light through the casuarina needles.




Soft weird sky seen through the casuarinas.




That's Koolewong there in the red box. It's a narrow strip of flat land and a couple of streets going up the ridgeside a bit.

It has bugger-all streets compared to Woy Woy. Or compared to anywhere really. Except maybe Patonga, which has five streets.


Pissing down most of the week. Today can't make up its mind. I can. I'm off to a barbie. At which I will not eat bacon, pizza or those really fat sausages not matter how good they smell. Nor will I be imbibing of the amber fluid. How boring is that?


By the way

That Rip Bridge photo everyone loves got invited to the Best of Australia group in Flickr. One of them invite-only photo groups. Goes to show how a bit of practice can turn a crap photographer into a decent photographer.

How to take decent photos

All is calm, all is quiet

Went walkies along the western side of Brisbane Water, looking from Brisbane Water Drive across at Green Point and Saratoga and beyond to Kincumber and Avoca Beach and Killcare.

The gentle winter sun shone down, the ducks and heron-type-thingies browsed in the shallows, the commuters wished they were out on the still quiet water.




Wading and snapping. The heron-type-thingy wading sedately with that gawky knees-up walk they have. No idea what this one was eating but he didn't seem to be finding much of it. The ducks were finding plenty, poking their beaks into the sea grass and snapping their beaks in a satisfied way.




What ducks eat. Seemed to be wee creatures in the sea grass or the sea grass itself.




There's very nearly more boats than people around Brisbane Water. These ones looked scrumptious in the soft fading light.

Bonus picture: You wouldn't be dead for quids


Spider bites it



This is Gorgeous. Well, her body anyways. She's dead now.

She was my pet/flatmate. She moved in a couple of months ago, when the nights started to get cold. She hung out in the kitchen during the day and watched TV together and she slept behind a picture in the living room. We chatted when I made my morning cuppa and stuff.

Then a couple of days ago she disappeared. It was too cold outside so I knew she hadn't left. I found her body yesterday. She'd died of natural causes I think and fallen down behind the dish-rack. I buried her under the geranium.

Bloody wet

It is too bloody wet and too bloody dark for walkies. It is this dark. Took that in 2008 but it's the same dark this week only wetter.

Anyways, here's some I took last week when the sun was out.



Rocks and yachts at Koolewong.

Looking north-north-east up towards East Gosford/Springfield. The low ground in the left background is the low bit of Tascott/Point Clare and Longnose (Pt Frederick) and the flat hill on the right is Kincumba Mountain.




Mangroves beside Brisbane Water Drive. The bare-branched one isn't bare-branched because it's winter. It's just dead. Mangroves are evergreen, like most Australian trees. It's mostly the imported species of trees that are deciduous.




Jetty building equipment near Woy Woy wharf.




Jetty building equipment near Woy Woy wharf.

That's Pelican Island in the near background, with the pointy hill of Saratoga behind it.




Woy Woy from Brisbane Water Drive

The pines are at the war memorial on Brick Wharf Road, the white building with the dark side is the fish and chip shop, the red-roofed building is a storage thingy either for the fish and chip shop or the commercial wharf in front of it. I forget.

The square white building is Roma (now St. Vinnie's), the two-storey building beside it is the pub (Woy Woy Hotel, the CWA is the low grey roof in front of the pub.

The ferry wharf is all those white pylons in the water and that big gum is in Anderson Park, a wee park behind the other pub.


Not drowning, wading

As soggy as it is here in Woy Woy, our rain is fuck-all compared to what they're copping up north.

"The worst drought in South-East Queensland's history is over." That's what the Queensland Premier said about the flooding in Brissie. Give that pollie an award for understatement.

Brissie (Brisbane) is a fucking disaster area. Brissie is one of Australia's bigger cities. It has about 2 million peeps. And it's built on a flood plain.

Thousands of peeps around the Queensland/NSW border were told to pack up and bugger off to higher ground. And maybe something has been learnt from the Victorian bushfires because they went and they went without a murmur. (Apart from a few argumentative types of course, but you always get them.)

The good news is Lake Eyre is filling with trickle-down from the flooding in Queensland a couple of months back (during the Victorian bushfires). Lake Eyre is a fucking huge salt lake in South Australia. Since 1885 it has filled six times.

