Boats & cars

(Every street walkies, Gosford #7)

Sun was back out today. Went up to Gosford waterfront. Before the railway came through in the 1880s, the wharf end of Mann Street was the happening end of town. There were no sealed roads, stuff and peole came up from Sydney and in from other parts of the Central Coast by boat. Everything was then hoicked up Wharf Road (now Vaughan Avenue) by hand or horse or carried off in private boats.


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Ferry wharf off Dane Drive. There's a ferry that does cruises and shit.


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Illustrated legal bag & size thingy. Pretty and delicious. Stuck on a bollard on the ferry wharf.


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Working boat. She appears to have been registered in Sydney in1964 and is 14.3 metres (46.92 feet) long.


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Looks like she picks up all the flotsam and jetsam.

Misquoting Oscar Wilde: To lose one deckchair is unfortunate, to lose two looks like someone was in a drunken rage and threw them overboard.


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She looks a bit portly from this angle. Not her most flattering side.


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All kitted out for a hard day on the job.


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Parked at that restaurant place on the waterfront with all the sails. Possibly it's called Sails.

Anyways, Morgan have been making cars for 70 years now apparently. This model seems to be a 1957 4 4 model. Can't be stuffed trawling for more info on it ATM but there's a very pretty picture of it here.


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I know bugger all about hotrods. In the classic cars (i.e., vintage and veteran originals) circles my father hung out in, hotrods were considered bogan cars and therefore knowing anything about them was considered crass.

This one had a Ford badge on the front and a couple of hotrod club stickers on the windscreen. Didn't find any more specific insignia. The instruments looked like the real deal though they could've been repro and I expect they're hooked up to something modern. That's a fuel tank on the front.


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It was parked across from the Blacket on Mann Street, Gosford.

Creighton's

(Every street walkies, Gosford #6)

Did this one Saturday. Pissing down raining again today. Not great for photos but much needed. Gosford area dams are at 22%. Ouch.


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Art Deco (circa 1915 - c. 1940). Cement-rendered brick on a sandstone foundation. Built in 1938 for R.H. Creighton Funeral Directors.

One of my favourites in the Gosford area. Love the textures and shapes of it, the fins and the rectangular thingy up the middle and the rounded Deco corners and the wee balconies.


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The central fin and the rectangular thingy.

Before they were funeral directors the Creightons were carpenters and became undertakers in the 1880s apparently. They were in the area from around 1844 and the date on the ribbon says "Est[ablished] 1844".


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The building has sandstone foundations and a sandstone garage for the hearses attached. The fin motif has been carried across to the garage and the arches of the garage are wider versions of the entrance arch on the main building.

The building behind the garage appears to be a house or small block of flats. But a look at the Register of National Whatists reveals "The simple rectangular, brick building appears to date c[irca] 1950 and is believed to house preparation and storage areas". And there was I thinking the Creightons lived there.

As you can see, the building is for lease. It's on the Register of the National Estate (protected buildings & places) so it shouldn't be interfered with by it's new occupants.

From the Register:
"The use of such an exuberant and highly eclectic variation of the style, is rare for a funeral parlour...It is the only remaining Art Deco building in the main street of Gosford...It has considerable value for its contribution to the streetscape and civic precinct of Gosford...Its style, location and setting impart a landmark quality to the building".

It's certainly a landmark and I know I'm not the only one who loves having it on Mann Street.


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The Georgiana Terrace side. Notice the lovely rounded corner of the building. The windows and roof on the side veranda thingy were added around the 1950s.

And notice how steep the site is. Georgiana Terrace is a real goat track. Very good for conditioning the quads.


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The Register of National Whatsits also tells me the wee canvas hoods over these balconies (there's one the other side) are "a recent addition". They suit the place well.

Family historians will be pleased to know the Gosford Library has on microfiche the "R.H. Creighton Gosford Funeral Parlour Index and records 1909-1989". The Gosford District Local Studies Group appears to have copies as well.

If you're off to the old pioneer cemetery-cum-park on the tip of Longnose (Pt Frederick) have a gander at the graves. There's quite a few Creightons listed there.

