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.

The Birds

Rainbow lorikeet in bottlebrush. Somewhere in Woy Woy.

Out on the balcony this morning listening to the bird sounds all around me. There was a couple of lorrikeets fighting over a juicy flower in a nearby tree, two magpies and a mynah hypnotised by the movement of my spoon from bowl to mouth, a family of kookaburras several trees away having a morning chuckle, a flock of seagulls wheeling over the ridge towards the water and a lone pelican floating against the clouds. At sunset the cockies and galahs will fly over low screeching and calling to one another.

Never really noticed before how many there are around my place. Perhaps it's the rain making them breed extra this year.




Sulphur-crested cockatoo. Noisy buggers. They fly low overhead at sunset and screech loud enough to wake the dead.

Note the black cockatoos in flight on either side. Painted on a bus-shelter at Taylor Street Woy Woy Bay.

Added to the ones I can see from my balcony there's all the other birds I've seen on my walkies:

Australian ravens and the seldom-seen black cockatoo
Flocks of pelicans spiralling high into the sky in the summer heat and in the teeth of a storm, or camped on the roof of the fish-and-chip shop waiting for the midday fishheads.
Ducks and geese
Shags
Pink-and-grey galahs
Cormorants and plump white wading birds with yellow beaks
Brush turkeys pacing irritably along side streets up on the ridges or scratching the shit out of people's gardens

One I haven't see and would love to is the Bush stone curlew over who's habitat on Veron Road the fight is still ongoing



Geese or muscovy ducks. Correa Bay Reserve Woy Woy South.




Mallard ducks in Davistown.




Shag on a rock. Henderson Road Saratoga.




The ubiquitous seagulls and pelicans. Correa Bay Reserve Woy Woy South.




Kookaburra at Red Cross in Gosford, up on the hill on the edge of Rumbalara Reserve.




Brush turkey hurrying away from the camera like a film star, up on the ridge in Tascott.




Painting of a brush turkey from a bus-shelter in Taylor Street Woy Woy.


Some of the birds on Lion Island would be coming across to the mainland all the time but there's a few there I'd never see.


Aaardvaark's Australian bird photos - very patient man with a lens


Highway to Hell

Great account of a rock-climb gone haywire here. Has pictures and a map link showing their trip from Patonga to Woy Woy via the shore opposite Dangar Island (don't ask). Map link's at the top of the thumbnails.

Saratoga slog

(Saratoga walkies #8)

The great lethargy has not lifted but I did manage to overcome it for a morning and drag myself round the streets of Saratoga.

It was a blue sky day. The birds were hopping and fluttering about picking up worms and rubbing their beaks together in a flirtatious manner. The sun was warm on my back and the flowers were bright. The hills were long and steep and I'd left my map at home but it was good to be out on the road again.



This shag was not hopping or fluttering. It was having a good long soak-up of sunshine. The water birds were not very active, mostly just sitting on rocks and poles sunning themselves with their eyes closed.



Mother Duck is the name half obscured on that 3rd boat back from the front.

I like this rack of boats. Technically it'll be called a mooring or summat but I like the phrase a rack of boats. This rack is on Henderson Road and that's Rileys Island, one of the uninhabited ones, in the background.



No idea what this climber is called. It had no perfume more's the pity but it was a pleasant site draped over its grey fence.



Sandwich houses I call these ones. Don't know if there's a technical name for them, but with their flat wide shape they look giant sandwiches to me. I've seen perhaps a dozen of the 1950s ones on my travels around the Peninsula and Brisbane Water and a few in the 1970s. This one was on Shaw Street.


Embiggen

Commer bus fitted out as a camper van, Morrison Street. Never seen a Commer bus before. Google tells me they were made in the UK between 1905 and 1979 by a UK manufacturer of commercial vehicles. Commer got bought out by the delightfully named Rootes company and they ended up in the hands of Dodge.

Google spat out a stack of images labelled Commer, including a rather eccentric bus looking like a double-decker glasshouse on wheels, but no image matching this model.

An identical wheel arch is visible on a Commer/Dodge here, bottom centre image and Commer later made the postal vans for the UK Royal Mail that look a lot like Postman Pat's van.

Best guess is this is a late 1950s model campervan. Fuck knows why I didn't look at the model when I saw the bloody van.


Comments & email

Pommy commenter Patty has not yet been flooded out. Good to hear.

Trainspotty & Michael suggest flu and lack of sun as a possible solution to the lethargy mystery.

They could be right (and Trainspotty's duckshit avoidance advice is noted) but Ron's answer is best: excessive gravity. Had a look at my Gravitex 3000 and the bloody gauge is stuck on 3G's! I'll have to get a little man in to fix it.

(BTW Ron, did you get my comment on bunging videos in posts?)

Mireen Avenue

(Davistown walkies #5)

Fog this morning, laying thick over the ridges and hills. Inversion fog I think because we got cloud later.

Went back to Davistown. Got the Saratoga from Woy Woy across to Lintern Street Wharf and wandered East from there and into Mireen Avenue.



An old creek or relatively new storm drain. (Sometimes they're both.) Full from the recent rain and providing a lovely calm vista at the T junction of Emora Avenue and Mireen Avenue.

Mireen Avenue is one of the old streets of the old Yow Yow Estate, flogged in 1908 by Henry F Halloran who was a native Sydneysider and mover and shaker in coastal real estate.

His great-granddad was transported for being a fake priest, amongst other things, and was mates with Simeon Lord and John Macarthur.

Lord was an ex-convict who owned one of the largest houses in the colony of Port Jackson (Sydney). Lieutenant Macarthur of the New South Wales Corps (marines-cum-prison wardens who accompanied the First Fleet convicts in 1788) started sword-fights, started Australia's lucrative wool industry, established Elizabeth Farm, went off his nut and died in 1834.



'Inala' Mireen Avenue. A Bungalow front on an earlier house, probably 1900s. Icecream colour scheme, old rose bush, deep shaded backyard. A comforting house to look at.

There's another 'Inala' at Pearl Beach, one of those holiday houses. Pearl Beach fascinates me. Half the houses are holiday cottages and the place is like a fucking ghost town outside school holidays.



Natty fifties house. Well looked after and painted not that long ago.

The pot plants and what might be native lillies in the garden aren't yer classic fifties plants but they look smart against the white and blue of the house.



Ducks. Found out the breed then clean forgot it. Mallards? Something like that. Anyways, they're the common-or-garden variety for southern Australia.

The males have the most beautiful shades of purple and blue and green under their wings and on their necks. The colours change with the light as they move.

This lot were poking about for snails in the shady bits of someone's front garden. Wish they'd come round my place. Planted a geranium last week and it's been eaten down to a stalk.

It's another warm autumn afternoon here in Woy Woy and a couple of mynahs are sitting on my balcony railing peering in at me as I type. They're inquisitive birds and like to know what you're up to. They often sit and watch me put sunblock on then nod at each other and fly off.