Walking Sydney Streets

Alan Waddell of Walking Sydney Streets is gone.

From his website:
"Alan's Passing 2 September 2008

Alan died peacefully at 3.00 this morning from complications after a successful hip replacement. In memory of Alan we will retain the site and continue to add accumulated photos of his discoveries. We trust that this will still help to brighten your day and encourage exercise in the interests of better health."

Sydney has 642 suburbs. Alan walked every street of 284 of them. He started in January 2003. On his 94th birthday last month his site got its 500,000th visitor.

A massive walk for anyone, let alone a guy in his nineties. Onya, Alan.

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Alan in the news

FAQ


Little red man

Skitster at Walking New Cross seems to have stopped walking for the moment. Hope it's not permanent.

Matt and Tiffany haven't blogged a walk since April, and Rob McIntosh's power has been out since June.

Our New Zealand cousins seemed to have stopped. Their blog has said "Error establishing a database connection" for months now.

On the up side, I've added Rob Burdock and Wulf and Eric to the world wide walkers blogroll at last.


Today's picture post

All about Olive

I hoped I would not have to write this post this year but unfortunately it has happened. Olive Riley, the world's oldest blogger, has died.

She was 108 year old and a Woy Woy resident. She was born in Broken Hill in 1899. She died at 6am yesterday in the nursing home in which she has lived for some years. Her blog, All About Olive is maxed out at the moment and can't be accessed. But the news sites are full of the news and it is on the TV tonight.

From the ABC article below:
"Documentary maker Mike Rubbo says the idea for blogging came from another older friend who had taken it up.

"He suggested that Ollie could blog so we put it to her and explained what a blog was and then I undertook to do all the sort of leg work, it was great fun and it was great too to probe her memory more deeply and you get evermore stories about her past, many of which of course were set in Broken Hill," he said."

From the SMH:
"She will be mourned by family and an international readership in the thousands.

"She had people communicating with her from as far away as Russia and America on a continual basis, not just once in a while."
...

Olive had posted more than 70 entries on her blog, or as she jokingly labelled it, her "blob", since February last year.
...
Olive's funeral will be held at Palmdale Cemetery, on the NSW Central Coast, late this week."

Her main site, All About Olive, is inaccessible at the moment due to traffic no doubt. You can say goodbye to her World's Oldest Blogger, run by Eric Shackle while her usual blob typist Mike Rubbo was on holiday.


Goodbye, Olive. We will miss you.


'World's oldest blogger' dies at 108 (ABC) - includes videos of Olive & map of Broken Hill.

World's oldest blogger makes final post (SMH)

Someone peed on the fish - Olive singing & talking on YouTube, posted by Mike Rubbo

Film Broken Hill - photos of Broken Hill


Update, 17th July 2008

World farewells its oldest blogger in the other local rag, the Express Advocate.

Olive's main blob, All About Olive, is accessible again after the massive spike of traffic following the news of her death.

Mike Rubbo, Olive's typist, photographer and video-er, made it possible for her to be the world's oldest blobber. He also went above and beyond in emailing readers when she flagged, asking them to comment again to help perk her up.

Mike has written on the post of 13th July: "She was on the Sydney Harbour bridge when Simon De Groote cut the ribbon, pre empting the opening of that famous bridge, but she took no part". (See the Bridge's 75th for de Groot)

She was born before Queen Victoria died and before Australia became officially Australia at Federation (both 1901) and lived through both World Wars and the Great Depression.

May we all be Olive when we're old.

Mucking out

The indignity starts here.

Get yer gear off, stand on the H and grasp yer knees while the warder puts the latex glove on.

This is the intake area of Freo Prison, built in the 1940s, used until 1991.

Your particulars were taken down, you were photographed, made to strip, cavity searched, deloused in the showers through that white door on the right, issued a green shirt and trousers and a slop bucket, and banged up.

(The bloke in the Driz-a-bone is the tour guide. And an otter*.)