Good and chilly today. I'm off to have a nice hot cuppa.

Gosford war memorial park

(Every-street walkies, Gosford #5)

Pissing down raining today. It's so long since it rained I'd forgotten what it looked like. I'm sitting here with a hot cuppa enjoying the rain and the cold and blogging some more photos from Wednesday.


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Looking down the hill to The Broadwater (Brisbane Water) and the ferry with the war memorial park on the left. The hill in the background is Point Clare.


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View from the top part of the park over The Broadwater to Fagans Bay and the Kariong hills. The ramp on the right is the Pacific Hwy overpass, the road in the bottom left is Dane Drive. The footy stadium is on the far right. The Kariong Hill lookout is up there on the left side of the ridge somewhere.


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The main memorial in the park. Nice and quiet and appropriately surrounded by rosemary.

Annotated photos of the whole memorial.


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Boer War memorial.

"Erected
In Memory Of
OUR SOLDIERS
WHO, IN SOUTH AFRICA,
FELL IN DEFENCE OF THEIR NATION
DURING THE BOER WAR
1899 - 1902

They obeyed their country's call".

Annotated photos of the whole memorial.


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On the Boer War memorial.

"Corporal
FRANKYN HARCOURT
LEGGE
of 'Woodport'.
20th May 1901".

The date is wrong, according to the library. They say the official record has him dying "exactly a year earlier". Trooper Sidney S. Mayo and Legge are both "listed as killed in action". Rooksberry, author of Every Mother's Son (copies in the Gosford Lirary system) found out they probably died of enteric fever, which during the Boer War killed more men that combat did.


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Some people don't like guns being included at war memorials. Mechanism of death and all that. There's no National Service now in my country and I've never joined voluntarily. For me the guns show some of the mundane detail of what it was like every day for the troops on the front line. I can sit on the gunner's tiny seat and put my hands on the levers and wheels he touched and imagine what it was like to sit there firing and hoping death didn't come that day.

Engraved on a small panel on this side near the gunner's position:
"SADDLE. 25 Pn/r
No. [blank section] Mk [blank section]".

Engraved on the barrel:
"C. of G.
Q.F.25Pr MK.II.
M.O. 1941 JACKET No L/6136
8 - 0 - 4

25PII
M.O. 1944".

Engraved on a small panel on the other side:
"CARR. 25 Pr MKI|L|
RUWOLT 1942
REG. No. 4033 [or 4933]".


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Over the left wheel you can see the tiny seat theat is the gunner's position. Not very big and probably caused terrible cases of Gunner's Bum. The big flat circular section swings the barrel round in response to the gunner's actions on the levers and wheels.

There endeth my knowledge of guns 'n' ammo.

Somewhere on the water side of the barrel:
"CONTROLLING SPEED OF
RUN OUT
TO INCREASE TURN VALVE A
ANTI-CLOCKWISE".


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Gunner's view. Except that he'd had the peephole open. Click for the annotated version.

Annotated photos of all five memorials.

Noo York Noo York

From Steve Vaught's (Fat Man Walking) site:

"IN NEW YORK CITY!!!

Watch Steve on the Today Show, May 10th at approximately 7:30 am."

He made it. Onya, Steve! Knew you'd make it, mate. Congratulations. Hope they had a cold beer and a footrub waiting for you.

Steve's walked across America. All the way from California to New York. All the way, sleeping in a tent beside the road most of the way. He's had a few companions, people who've walked a few miles with him and a few TV crews trailing along with him interviewing him. But he's walked the whole way essentially alone, no support crew. That's the same distance as from Perth to Canberra then up to Brissie or Nepal to North Korea or Calais to the Red Sea. Hell of a distance and a hell of an achievement.

He hasn't been on the news here yet. Got bumped off by fire, a suburban bomb maker and the Federal Budget.

Unless he gets bumped off by a terrorist attack, he'll be on Sixty Minutes here this Sunday. They filmed an interview with him a few weeks ago. It'll be interesting to see how he was doing back then with New York still ahead of him.

