The lion in winter

(Random blogging urge)


18th of June 2007, after a big wind

I've been walking and photographing for 4 years now. I've got about 2,000 walkies photos on my Flickr thingy.

Only just realised I've got a year round record of Lion Island. It's one of my favourite views. Won't bombard you with the whole year's worth of photos in one go. There's 26 of them.

So let's be looking at just one season at a time. It's spring here now, officially and in fact but I like the title 'The lion in winter' so much I'm ignoring inconvenient real-world facts.



30th of June 2005, from Umina Beach



7th of July 2006



23rd of July 2005



26th of July 2005



5th of August 2008, from Ettalong Beach just near Bustling Downtown Ettalong

Australia really doesn't have a noticable winter in terms of bare trees and stuff. Not unless yer in Tassie and it's snowing. Pretty sure you'd notice winter then, even without the bare trees.


Excuses excuses

Did not go walkies this week. Had the annual flu. Not swine flu, thank fuck, and not even man flu just yer bog standard 3 days in bed crap.

Right now I'm off to seek sustenance in the form of a barbie and a steak sanger. Doubt if I'm up to a bonk today.

Bugger this for a laugh

Spent yesterday in bed. Still feeling like I've gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson, yacking up gross stuff, coughing so hard I forget my own name. Stupid flu aftermath.


Embiggen

On the up side, I tottered down to the beach today and laid there in the sun for a couple of hours.


Mailbag

I have a young family and am looking at moving to the central coast, maybe Umina direction. ...I am not overly familiar with the area, but Woy Woy gets lots of bad press amongst the Sydney-siders.

Is it really that bad? Having driven up there once or twice it doesn’t appear to be so….and reading your blog it appears you never got mugged, stabbed, robbed, etc. I guess I am looking for an honest local opinion. Would appreciate your thoughts.


Don't believe everything you read on the telly.

Woy Woy is safe. Naturally we got a few nutters and fuckwits and road collapses but so has every town, including Sydney. Bad news about Woy Woy sticks in the mind because of the memorable name. And because only bad news is reported.

Little old ladies are safe here. Fuckwits who lurk on the beach with an open beer and an attitude get punched by other fuckwits. They're not often active, it's a big beach and there's usually lifesavers on duty*. Housing prices are going up not down. They don't go up in unsafe places.

Bring the kiddies up for the weekend and have a look. You'll love it.


Snippets

Council risks second road collapse - scary cracked culvert photo of Pearl Beach Drive

Aboriginal place names


Righto. I'm off to bed with a couple of hotties called Whisky and Lemon.


* Swim between the flags and all that.

Palm Beach

While the Palm Beach ferry is a hot topic, let's pop back across to Palmy.




Pittwater and Brisbane Water ferry routes. The bottom route goes from Ettalong to Palm Beach and is the one threatened by the sandbank.

(Incidentally, everything on the green and blue map is on the Central Coast and everything on the blue map is in Sydney.)




Fantasea Crystal at Palm Beach. A comfy and efficient ferry but not exciting as ferries go.

These two are also of the Palm Beach fleet:

Crystal Spirit, at Wagstaffe
Myra & friend, wooden ferries at Palm Beach

Floating life - ferries, dingies, wooden boats, putt-putts, a hull, a raised wreck, and a sub




Lion Island from the Palm Beach ferry. I never get tired of Lion Island.

List of birds & beasts on Lion Island
Islands of Broken Bay







Seaplane at Palm Beach, with Barrenjoey Head behind it. The seaplane takes off from Sydney Harbour and does sightseeing tours up the coast to Pittwater.


Work work work

Have been working long hours. Hence the late posts recently. Made the deadline though and there's a bit of calmer water ahead, thank christ.

Ettalong Beach

(Random walkies on the Woy Woy Peninsula)



Golden Wattle. Acacia is the proper name of the golden wattles. This one seems to be the Coastal Wattle AKA Acacia longifolia or A. sophorae and as you can see it's growing happily on the beach and the link below says "[g]rows in dunal, heath and sclerophyll communities including headlands" and "[d]istribution: Queensland to Victoria".

Species page at some govt site

Wattle wattle wattle - all my wattle photos at Flickr




These photos were all taken just opposite the Excresence, that great white whale of a resort on the foreshore at Ettalong.




Lion Island there in the distance, and on the right the Ettalong foreshore where the pines, drain and barbies are and where Mr Whippy dispenses icecreams of a weekend.



Barrenjoey Head and Lion Island from Ettalong Beach.


