Between the flags

(Random walkies)

Yesterday there were 5 metre (16 foot) waves off Sydney. Courtesy of the tail end of Cyclone Hubert. Surfers dribbled (drooled) and flocked and some silly bugger who went fishing on a ledge is missing.


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The surf's calmed down but swimming between the flags wouldn't be easy today. Normally they're as much as a kilometre (1,093.61 yards) apart but not today. Just out of frame on the right is the Life Savers ute (utility vehicle), kayaks and natty jetski thingy with attached stretcher.

The waves are back to their usual height after yesterday's big swells. All but four beaches on the whole NSW coast were closed due to the waves. Leftover weather from the 5th cyclone of the season.

That's Little Box Head, Box Head and the Tasman Sea in the background.


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Surf Rescue vehicle and Life Savers flags in front of Umina SLSC (Surf Life Saving Club). Barrenjoey lighthouse visible again today in the background. Behind Lion Island and Barrenjoey Head you can see the northern beaches of Sydney and Pittwater.


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Natty jetski thingy with attached stretcher. There's a rescue kayak behind it and, out of frame on the right, a rescue ute. Out in front of Umina SLSC.


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After the beach I went walkies and did the other half of Ocean Beach Road. Fifties house on Ocean Beach Road sinking into a see of green. The twigs on the roof are probably from that nice wind a couple of days back.

That's an oleander bush in the right foreground. Very popular in the fifties and there's still plenty of them about. California Polytechnic offers the comforting news that oleander usually only kills children and the elderly.

Off the coast of Fremantle in Western Australia there's a small island known to the locals as Rotto. Oleanders are feral there as well as in half of Australia. Camping is popular there and I remember several summers when there were child deaths on Rotto from oleander. Almost always it was some dad who'd let his kid stir the hot chocolate with an oleander twig. It's not far from Rotto to the mainland but oleander is quick and by the time the dad has run screaming out of the bush the kid's fucked, dead as a bloody doornail.


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Another partly obscured fifties house on Ocean Beach Road. Love the colour and it's in its orginal fibro.

Nice day for a walk again today. Got warm but I did walk three quarters of the longest street on the Peninsula. Lovely and sunny on my way back and a nice breeze. Autumn's great for walkies.

400 miles

Steve (Fat Man Walking) has been on the telly and in the papers up there in America. He's walking from southern California to New York and now has less than 400 miles (321.87 kays) to go.

A snippet from his blog for 04 05 06:

Monday morning, Australians for breakfast! There is a news magazine in Australia called 60 minutes ... They wanted to interview me and a couple of other guys who were inspired by me to do their own walk or bike ride across the country.

60 Minutes is on here tonight (7.30, channel 9). I'll be watching and cheering for you, Steve. By the way, mate, you sound much chirpier despite the stress fractures. Keep plodding. The end is in sight.

Might go out for a plod of my own this afternoon. Stayed home yesterday. Been feeling a bit fluey and the autumn sun will do me good.

Paton Street

(Random holiday walkies)

This afternoon's walk makes a walk every day this week. What a change from a few weeks back when it was too bloody hot to do anything but sit around in yer undies whinging about the heat. This week it's been nice and nippy in the mornings then warm sunny afternoons like last autumn. We had one day of 33 (91.4 F) but even then it was a reasonable morning.


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Wandered off up to the railway line today. Mostly pre-war houses along there but I found a couple of fifties there and in Paton Street. This one's in Railway Street near Rawson Road where the level crossing is. The windows look like sixties replacements but the shape of the house hasn't been obscured much and the colours are not bad.


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Railway Street again, not far from the one above. This one's still got its fibro on but has the same sort of sixties-looking windows and some seventies fiddling on the veranda.

Found one fifties place in Paton Street but it was almost entirely obscured by trees and cars. The cars were parked two blocks back along Paton Street. Might be from the blokes working on the shopping centre. They're putting in ceilings and air-conditioning and shit like that.

No idea if Paton Street is named after the American General Paton. But the Drainage Levy introduced in 1991 ($42 per property) paid for some tinkering with drains around Brisbane Water for the purposes of flood mitigation.

The local council's Proposal For Water, Wastewater and Stormwater Prices For Period 2006/2007 and 2008/2009. It also had this to say:

To meet the community’s needs by providing a high quality water supply
complying with recognised drinking water standards ... To transport and treat sewage for disposal by effectively planning and developing works and operating and maintaining existing installations to provide services fit for customers’ purpose ...