In other news

You can now buy a board game based on the life and crimes of Australia's second most famous criminal, Chopper Read. BYO toe-cutters.

Our most famous crim is of course, Ned Kelly. Yep, the same Ned Kelly they made into a movie.

Old sandstone church

(Every street walkies, Gosford #4, read #3)

Mann Street is the main street of Gosford. At the water end of Mann Street there's a block of sixties or seventies flats in beige brick and beside them the two churches of Christ Church, one an unattractive round 1960s job with a spire sticking up from the middle of it, the other a wee old sandstone church known as the Blacket.


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The style is Victorian Free Gothic (c. 1840-c. 1890). According to the library, the Blacket was built in 1858 in East Gosford and moved to Mann Street in 1905. This photo is taken from the veranda of the round sixties church.


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When the Blacket was moved its sandstone blocks were numbered so they could put it back together at the other end. On the big version you can still see the numbers 57, 59 and 6? on the blocks on the north side.


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The older churches round Brisbane Water are small and generally simple. I like a bit of Perp Dec but I also like these nice simple little churches with their simple little doors and windows.


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Lovely interior. Used mostly for weddings and christenings I gather from their website.

There's stained glass window (not showing here) with a bloke and another bloke in memory of Sidney Fielder who died in 1925.


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This is an interesting old structure. It's to the back of the Blacket and close enough to be used for the minister's changing room. The size of it indicates it also was used for whatever other churchy things ministers regularly do. It seems to be still in use.

It's bloody hard to put any sort of date on this bugger. The library had no info on it and neither does the church website. The style suggests it was built to complement the church and the info I've got on the church grounds suggests it was built after 1905. The sandstone looks at least seventy years old. I'm going to put the bugger at inter-war (1919 - 1939) and leave it that till I get some info.


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Now the office, formely the Rectory (the minister's house). Built in 1913 in the Arts & Crafts style that led to the California Bungalow. Very nice.


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Looks like a fifties building possibly on older founations and with recycled windows. The little portico thingy is cute but stylistically bewildering. It too is still in use.

It's good to get back to the every-street walkies. It's been so nice and nippy in the mornings lately it spurred me on.

Miners, Carleton, Sophie, Steve & lunch

The miners walked out of the mine before dawn this morning. Thank fuck.

It was torture waiting for them to be rescued so imagine how they must've felt spending two weeks down there a kilometre underground with a fucking great rock poised over their heads.

Just before I went to bed last night the probe had broken through and the miners could see it. When I got up this morning there was footage of them walking out of the mine lift (elevator) at about five this morning. Their mate Larry Knight is being buried this afternoon.

Carleton

You may also have heard that one of our well known journos Richard Carleton dropped dead on the job. He'd just asked a question of the mine manager down at the Tasmanian mine rescue. "Before [the mine manager] finished his answer, Carleton turned to his crew's camera, walked about eight metres, and collapsed." He didn't look crash hot that day but who would after being up at all hours covering a story like that. Poor bastard.

Sophie

Five-year-old Sophie Delezio is still in a stable condition in intensive care. She's the poor sprog who was badly burnt and lost her feet in 2003 and run over on Friday. She's got a lot of injuries and will be in hospital for a while. When she recovers from this lot of injuries she needs to have more operations relating to the burns. Jesus.

Steve

Okay. Let's have some good news for a fucking change. Steve (Fat Man Walking) is a star. The media are all over him like a rash and his inbox is clogged with people who want to walk the last few miles with him as he finishs his walk across America.

The latest from Steve's site:

"May 8, 2006

Want to walk to NYC with Steve?

Meeting Place: Leaving from the north walkway of the George Washington Bridge at 6pm on May 9th.

MEDIA ADVISORY May 8, 2006 Steve’s honored by all of the attention his quest to walk across America has gathered from the media...

...he walks across the Bridge and into New York City tomorrow. Contact: Melinda Cataldo mcataldo@att.net"

It's the 9th here already, Tuesday afternoon. Hopefully he'll be on the news tonight at the end of his epic journey from California to New York. Onya, Steve. Knew you'd make it all the way.

