I shall return

I've taken some nasty punches this year. Feels like I've done ten rounds with bloody Mike Tyson and four halves against the All Blacks.

And it ain't over yet, neither. I've still got some serious legal shit to deal with. Looks like I'll get that refund on that gold brick my father bought but there's more work to do on it.

Anyways, this is not a goodbye post. I just need some headspace. I'll be back at the end of the month with pictures of wooden boats from the Putt Putt Regatta.

Comments and email will be answered (eventually) and I might even get time to catch up on my blogroll.


Stone Curlew update

The Council won't mind my pasting most of their update about the stone curlew:

"Gosford Council has called for the cooperation of Peninsula residents as the endangered bush stone-curlew enters its breeding season. ...

Only 20 of the birds are thought to exist on the Central Coast and the Peninsula is thought to be home to at least one breeding pair.

Guidelines for their treatment during the breeding season:

Dogs, foxes and cats to be kept away from these birds at all times.

Adequate habitat needed to be protected and maintained in the area.

This include[s] sufficient fallen timber being left on the ground as the Bush Stone-curlew required logs for camouflage when roosting or nesting and for foraging for insects.

No fertiliser, insecticide or herbicide should be used in areas used by the birds.

Mowing of grass areas near nest sites should cease until eggs hatch.

Disturbance to the birds should be limited... This may be supported by installing temporary or permanent fencing around the nesting site.

If a nest was abandoned before the eggs hatch, residents should contact Ms Bennetts at the Council offices or contact the National Parks and Wildlife Service Gosford office. ...

This bird is easily recognised as it stands 50-60cm tall with long legs, mottled brown, white and grey plumage, a short, dark beak and a large yellow eye.

It tends to stand or lie motionless in woodlands where it is well camouflaged during the day and becomes active between dusk and dawn while foraging for food.

Its presence is more often indicated by a wailing 'weer-lo' call after dark.

The breeding season usually [begins] around August or September with a noisy courtship.

When preparing for breeding, bush stone-curlews begin to call more frequently and will be seen regularly at their chosen nest site until a clutch is laid.

A pair may have one or two clutches per breeding season containing one or two well-camouflaged brown speckled chicken egg sized eggs.

Eggs are laid directly on bare ground and the site is typically near the edge of open grassy woodland.

The incubation period is between 22 and 30 days after which the nest site will be abandoned.

The parents feed the chick until it is four weeks old and it will be eight to 10 weeks before the chick can fly.

Until this stage, the chick is extremely vulnerable to predation.

The parents may also chase the chick away one to two weeks before attempting to lay a second clutch in the same or nearby site.

The bush stone-curlew (burhinus grallarius) is listed as endangered on Schedule 1 of the NSW Threatened Species Conservation Act 1995. ...

Recovery Plan and further information about bush stone-curlews

For further information or to report abandoned nests, contact Ms Bennetts at Gosford Council on 4325 8844 or the National Parks and Wildlife Service Gosford office on 4320 4280.

Media release, 10 Oct 2007 Nikki Bennetts, Gosford Council" (Full thingy in local rag)

Freo Asylum

Yep, while I was in Freo I visited my father in the nut-house then I visited another nut-house just for the fun of it.



Fremantle Lunatic Asylum. Started, finished and used in July 1865, finished up as a nut-house when the last of the nutters where transferred to the Claremont Hospital for the Mentally Ill.

Built by the same convicts who built and lived in Freo Prison. Local limestome used again, architecture style Victorian Tudor/Dutch Colonial (circa 1840 - circa 1890). Same as the old Fremantle Boys School below.



Same architectural style, same convicts. Freo Boys is the one on the right.

It's on Adelaide Street in Freo, opposite the Catholic church, right in Freo.

Freo Boys was built in 1854 and finished up as a school in 1958, with the last of the students from there and the girls' school new door (Princess May) sent off to new John Curtin High School up the road. (John Curtin was named after Australia's wartime Prime Minister.)

Freo Boys was also requisitioned during the way, by the navy. Freo was felt to be under threat from the Japanese forces and the students of Freo Boys and Princess May were shipped off to schools in the suburbs.

Back to the Asylum

The first official nutters in Freo were ten convicts. They were shifted from the nick to Scot's Warehouse in November 1857. Can't get any info on Scot's Warehouse but ten bob says it was some old wreck of a building down near the harbour.

The Asylum was only used as a nut-house for 40 years. There was a couple of suspicious deaths in the Freo Asylum in the early 1900s and that seems to have been the catalyst for closing it down. A nice new building with a less forbidding name, the Claremont Hospital for the Mentally Ill, had been built in the suburbs and the nutters were all shifted there from 1905 to 1909.


Inner courtyard, Arts Centre half

1909 to the outbreak of WWII in 1939 the old Asylum was a homeless women's shelter. In the war it was the HQ of the American forces in Australia "during which time the majority of the complex fell into disrepair".


Back of the Arts Centre, used as the logo of the Fremantle Arts Centre Press

After the war it was used for this, that and the other until it restoration started in 1970. Since then it's been housing the Fremantle Museum & Arts Centre. They've got half each, with the old cell and the haunty bits being mainly in the museum's half.

Haunty bits

Someone called Scotty puts it succinctly: the "Old Fremantle Asylum [is] reputably haunted as fuck."

