La Nina

It just stopped raining. No, wait, it's starting again. Been raining all night and all day. No danger of flash floods I hasten to add. Even it pissed down for forty nights and forty nights here it'd drain off toot sweet into the estuary.

This La Nina business is very nice what with the rain and everything after the drought and the relevant gods should note that I am not complaining about the rain but it is crap weather for walkies and photography.

Thus we are looking at some old photos today and a couple that are just for pretty.




Historic photo of some blokes and a dingy at Woy Woy Bay about 100 years ago. Why the bloke in the 3 piece suit is wearing a 3 piece suit on a dingy expedition is beyond me. I s'pose they did that sorta thing back then.




Ocean Beach (Umina) postcard from 1924. Flogging the unsophisticated charms of Woy Woy's Ocean Beach to Sydneysiders. Nothing remains of those 2 boarding houses or the bus and the Umina Post Office now ekes out an existence in the back of a chemist.




1930s Woy Woy from Woy Woy Bay. Notice how many houses there aren't. Now the Peninsula's covered in houses. Here they're pretty much all clustered around the station.

The station is the wee white building at the end of that long jetty sticking out onto the low-tide mud flats, this side of the tracks.

The biggest building, pale roof, on the left of the road, is the old 200-seat cinema where the Woolworths supermarket is now.

The road heading towards the back of the photo from about a third of the way across from the left, is Blackwall Road on its way to Blackwall Mountain.




Umina Beach (lower left) and the Bouddi Peninsula (right) from Mount Ettalong.

Follow the beach up from the left bottom corner until it gets to a sharp bend. Follow the sand bar out to the right from that sharp bend. That's the big sandbar the ferries have to avoid as they come across from Palm Beach.



We're looking here across from Daleys Point to Blackwall Point (left, houses on Orange Grove Road) and Blackwall foreshore. That flat-topped pine tree is at the end of McMasters Road and Blackwall Road runs parallel to and behind the foreshore.

Purple penis plant

Fucking horrible day for walkies today. Plenty of sun but flat light and the weather's as muggy as buggery. I had a bit of a wander then sought refuge in the cool of the pub.



Ocean Beach SLSC Trafalgar Avenue Umina

Finished at last. The outside anyways. The inside looks semi-finished.

T'other one, Umina Beach SLSC down the road a bit, is still being landscaped and having tiles done downstairs.




Second memorial seat at Ocean Beach SLSC. The other one is dedicated to the memory of Bob da Silva.

Dunnies (left) and playground of the SLSC in the background.

This one says:

"In loving memory of
Dellwyn Elizabeth Mardell
1943 - 2001".




Box Head from Ocean Beach SLSC

Box Head was on the telly the other night, on that surf rescue programme. It was filmed a while back and the bit at Box Head was an overturned dingy or summat.

Nice shots of the area from the rescue chopper and, after the campers cleared their tents off the camping ground, the chopper put down and picked up the peeps from the boat.




Barrenjoey Head & Lion Island from Ocean Beach SLSC

Storm clouds building up out to sea and a raft of small cumulus floating up from Sydney.




Purple penis bush. Large firm pannicles with a faint perfume reminiscent of soap.


R.I.P.

Bernie Banton's dead. The mesothelioma got him in the end. He'd had asbestosis and asbestos-related pleural disease for yonks, hence the oxygen tube he wore.

Asbestos is a fibrous mineral. You might know it as the brown and yellow-striped gem stone tiger's eye. The industrial grade is a dull grey. It was used in World War 2 as fire insulation in warships, heaps of houses have been built from sheets of it (in NSW it's called fibro).

It's deadly stuff. The fibres get in your lungs and cells built up round them and pretty soon there's a whacking great lump in your chest using up more and more of the space you need to breathe. It can take years to show you and there's a group of diseases you can get from it, mesothelioma being one of them and the one that can take twenty years to develop.

You can get asbestos diseases from mining it, from manufacturing it like Banton did when he worked for Hardies, from installing it and from uninstalling it or just from being in the same room as the fibres. Men who worked for Hardies died of it and are still dying of it, wives who washed their work clothes have died from it, builders have died from it, home renovators have died from it. Stay away from the shit.

Hardies fucked around with their workers' lives then tried to wriggle out of the consequences. Banton and the rest of the crew that fought Hardies worked bloody hard to get them to cough up workers' comp. Tell you what, I wouldn't be able to sit across the table from a guy who had to cart a tank of oxygen round to live and say he couldn't have any compo. Takes a real lack of guts to do that.


Onya, Bern. Even those who didn't know you will miss you.


ABC article with picutre

Squizz*

Trotted down to Ocean Beach and took a few snaps of the dune damage. Not very dramatic is it?

The damage on the Peninsula is minor. The main suffering was had when the power was out for 3 days and no-one could get a hot cup of tea or a warm bath. Except in the few shops that didn't get a blackout.

There were no deaths on the Peninsula. The seven deaths were all further up the Coast where the damage was much worse. A falling tree, one unknown but probably a drowning and that whole family whose car plunged into the missing bit of the Old Pacific Highway, poor bastards.



Dune damage on Ocean Beach near the Ettalong Beach corner.

In the background there we're looking at the back of Wagstaffe and at Lobster Beach, which appears to have disappeared entirely.



Ocean Beach SLSC (Surf Life Saving Club) Trafalgar Avenue Umina. The construction site didn't suffer much damage that I could see.



Lion Island, Barrenjoey Head & Pittwater from Ocean Beach. Tree trunk and seaweed in foreground. There was a lot of seaweed and bits of trees washed up. It's a week now since the big storm (another possible tomorrow) and all the interesting and fun washed-up stuff is gone. The waves are still big and fierce though and half the beach is gone.

This photo is not lightened. This is how dark it is today and since I got back. There's another storm forecast and even if we don't get any more big winds, it'll piss down again.

Storm map from Friday

Umina Rampart has some nice photos of trees down on powerlines and so on. This one nicely illustrates the level of damage in most parts of the Peninsula.

The Dear Old Things and the Local Rag have caught me up on all the storm gossip:

Power blackouts from Saturday/Sunday to Monday/Tuesday, all over the Peninsula & The Bays.
No mobile phone coverage.
Minor flooding only & sand across the road on The Esplanade at Ettalong.
Plenty of roads closed, including roads to Gosford & Sydney.
Plenty of bits ripped off roofs & several shop signs & awnings down.
Tree on the line at Woy Woy & landslide at Wondabyne (Mullet Creek) brought the Sydney train to a halt & cutting the Sydney-Newcastle rail link.
Buses replaced trains between Hornsby (Sydney) and Gosford & a bus got flooded out at Gosford.
Train hit the landslide at Wondabyne but wasn't derailed.
It took 3 days to get the trains running again.
Jim Morrison of Woy Woy recorded the Peninsula's rain at 217MM for the storm period. The June average is 128MM.


* Ducktionary