Lunch

Meanwhile, in Woy Woy, it's another blue blue day. Bitey cold last night, down to 1 degree celcuis (33.8 Fahrenheit) then another day of warm autumn sun. Went down to Ettalong and had a pie for lunch in the park.


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A busy Tuesday at Ettalong Beach. Wagstaffe on the left, Barrenjoey Head on the northern beaches of Sydney on the right.


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Nice old shop on Broken Bay Road behind The Excrescence.

Might be Inter-War Free Classical (circa 1915 - circa 1940). Not sure. The tethers on the veranda roof are gone from shop fronts by 1940.


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Banskia flowers and seed cone. There's plenty of blooms still out this autumn. It was the same last year with the same warm sun we're having now. Beautiful.


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Smart colours and the trees on the Mountain behind it. Pleasant old building in a pleasant setting.

Ettalong was settled in the 1830s and this hall was built in 1954. Doesn't look it. I would've said 1930s at the latest so there yer go.

It was a nice warm gentle walk in the warm gentle sun. Just what the doctor ordered. Will have another dose of the same tomorrow.

St John the Baptist

(Random walkies)

Last week the old wooden buildings were gone from the 1914 brick church grounds. They're not in my Hist List and the NSW Heritage Office has only this to say about them:

"Timber framed school buildings and hall on site of some note."


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View from Blackwall Road. Pre demolitions.


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View from Regina Close of the back of the church and the gap where this building was.


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A strange little building on the corner across from the chuch, facing the Thai restaurant.

I think it's a classroom and was an extension of the school (housed in the old wooden buildings recently demolished) before the school was moved to Woy Woy South.


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Don't know the current status of the Presbytery or whether it's occupied at the moment. I do know there's a new Presbytery being built or built out at Springfield.

This Presbytery is immediately to the left of the little fifties building above.


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Immediately to the left of the Presbytery above.

Can't find any reference to this old house in my notes or online. I've a feeling it was or is used as a some sort of boarding house and called Mary McKillop House. It seems to be empty now. No idea what it's fate is.

The Mary McKillop connection is through the Josephite Sisters who run the Catholic Primary School at Woy Woy South. McKillop was their founder and the school was once in the grounds of the church. This building is part of the church buildings on the Blackwall Road-Victoria Road corner.


The trapped miners & little Sophie

Little Sophie was run over on a crosswalk (zebra crossing) on Friday and is still in a critical condition in hospital. The driver has been charged.

Sophie is now five. When she was two she was badly burnt when a car ran off the road and into her child care centre. Quite a few kids were hurt and Sophie lost both feet and ear and a couple of fingers.

Sydney Morning Herald article.

The miners trapped a kilometre (0.62 miles) underground after a rock fall in a Tasmanian mine are still down there after 12 nights.

The last bit of the rescue tunnel is a bastard. The rock is the last couple of metres (6.56 feet) is as hard as buggery and far harder than expected. The last section of the tunnel has to be done by hand with small drills & pick axes to due to the danger of another rock fall. It's 1.5 metres (4.92 feet) wide and goes upwards. So it's a bloody tricky width and angle to work.

The tunnel will come out in the floor where the miners are trapped. They're in the cage of the machine they were operating and there's a very small space just outside the door of the cage. That space is where the tunnel will come out.

Due to the tiny work space and the hardness of the rock, this last tiny section of tunnel could take all of today to complete. The rescue has to be slow and careful in case of more rock falls.

The miners are still in good nick and good spirits. They've been getting food, air and newspapers through a narrow tube drilled the day after the fall. One of their mates, Larry Knight, was killed in the fall. These two guys are sitting there in a small steel safety cage with a big slab of rock on top of it.

Sydney Morning Herald article.

Blackwall foreshore

(Random walkies)

Off down to the Blackwall foreshore this morning. Nice and nippy, no breeze, magpies squawking and sparrows twittering in the trees, the gentle lap of water against private jetties and the jingle of dogs' leads as they trotted past with their owners.