Mappage:

Australia, with Queensland highlighted (New South Wales is immediately below Queensland)

A river runs through it (Satellite photo showing why Brissie is currently flooded)

Luscious satellite photo of Lake Eyre


Speaking of water

Lately I've been hoicking my carcass up to North Gosford and Wyoming and the like for walkies.

And not loving it. They are too far from the water. I like walking near the water. There's no two ways around it.

So I'm temporarily re-focussing my walkies to only towns and suburbs that border on the water.

That includes, from south to north:

Pretty Beach (started but not finished)
Hardys Bay (started but not finished)
Killcare
Killcare Heights
Empire Bay (started but not finished)
Bensville
Kincumber South
Kincumber (started but not finished)
Green Point
Rocky Point (part of Green Point)
Ironbark Point (part of Green Point)



(Walkies Map May 2009)

The purple bit is what I've temporarily crossed off my list.

The orange lines outline my walkies target area. The filled-in orange bits are already walked.

The blank islands are uninhabited and have no roads. The green lines are landscape contours lines indicating hills and ridges.

Walked so far:

Woy Woy Peninsula:
(clockwise from station)

Woy Woy (station)
Blackwall
Orange Grove
Booker Bay
Ettalong
Umina, Ocean Beach & Umina Beach
Pearl Beach
Patonga, Dark Corner & Brisk Bay
Woy Woy South/Correa Bay

The Bays:

(where the fires were, next to Woy Woy)
Horsfield Bay (Deadmans Bay)
Phegans Bay
Woy Woy Bay
Parks Bay (old/semi-official name, part of Koolewong)

Clockwise round Brisbane Water from Woy Woy:

Koolewong /Murphys Bay
Tascott
Noonan Point (old/semi-official name, part of Tascott & Point Clare)
Point Clare
Fagans Bay
West Gosford (started but not finished, outside revised target area)
Gosford (started but not finished)
Point Frederick (Longnose)
Caroline Bay (part of East Gosford)
East Gosford (started but not finished)
Peeks Point
Springfield (started but not finished, outside revised target area)
Erina (started but not finished)
Yattalunga
Saratoga
Davistown
Kincumber (started but not finished)
Empire Bay (started but not finished)
St Huberts Island
Daleys Point (started but not finished)
Fishermans Bay
Hardys Bay (started but not finished)
Pretty Beach
Wagstaffe
Kourung Gourong Point (part of Wagstaffe)

'Started but not finished' doesn't mean I've abandoned that walk. It just means it's now outside my revides target are. Plus I'm just a random bastard these days.

Ye olde Post Offices

You should be hearing this post in a faint scratchy voice frequently interrupted by a hacking cough and intemperate language. I am definitely Not Well. And definitely Utterly Fed Up. It's one of these new-fangled wogs that's resistant to anti-biotics and takes a while to shift.




This wee old cottage is the former Saratoga Post Office, on Steyne Road, facing Point Clare across Brisbane Water. It has been posted on a stamp-fanciers' board (ta for the acknowledgement & link, Skippy), along with a lovely old photo of when it was the P.O..

Also check out the old Matcham PO further down the board. It is barely bigger than a backyard dunny.




One of the old Kincumber Post Offices, on the corner of Avoca Drive & Davies Street, opposite Frost Reserve.

Run by William George Humphrey from 1945 to the 1990s. Before that the P.O. was down the road a bit at Manasseh Frost's place (below).



You can still see the old "Kincumber Post Office" sign up under the upholsterer's sign.



The old PO Boxes are still there, albeit closed up. I wonder if the upholsterer uses the backs of them as a cupboard?




The other of Kincumber's old Post Offices, and Manasseh Frost's Store (1901), just a couple of blocks down the hill from the other old P.O..

The sign on the right of the building reads "M Frost Kincumber Cash Store".




Sheets of tin over the top of each stone stump to stop the ants eating the wood of the building.

More on Frost's Post Office


Woy Woy's own old P.O.'s are long gone but you can see their photos up in the current P.O. (opposite the library, just near the station) and here, second from the right.

There's the old "PMG" (Post master General) lettering on a Woy Woy manhole cover on Brisbane Water Drive between the Bay View pub and the footbridge.