Mainly it's the old cell and an upstairs passageway in the museum part and the big painting studio upstairs in the arts centre part.

You go up this endless fucking staircase to get to the painting studio. Haunted Australia tells us the staircase induces feelings of dread in some people and the ghosts are a former inmate bunged in there by her husband for no good reason and a former warder.



The passageway is the territory of the former inmate. She's supposed to have jumped out of an upstairs window and killed herself after her baby was taken away from her.

When I was a wee thing rumour had it there was a poltergeist who moved stuff about in the storage room next to the studio. On a primary school excursion to the museum we were allowed into the old cell. Predictably, the door shut of its own accord and one poor bugger wet his pants. (I swear it wasn't me!)


Freo Museum
WA Register of Heritage Places
Publicly available records on the Freo Lunatic Asylum

This morning was shit for photos and pretty ordinary for walkies. This afternoon is shaping up nicely. Nice bit of wind and the sky's clear at the moment. It's s'posed to blow a gale. I'll be out in it pretending me balcony is the prow of the Titanic.

Back

Last month my father moved into a small but well-upholstered room in a Home for the Incurably Bonkers.

In his last few months of freedom he made some peculiar financial decisions. One of these was buying a swamp. It's worth a tenth of what he paid for it. The bloke who sold it to him is not afraid of letters from solicitors (lawyers) and possesses many fine examples. I went over to look the bastard in the eye and inform him of my intention to pursue the matter till hell freezes over.

Hopefully that'll be the end of it. Flying back and forth across the country on tedious legal errands does not thrill me to the core. Let's look at some of the photos I got while I was there.



Xanthorrhoea AKA grass tree.

We had one of these in the backyard when I was a kid. Ours must've been impotent or summat because it never flowered, poor bugger.



There you go. Can't remember if this was two very close together or one with a double trunk.



Base of flower in amongst the leaves.

The flower spikes are anything from a metre to 3 metres long, usually about 2 and as thick as a can of Red Bull. They look soft but are really hard and prickly. Green means they're not in full bloom yet. They go soft and creamy yellow when they're in full bloom.

The spines (leaves) are about a metre long (3 feet), 3-6mm wide (1/8th inch), easy to snap, diamond-shaped in the cross section. A handful makes a great whip but you get yer eye poked out reaching in to break them off.



Fallen trunk of a Xanthorrhoea. Glorious colour inside, no? It's hollow up the middle and made of strange flat spines.

Couple more Xanthorrhoea photos



Kangaroo paw flower. Anigozanthos manglesii its proper name is. Grows to about knee height and in small clumps.



The red and green one is the most sought after. There's a yellow one as well. The texture is soft and velvety.


Blue sky this morning and a bank of grey cloud coming over now. The kookaburras were laughing again. My inbox is full of improbably named persons who want to tell me their volume exploded and a mate sent this amusing photo of two cocks and a ball.

I will be away for approximately 7 days.

Email and comments will go unanswered.

Nobody else is dead.

Back on track

Thank you everyone for your sympathies. They are much appreciated.

Feeling a bit bewildered, as you might expect in the circumstances, but also rather relieved. Once someone's gone they're feeling no more pain and that applies to my Nana as well as my mother in different ways.

I've had some work to bury myself in this last couple of days and I'm looking forward to throwing off that stupid fucking lethargy and getting my walkies back on track.


P.S.

I'm in the ferry newsletter and there's some stuff in there as well about how the ferries came off in the big storms.

Back

We buried my mother in the same grave as her mother.

The funeral was bloody awful. Not least because we had to sit on my father's head until the ambulance came and took him to the psych ward.

It was a great relief, quite frankly, though I'm very glad my mother didn't see it. The funeral was a catalyst of course but it would've happened sooner or later anyways.

I'm very much looking forward to the calming affects of walkies on Friday.

Back

The funeral was my grandmother's. She was 93 and went rather quickly and quietly. She would've been rather miffed about the quickly and quietly bit, she loved a good scene. But we filled the church to the roof with bright pink roses and sang Knees Up Mother Brown and howled into our hankies. She would've enjoyed that.

I loved her as much as my Gran but she was a strange bugger. She declared herself not racist but couldn't stand "bloody foreigners". She was also utterly convinced there were None Of Those* in our family but terrified I'd was turning into One Of Them and didn't dare mention it in case she tipped me over the edge. She was also convinced Liberace and Rock Hudson were straight.

Death seems to be stalking my family. It's all been a bit much frankly. Let's look at some photos instead.



In 1929 12 year olds Jim Dix and John Murton built two of these out of a bit of tin (galvanised iron) and launched them off Freo. They were going to paddle round from Howard Street to Fishermans Harbour.

But their boat-building skills weren't up to the job and a couple of hundred metres offshore, John's boat filled up and sank under him. He couldn't swim and when Jim tried to pull him into his boat, John panicked and nearly drowned them both. Jim got them back to shore somehow and they were found by passersby. John had swallowed a fair bit of water and spent a week in hospital and Jim got a certificate of merit from the Royal Humane Society of Australasia.

Maritime Museum at Freo Harbour.



A rather gloomy fish. Don't know why I like it but I do.


Embiggen

Man versus Moby. You'd want to be bloody well paid to go out in a boat that size to poke a whale with a harpoon.

Whalers' Tunnel post


* One Of Those is DOT Speak for a queer person.