The foreshore looks out across the water to St Huberts Island, Daleys Point and Saratoga and Davistown. It's fringed with private jetties and moorings with old wooden dingies tied up on tide ropes. There are clumps of mangroves here and there an small stands of pines and paperbarks. The park runs from Blackwall Mountain to the point behind the bowls club where the boat ramps are.


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Lovely old Federation (circa 1890 - circa 1915) place near McMasters Road. (There's a wee carpark opposite McMasters. Go through it to the park, turn left and it's 3 or 4 houses along.)

Can't find a chimney like that earlier than 1890. The chimney pot is as new as it looks but they're often replaced. The style and age of materials of the the chimney stack is the key.

That pleasant little portico is of the same period. Either Arts & Crafts (circa 1890 - circa 1915) or Federation Bungalow (circa 1890 - circa 1915). I plump for Bungalow.

Can't find this house in my Hist List. That just means its origins are uncertain. But I'll stumble across an old photo of it in the library eventually.


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The front section is original 1950s. The age and style of the roof materials are definitely fifties though the windows and walls have obviously been renovated.

It'll be interesting to see how the extension looks when they've finished. It does look like it could be in keeping with the original section to some extent.


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These people have chosen one of the colour combinations I most loathe. But other than that, the house is quite pleasant. The octagonal window is clunky but I like the rectangular repro windows and the veranda is lovely.

How much of this house is original is hard to say. The section under the back roof is not. The main roof (with the octagonal window) looks like a new steeper-pitched roof over the oldest section of the house. The portico and the pillars I'm not even going to try to date. They could be repro, second-hand or original. I can't tell under that paint.

The steps are badly cracked as you can see. They and the white thingies beside them are inter-war, between the 1st and 2nd World Wars. Steps and verandas are often updated and so can be younger than the oldest part of the house. Having a gander at the foundations would give me a better idea of the age of this house.


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Sometimes I get a nice surprise when I date a building. Sometimes they turn out to be older than I think at first glance. When I took the photo of this one I was thinking Federation (circa 1890 - circa 1915). But the book (Apperly, Irving & Reynolds' Pictorial Guide to Identifying Australian Architecture) puts it at circa 1840 to circa 1890, Victorian Georgian.

Ignore that square hip on the roof. I'm pretty sure that's recent. Look instead at the shape of the roof without the square hip, at the shape of the veranda roof, the chimney, the boxed eaves and the two narrow windows on the left. Those windows have stone lintels and flat arches which are gone from domestic architecture by circa 1915, according to the book.

It was a nice walk. Not terribly long but walking beside the water is always nice. Didn't notice your dad's house, Jimmy. What end of the foreshore is it?

Start spreading the news

Steve (Fat Man Walking) will reach New York this week. How cool is that?

He started from Oceanside in California on the 10th of April and he's walked across America. His end point is the Rockefeller Center in New York and he's hoping to be there on the 8th of May.

Steve's been walking alone and without a support vehicle. He's been sleeping in a tent beside the road and buying food in towns along the way or cooking on a camp stove. He's had to content with dickheads, weather, self-doubt, injuries and TV crews. He's lost a lot of weight, gained a lot of health and worked through some heavy personal shit. He's been doing it tough but he hasn't given up. If you're in the area, lend him your support by walking the last few miles with him and tell him I sent you.

There's some newspaper articles and so on about him here. Australian current affairs programme 60 Minutes did an interview with him in April and will presumably show it when he reaches New York.

From Steve's blog for the 1st of May:

"I am trying to get to NYC between the 8th and 10th of May. It looks as though I will make it by the 8th if nothing goes wrong in this last week. So if you are planning on walking with me into NYC then get ready, let me know and we will meet up in Newark, May 7th and walk into NYC across the George Washing bridge, then walk along a bike / walking path down to around 50th street then cross over to Rockefeller Center which is my ending point."

Kuttabul

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This is the HMAS Kuttabul in June 1942., Kuttabul was an obsolete ferry before the war. When the war came she was converted to a barracks and moored off Garden Island naval base in Sydney Harbour.