You can have fish and chips in an old Post Office (albeit a seventies one) by getting the ferry to Empire Bay and walking to the orange and brown building you can see from the wharf.

Recommended fiction for stamp-fanciers is Terry Pratchett's Going Postal. It is amusing even to non-philatelists and has a hero called Moist von Lipwig.


Snippets

Old news but worth having: Australian researcher saves the planet

"An Australian researcher has won an international prize for her plan to wrap a giant asteroid with reflective sheeting to stop it colliding with the earth and destroying all life.

Such an impact would have the force of 110,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs if the asteroid, which actually exists, hits the planet in 2036, said Mary D'Souza, a PhD student with the University of Queensland's School of Engineering."

Click for the spectacular digital mock-up picture, stay for the scary asteroid stats.

Woy Woy girl competes in her fifth consecutive Paralympic Games - Australian basketball capt. Liesl Tesch in Beijing


Right then. I'm logging out before I crash on the keyboard. Thank you very kindly for all the hugs and haiku and tips. It makes a person get well a bit faster than by mere meds alone.

Lady Kendall saved

(Random walkies)

Went off along Brisbane Water Drive today. There was a crane at Koolewong. There was a skip beside the crane, loaded with bits of old wood. I thought the Lady Kendall was off to the knacker's yard. But someone said no, she's off to Sydney to be restored and the bits in the skip were just garbage that came up with her.


(Embiggen)

Her bow all hooked up ready and waiting for the other crane to arrive. She looks like a fish skeleton, all ribs and head and tail.


(Embiggen)

Cleaning her up before her trip. She was full of seaweed and empty beer cans last week.


(Embiggen)

Cranes, skips, bits, blokes, the Lady herself, the barges and gawkers.


(Embiggen)

Lifting her onto the rocks. After that they cleaned up the barges and the cranes went home.


(Embiggen)

On the rocks. Where presumably she'll rest until carted off to be restored.


(Embiggen)

Her bow and midships. Note the red and white paint and the touch of blue amidships.


(Embiggen)

Her stern and propeller.


(Embiggen)

Drainage hole (?) and pump wheel. Amidships.

There was a cameraperson there from NBN (Northern Beaches Telly) so there should be some more about her on the telly tonight. 6PM their news is on. Sydneysiders, twiddle yer dial, you might be able to get it down to Dee Why.

Stingrays

(Embiggen)

See the stingray? Light patch in the middle, with its tail to the left. The stuff floating on the surface is dry plant bits blown into the water. The stuff under the water in the upper half of the photo is seaweed, that sort like strings of beads.

Thanks to Ami for these stingray photos. They were not moving, she said, just laying there on the bottom waving their tails occasionally.

This is in a few feet of water between Brisbane Water Drive and Pelican Island. From the photo below, it looks like it's no more than a hundred yards from Woy Woy.


(Embiggen)

The second one, again just laying there on the bottom in the shallow water. See it? Down the bottom there, that light patch.

Got an idea they're waiting for the wee fish to clean them. Like sharks get cleaned by pilot fish or whatever. It was on some doco the other night.

Either that or they're waiting for an Irwin.

"[N]ot aggressive" says the Australian Museum but raises "its tail which is capable of inflicting severe or potentially fatal wounds... above its back like a scorpion", as Steve Irwin found out.

Not sure what type of ray these two are but they fit the stats for the Smooth Stingray (Dasyatis brevicaudata): "a bottom-dwelling species which is recorded from temperate waters of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.

In Australia it occurs from southern Queensland, around the south of the country and north to the central coast of Western Australia. It lives in coastal waters and estuaries from shallow water down to about 170 m."

Brisbane Water is an estuary and a very shallow one in places and it's in southern Australia.

I've seen rays a few times, mostly at ocean beaches where it's very shallow and calm. And the aquarium at Manly has a has a cool glass tunnel you walk through to look at the fish & rays & sharks. Stingrays don't so much swim as fly along like a very calm magic carpet. They're rather beautiful.

Smooth Stingray, includes video, Australian Museum.
Oceanworld Manly, the one with the tunnel.

Wreck of the Lady Kendall

(Click photos for big versions)

Pop along and have a look at her. She's at the boat ramps on Brisbane Water Drive between Koolewong and Tascott stations.