Bustling Downtown Ettalong (Map)

Palm Beach again

(Palm Beach again)



Our trusty steed Fantasea Crystal at Ettalong Wharf. She is a 25 metre aluminium catamaran and takes a max of 192 passengers.




Lion Island, looking south from the Palm Beach ferry. Notice the cliff at the head end, facing out therough the heads of Broken Bay, and the lion-ish shape of the whole thing.




Lion Island from the Palm Beach ferry.




Head on of Lion Island. Rock climbers can occasionally be spotted inching their way up its face.

The island is on a couple of my old maps as Elliott Island, named in 1789 by Governor Phillip after another Island where his mate General Elliott gave the Spanish and French a kicking. It's 8 hectares and was made into Lion Island Nature Reserve in 1956. There's quite a few beasties living on it, mostly birds though of course.

White-bellied Sea-Eagle
Osprey
Kookaburra
Grey Teal
Fork-tailed Swift
White-throated Needletail
Pied Currawong
Australian Raven
Mistletoe bird
Nankeen Kestrel
Peregrine Falcon
Silver Gull
Crested Tern
Yellow-faced Honeyeater
White-cheeked Honeyeater
Great Cormorant
Little Pied Cormorant
Little Black Cormorant
Tawny Frogmouth
Blue Petrel
Fluttering Shearwater
Sooty Shearwater
Wedge-tailed Shearwater
Short-tailed Shearwater
Eastern Rosella
Little Penguin
Southern Boobook
Silvereye

Water-rat
House mouse

Eastern Water Dragon
Robust Ctenotus
Copper-tailed Skink
Eastern Water-skink
Three-toed Skink
Lace Monitor

Proper names at NSW National Parks

Sydney Climbing



Embiggen

Barrenjoey Head from Pittwater. Note the flat strip of land on the right hand side of the Head. That's the golf course, with Palm Beach itself on the other side of it and Barrenjoey Beach on the Pittwater side, which is this side.




Myra leaving Palm Beach wharf. She does the bays and wharves of Pittwater. She's too small to go across the mouth of Broken Bay to Ettalong. She'd be all over the place in a decent swell.

She is a 15 metre woodern ferry and "the pride of Palm Beach Ferry Service". She takes a max of 130 passengers.

Sister ship Crystal Spirit at Wagstaffe wharf

Palm Beach ferry fleet

Ettalong to Palm Beach map

More Broken ferries & boats

Islands of Broken Bay


And that's yer lot for the year. I'm on me holidays now and will be laying on the beach and having barbies for a couple of weeks, storms permitting. Have a good Chrissy and come back on the 15th of January.

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

Jacaranda Avenue

Back on deck. Feeling like I've been slugged in an alley but that's the flu for yer. Managed to totter out for a walk this morning. Bloody hot day for it.




Naroo Road. Tiny street off Veron Road in Umina, near the High School. A favourite site at this time of year. Locals often refer to it as Jacaranda Avenue.

The jacarandas are still in flower all over the Peninsula. Love their soft trumpet-shaped flowers and their warm soft honey scent.




Hot and hazy day on the Coast. That's just low cloud or leftover mist hanging over Sydney, not smog. Been foggy up and down the NSW coast for a few days.

Taken from Ettalong Beach, near the dunnies at the end of Picnic Parade.

Left to right: Wagstaffe (closeest), Barrenjoey Head (distant), Pittwater (most distant), Lion Island (right of centre), Commodore Heights in the Ku-ring-gai (behind the Lion), Ettalong Beach (closest) and Mt Ettalong (behind it).


Pop over and have a gander at this wee old house on Mullet Creek. A Umina resident has snapped it from the train.

Mullet Creek is an offshoot of the Hawkesbury River, which is one of the branches of Broken Bay. Woy Woy is in Brisbane Water and Brisbane Water is also part of Broken Bay. Mullet Creek is stoppered at its end by Dangar Island, which has electricity but only one car.

Rumour has it this house has no electricity nor running water. Dear God! It's rather pleasant though and is either a late example of Old Colonial Georgian (1788 - circa 1840) or Victorian Georgian (circa 1840 - c.1890). I plump for Victorian. The area wasn't built in until the 1860s from what I can gather.

To get home its residents would have to get off at tiny Wondabyne station("passengers for Wondabyne please inform the guard and alight from the rear door or the rear carriage") or row for 20 minutes from Brooklyn township.




Dangar Island is the red dot the arrow is pointing at. Mullet Creek is the wee offshoot of river rising vertically above it and half obscured by the name of Woy Woy.