The, Kuttabul is one of Australia's most famous ships. It was wrecked in the attack on Sydney Harbour. It also has a personal connection. Twenty one sailors died on the wreck and my great uncle wasn't one of them.

My great uncle Herbie was on the, Kuttabul in July and September of 1941. Four of the ships he was on went down and one was torpedoed while he was on it, according to my Nana. He had a fair few near misses, as might be expected in the middle of a war. But he came through the war with nary a scratch on him and died in 1947 of cancer. He was a bachelor and had no known children. Other than that I know bugger all about him and seeing a ship he slept on during the war brings me a tiny bit closer to him.

In her days as a ferry,, Kuttabul seated 2,250 passengers. In the photo of the wreck she looks quite small because we can only see her upper deck. She was 56 metres (183 feet) long and 11 metres (36 feet) wide.

In the wee hours of Saturday the 30th of May 1942 a Japanese Navy plane flew a reconnaissance flight over Sydney Harbour. It spotted two big cruisers (warships) in the Harbour, the USS Chicago and the HMAS Canberra. The plane was mistaken for American by the navy.

There were five Japanese submarines off the coast of Sydney. Three of them (the I-22, I-24 & I-27) carried Ko-hyoteki class midget submarines. At sunset on the 31st the three nameless midget subs (M-22, M-24 & M-27) left their mother submarines and headed into Sydney Harbour.


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The midget subs were 23.9 m (78.5 ft) long, 1.8 m (6 ft) wide and 3 m (10.2 ft) high. I poked my head into this one at the Garden Island museum and it's tiny in there, really tiny. Each sub had two guys in it and it must've been hell in there, stinking and hot and noisy as hell. These guys knew they were going to die. It was a suicide mission. These little subs didn't have enough power to do the job then get back to their mother ships.

M-27 ran into the Harbour's anti-torpedo net and was trapped there. It was spotted by a Harbour watchman and depth charges were dropped from the HMAS Lolita. They missed and its crew self-destructed the sub after more than two hours trapped in the net. They died instantly. The bang shook stuff off shelves in houses onshore and people rushed out into the streets.

By this time Pearl Harbor had already happened (December 1941) and fear of a similar attack can't have been far from their minds. Civilians and forces personnel alike must've filled their pants as soon as they realised the Harbour was under attack.

The second sub was spotted near Garden Island and fired upon by the HMAS Geelong and the USS Chicago. A few of the Chicago's shells knocked bits off Fort Denison and the bits landed in Mosman and Cremorne. The sub got off a couple of torpedoes. One ran ashore on Garden Island but didn't go off. The other one shot under the Dutch submarine K-IX, exploded underwater against Garden Island and the impact sunk the, Kuttabul and damaged the K-IX. Twenty one sailors on the, Kuttabul died.

The third sub into the Harbour was spotted and seriously damaged by depth charges. Down there in the dark its crew committed suicide with a handgun rather than be captured alive.

Four bodies were recovered from the midget subs and their ashes returned to Japan. Twenty five people died altogether and no warships were sunk.

In alphabetical order:

John Samuel Asher, Kuttabul
Mamoru Ashibi, M-24
Katsuhisa Ben, M-24
Leslie William Bland, Kuttabul
William Richard Boundy, Kuttabul
Sydney William Butcher, Kuttabul
Kenshi Chuman, M-27
Leslie Joseph Dennison, Kuttabul
Arthur William Francis, Kuttabul
John Edward Gannon, Kuttabul
Jack Albert Gardener, Kuttabul
Frederick Arthur Glanford, Kuttabul
Walter George Gordon, Kuttabul
Leonard Walter Howroyd, Kuttabul
Lester Richard Jamieson, Kuttabul
Kenneth Francis Killeen, Kuttabul
Frank Kirby ((British) Royal Navy), Kuttabul
Takeshi Mamoru, M-27
Keiu Matsuo, M-22
Jack Edmund Numan, Kuttabul
Norman Leslie Robson, Kuttabul
Arthur James Smith, Kuttabul
Herbert Arthur Smith, Kuttabul
David Black Trist ((British) Royal Navy), Kuttabul
Masao Tsuzukuc, M-22
Raymond Owen Venning, Kuttabul
Thomas Jospeh Watson, Kuttabul