She's currently sitting on a barge, having been raised recently. She sunk in January 2006. She's owned by Alan Draper, the guy who runs the Starship Cruises (lunch cruises) out of Gosford. She was once the ketch Lenna of Taswegian (Tasmanian).

There's another boat of the same name, the Lady Kendall II. She's a modern ferry currently doing lunch cruises on Brisbane Water. See her here.



The prow (front AKA pointy end) with anchor chain hole.

The article on her in today's hard copy of the Express Advocate has a picture of her as a ferry. Very smart she looks, all white with red trim.



She's crusty with barnacles and full of seaweed but you can still see her red paint shining through.



Amidships. That's the middle bit of the boat. I know that from a misspent youth spent watching old war movies.

She was built in Tasmania and launched there in 1903. She was a ketch called Lenna. 21 metres long and twin-masted. She carried logs to Hobart and later worked as a fishing boat in Bass Strait (between Tassie and the mainland).

She won in her class in the Hobart Regatta in 1940, '47, '50 and '54. In 1966 she was converted to a ferry in Melbourne, re-named the Lenna Bird and worked as a tourist ferry on the Gippsland Lakes in Victoria. In 1985 she came up here.



Looking towards the stern (back end) from amidships.

Before the railway came trading ketches took farm produce from Brisbane Water to Sydney. It's 18.2 nautical miles from Barrenjoey Lighthouse to the Sydney Heads. Dunno what that is in kilometres but it can't be more than a morning's sail.



The stern view. You can see the propeller there on the left.

She's off back to Tassie soon. The Tasmanian Wooden Boat Museum is going to restore her to her former glory.

January article
May article, drawing & podcast on her history


Fake doctor

Some guy wearing a stethescope tried to drag a woman out of Wyong Hospital on Sunday night. He got sprung but ran off. He's 40-45, got "dark hair and a bald spot", orders the nurses around and flashed an army badge as ID. Express Advocate article.

Buggered

No proper walkies today. Stopped after a couple of hundred yards. I am absolutely buggered. This happens every now and then and is something I'm learning to live with. Thank yer for all the nice get-well-soons.



This is a banksia tree at Point Clare. Banksias are named after Joseph Banks. Who was the botanist on the Endeavour when Cook came to suss out Australia in 1770. That's 18 years before the first whitefellas came to stay in Australia.

Cook was of course the last captain to tour Australia successfully, as many a cricket fan will tell you.


(Big one)

Banksia cone off the same tree. The leaves had smooth edges and the flowering cones were bright yellow. Some were going to seed.


(Big one)

Cones gone (left) and going (right) to seed. Off a different tree (saw leaf banksia) but you get the idea. At the top and left of the left cone there's a few opened pods and in the middle a few still unopened.

The left one played the bad guy in Snugglepot & Cuddlepie.

Good banksia photos



This is today. There's a bit of breeze and rain coming up from Sydney but plenty of warm sun to potter about in. Good day for being out and about.

Left to right: Saratoga, Daleys Pt, Woy Woy & Koolewong from Brisbane Water Drive Tascott.


Update


(Click on them for big versions)

Lorraine AKA 144 Railway Street Woy Woy, has been painted. That's her before photo on the left and her after on the right. I like both versions but she's a damn sight easier to photograph in the new colours. She was built in about 1912 and had a refurbishment several years back.


Another look

How close to the houses was the 2006 New Year's Day fire at Umina? Bloody close as Mark Simpson's photos show.

After the rain

(Random walkies)

How good was the weekend? All that lovely wind and rain and so deliciously cool. I even had my trackies on it was that cool. It's not bad today either and we're off daylight saving as well so autumn is properly here!



The brightest photo in a morning of iffy light. Taken by the camera itself when given a knock whilst sitting on a pigeon-shit bespattered table.

Walked halfway to Gosford this morning. Bad idea. Wanted to try out the new suspension bridge and got a bit carried away. The bridge is a footbridge and its opening has completed the walk-n-cycle path from Woy Woy to Gosford.

Took some more photos of the bridge today but they're as dark as that link above. The light was going fast. Nice bank of cumulus was coming in from the sea. Might rain again this evening.