Interior of One Division or Two Division

Muster was at 7AM. You had 15 minutes to get dressed, grab your razor and your slop bucket and stand by your door.



Left to right: 1850 to 1960s, 1970s, 1970s to 1991.

Yer looking here at the toilets used by convicts and prisoners in Fremantle Prison from its opening 1850 to its closing in 1991.

The one in the middle is a chemical loo, introduced in the 1970s. Wasn't a huge success. The prisoners either smashed them up or drank the chemicals.

After the fiasco of the chemical toilets in the 1970s, it was back to the bucket system. The only upgrade was from metal to plastic.

You and yer slops bucket and water bucket spent 14½ hours of the day and night together in a cell, and God help if you pissed in the wrong one at 3AM.



Division Yard

After muster you marched into the division yard with your razor and slops bucket, emptied the bucket into an open drain and had a wash and a shave.

The yard was where you stayed all day, rain hail and blazing bloody heat. In the yard there was an open drain. You emptied yer slops in there and it was also the daytime dunny. Buckets were cleaned by the new guy.


This is Two Division Yard, dining room and outdoor bathroom. You spent your day in it with around 100 other men plus one warder in that mesh cage in the back right hand corner.

The roof wasn't added until the 1980s or '90s so you got wet in winter and roasted in summer. Behind the camera are the drinking trough, the open drain-cum-toilet, the slops buckets cleaning spot and the wrecked plumbed dunnies of the 1970s.

Other than your morning shave and wash behind the earholes at the trough, you got 3 showers a week, in one of them big open-plan tiled mass shower thingies. Like the one on Oz but with half-wall stalls. Mind you, 3 showers a week was a fucking luxury compared to the convicts, they got a bath once a week. Christ.




In the 1970s portable chemical dunnies (toilets) were put in cells and plumbed dunnies were built in the yards, against the back walls. Trouble was the prisoners either rammed things down them, smashed them up or, and I'm quoting the guidebook here, "drank the chemicals". Hopefully before someone had weed---I think we'll stop that train of thought right there!

So the cell dunnies were confiscated, the yard dunnies were stopped up with concrete and the slop buckets re-instated until the prison closed in 1991.

The plumbed dunnies in the yards had half-doors. This was so the warders could see if there was one bloke in there or two or three. But of course if the bloke in there stood up, another bloke could easily reach over the top of the door and give him a hand. Thus proving that horny blokes with time on their hands are more inventive than blokes who design prisons.


In the women's part of the prison, which housed up to 16 prisoners, things were about the same. Except that some prisoners were pregnant when they came in so you had stinking nappies and screaming sprogs to add to the delights of being banged up. After a bit the babies were taken away and handed over to relatives of the prisoner or made wards of the state.




Warders on duty in the main yard were allowed to pee. Provided they didn't take their eyes off the prisoners. So their loo was in the middle of the yard and had windows all round. On the other hand it had shelter and shade and wasn't a bucket. Sheer luxury.



Ouch

Some poor bastard fell off Woy Woy railway platform on the weekend. "He was struck by a southbound freight train moments later and killed instantly," says Central Coast Live.

18 years old. Jesus. My sympathies to his family.



* Otter. Hairy bloke. Related to bears. Bears are chubby hairy blokes. But not all chubs are bears. Otters are never chubs but always bears.

RIP

Shit.

Doddery Old Fart is dead. For real.

Just popped over to his blog, Rest Area 300M, to see what he's been up to since I went away and there was 83 comments on the latest post. Thought my computer was having a fit or something but it was 83 condolences.

Doddery was New Zealand's and the world's only blogging road-worker. His real name was Simon Lindsay and all I've been able to find out so far about his death is that it was "sudden".

Soubriquet of Bench says it best for my money:

"The only consolation is that I understand he died suddenly, without warning, of natural causes.
I hope there's a heaven. And a new entrant... frowning at the road surface... searching around for some tools. Muttering about potholes."

Growabrain has a photo of him here and a memorial of beautiful photos of his area of work has been set up here.

Rest in peace, mate.