Australia's war 1939 - 1945 - photos
Australia honours gallantry of Kuttabul: Survivors, memorials and stories of old mark 60th anniversary - first hand accounts of the attack
HMAS Kuttabul Memorial - Garden Island - includes a photo of the, Kuttabul in her glory days as a harbour ferry

No milk today

It put me in a terrible mood. I'm a grouch in the mornings. No-one gets between me and my breakfast and lives to tell the tale. This morning I was worse than usual. The milk was off and I had to have black tea. It was hideous.



Got this photo yesterday on The Esplanade. No walkies today. Not a proper walk anyways. No time. Spent the morning trotting hither and thither at the behest of various doctors. Useless buggers.

On the way home I was rendered even more irritable. St John's have demolished the buildings below.


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These two.


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These two.


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And this one. My favourite.

Bastards! Not only was the one above one of my favourite buildings on the Peninsula but also I hadn't finished photographing them either. I knew they were going to do some developing of their land on that corner but I thought it was that strange and unattractive brick building on the other side of the road that would be getting the chop.

The Esplanade

(Random walkies)

Fucking hell. The one day you don't back up your post as you work is the day you get a fucking crash. Don't go to sex-pistols.net. It fucking crashed me. Which is pretty appropriate for a Pistols site come to think of it.

Was going to get back to my every-street walkies this morning. But then I thought Stuff it and went to the beach instead. The Esplanade is a road running along the beach from Umina to Ettalong. I started at the Ocean Beach SLSC (Surf Life Savers Club) at Umina and walked round to the pie shop at Ettalong. Nice day for it. Warm but not hot, very faint breeze, front of grey cloud coming in from the south-east but clear over the Coast while I walked.


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The entrance to Broken Bay. Box Head on the left, Barrenjoey on the right with the lighthouse.


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They've trimmed those whatchamacallit trees since I was here last I think. The house looked quite gloomy before. I'm not loving the seventies fence but regular readers know I hate all that is seventies. Except some of the music. The Pistols of course and the Master's Apprentices.


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The extension at the back's pretty much dobled the size of the house.


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Right across the road from the beach. No prizes for guessing surfies live here.


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Corner of Barrenjoey Road. Fifties with maybe sixties windows. Or it could've been the whole thing was built in the sixties with a flat roof. Hard to say. Whatever era it is, that roof'd be a good spot for a fag and a cuppa tea on a sunny winter morning.


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Last chance to see by the look of it. For sale and that chimney has a dangerous lean so I'm thinking it'll go under the dozer.


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Won't have much trouble filling these holiday rentals. Dunno about the name though. Santorini's a volcanic island in the Aegean Sea. I can see the whole Greek island influence thing but you wouldn't say 'safe as houses' on Santorini.


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I like Box Head. Very restful to look at. Took another angle on it last year.


(Big version)

From the seats opposite Half Tide Rocks. The large white building on the left is The Excrescence. To its left, on the edge of the photo, is the tea tree grove.

Sat there for a bit listening to the waves quietly lapping on the sand. The Palm Beach ferry swung in close to the Ettalong side as it came round the green buoys between Half Tide Rocks and Ettalong. It disappeared round the corner into Hardys Bay and was there so long I thought it'd run aground. I could see the passengers waiting on the wharf over at Ferry Road in Ettalong and eventually it nosed its way across to them.

I was ravenous by then and went off for a pie. Some bloke near the memorial barbie tried to crack onto me but he'd just tried to crack onto a dog so I wasn't terribly flattered.

Alive

Might've been on the news overseas. Two Tasmanian miners have just been found alive after 5 days trapped a kilometre down by a rock fall. Lucky bastards. We were expecting to see their bodies brought up under tarps. Good to hear they survived.