Anyways. I was wandering along thinking happy thoughts about cool winter walkies to come and next thing I knew I was at Theroy's and hurting. Apart from the Bridge Walk I've hardly walked at all for yonks and the old legs are protesting heartily. Ah well. They'll be back on track soon with the nice cold weather coming.


(Embiggen)

Woy Woy waterfront from Brisbane Water Drive. Snapped months ago and lost in the terabyte that is my photos folder.

Left to right: a smidgeon of Pelican Island in the middle ground
Blackwall Mountain (background)
Woy Woy Memorial Park AKA Soldiers Park (pines)
Fish-n-chip shop (sloped roof)
Commercial wharf
CWA, Country Womens Association, the Pommyland equivalent is the WI.
St Vinne's formerly Roma (white, behind CWA)
Woy Woy Pub (yellow, 2 storey)
Ferry wharf (in front of CWA)


(Embiggen)

Bustling Downtown Woy Woy from Brisbane Water Drive Woy Woy. Snapped this morning in a brief bit of sunshine. The left hand dge of this photo joins up with the right hand edge of the one above. I'd bung them together but then they'd be too small for any detail.

Left to right:
Small park whose name I keep not finding out. The Bay to Bay Fun Run left from here last year.
Bay View Hotel. Same pub as was being menaced by a large cloud a few weeks again.
Wee 1950s arcade containing smallest hairdressing shop I've ever seen. Behind it, for the eagle-eyed, is the back of the facade of Noonan's.
The red veranda is a real estate (one of the many) one door along from Noonan's. You can't actually see the traffic lights but they're at the red veranda. At the lights the road stops being Brisbane Water Drive and starts being Railway Street.
The yellow building is on Railway Street as is the dark veranda you can see between it and the red veranda.
The two slim towers, background, one grey the other orange, are the 4-storey carpark outside Deepwater Plaza.
The clock tower is the Clocktower Building on Railway Street.


WTF is that thing?



6 months back they knocked down an elderly fibro cottage, a circa 1940s Presbytery and a peculiar 1950s building at the Blackwall Road-Victoria Road roundabout in Woy Woy, opposite 1914 St John's.

This is what they're bunging up in their place. It's either a new St John's (the old one is a bit cracked) or a landing pad for lopsided helicopters.

PMG

(Random walkies)



Telephone manhole covers on Brisbane Water Drive, just level with Parks Bay.

The interesting bit about them is they've got "PMG" on them. Before Telstra (Australia's original national phone provider) was called Telstra it was called Telecom and before that, way back when Noah was a lad, it was called PMG.

PMG is short for Postmaster General. When the telephone was a new and wondrous thing it was run by the Post Office not separately like it is now. Then, after the newness and the wondrousness had worn off, it took the government yonks to put phones in their own department.

"The Postmaster-General's Department (PMG) was created at Federation in 1901 to control all postal (and later, telecommunications) services within Australia. ... The earliest telephone exchanges in Australia date back to 1880. All phone calls were manually switched by human operators. The Melbourne exchange opened with just 44 customers.

The first automatic exchange did not open until 1912, featuring electromechanical switching equipment. So-called "cross-bar" systems started appearing in 1960. Electronic switching began in the late 1970s." (Wiki)

The Posmaster General's Department got renamed as well, to Australia Post in 1975 when Telecom was split off.

Ex-convict Isaac Nichols was the first Postmaster in New South Wales. He signed on in 1809 and part of the job was to go onto the ships as they pulled up at the wharf and collect all the post. Otherwise the locals were just charging on board in droves asking if there was any letters for them.

The post started going overland between Sydney and Melbourne in 1838. Before that it would've going on coastal shipping. Nichols got the world's first pre-paid postage started as well. And in 1956 sea mail started going monthly to the UK, no doubt carrying many postcards of Bondi with 'weather is great, get on the next ship out' on the back. (Wiki)


Eureka!



Finished two thirds of the lettering I was on about the other day. I cracked the GIMP and made better lettering for the shirts and hoodies and stuff in my wee shop.

There's more than in this picture. There's tee shirts, long sleeved tee shirts & windcheaters (sweaters), hoodies and mugs.

There's new colours in the tee shirts as well. Just click on little coloured squares under the picture.