I told you they're going to make us drink our own wee.

Paperbark Forest

(Random walkies, holidaying from every-street walkies)

Woke up to the sound of the wind at dawn. Small branches were breaking off the gums and clattering down on the roof. The Dear Old Things will be livid. As much as they hate leaves for falling they hate branches even more. They take them falling as some sort of personal insult. Still, the rage gets their blood pumping long enough for them to totter outside brandishing a rake and the raking gives them a cardio-vacular workout any heart specialist would approve of.


(No embiggulated version, this is my 4x zoom at max.)

The wind came and went as I walked. The trees tossed and bowed and leaves fell like flurries of snow. As I walked beside the Paperbark Forest the trees fell silent and I noticed a kookburra sitting on a branch. It's unusual to see kookaburras so close up. I was maybe fifteen feet away. This guy just sat there looking at me then looking away. Usually they fly off as soon as you point the camera at them.


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That's a paperbark tree in the foreground. Melalucas leucadendron (long-leaved) or Melalucas ericifolia (swamp) probably.


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One of the quietly pleasant views as you walk along beside the Paperbark Forest. Jacaranda from someone's back garden on the left, paperbark and other eucalypts and lantana on the right in the tiny sliver of bush I call the Paperbark Forest. Jacaranda and lantana are not Australian native species.


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The top sign carries all the usual prohibitions against flying your dog or walking your model aeroplane in the reserve. The middle sign reads "Gosford City Council / Bushcare / Bush regeneration in progress". The bottom sign reads: "Spraying of weeds has been carried out in this area by Gosford City Council using the herbicide Weedmaster Duo [?] on Date 27-3-06 in accordance with EPA Licence No 007643".


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Fifties house in Dorothy Avenue. Not bad. Still has its fibro exterior and white paint.

There's not a lot of fifties houses in the Paperbark Forest area. It's mostly forties and seventies with a few 1900s for good measure.


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A fairly boring fifties house. Might look better from the other side but the view was obscured by a tangle of cars. It'd look much more exciting and closer to the original if that closed in veranda (right) was ripped off and replaced with an upwards tilting fifties veranda. Dorothy Avenue again.

On my way home the wind was gusting harder again. It was making that nice menacing noise along the powerlines. They used the same wind sound in Twister when the tornado's just about to show up. I think they beefed it up digitally though.

Wind porn is not too hard to get. Pretty much any movie set on the moors in England or a coast somewhere will have good wind sound. Ditto any movie filmed in bits of America like Oklahoma and Nebraska as long as the movie's not Annie Git Yer Gun or whatever that unbearably cheerful Doris Day movie was called. Look for something excluding bonhomie and including menace and there's yer wind porn.

Bustling Downtown Woy Woy

(Random walkies, holidaying from every-street walkies)

Another sunny autumn day in Woy Woy. Took a stroll in to the bakery and snapped some photos while I was there. Not many people about on a Wednesday morning so I got a few clear shots.


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Woy Woy Library. Built 1931 as the Woy Woy Council Chambers. Not sure when it was turned into the library but I expect it was after Woy Woy was incorporated into the Gosford City Council. As you go inside look to your right to see the old Council Chambers etched (?) glass doors.

There's three buildings altogether, all in the same materials and colours, built 1931 (library), 1933 (garage & storeroom originally, then branch office of Gosford Council, now part of the library extension) and 1935 (old fire station). Photo taken from between Checka's bakery and the chemist where the Pizza Hut used to be.


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Side view of the library with the old fire station visible to the right of the right hand palm and Woolies beyond that. The Fire Station was built in 1935 and matches the Library and the 1933 garage and storeroom out of frame to the left.


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Pelican Island & the Woy Woy Baths. Barely a minute's walk from the library and the station. The baths are one of those old enclosed areas in the water with a net stopping the fish and most of the seaweed coming in. It's right next to the fish and chips and still popular with the sprogs.

The station is 50 yards behind the camera and a bit to the right. The ferry wharf is halfway between the station and the camera. The mangroves on the left are Pelican Island.


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Dawn services are held here on Anzac Day (25th of April). On the memorial are the names of the wars and the battles. On the low walls around the park are the names of the dead with their ranks and enlistment numbers. Last year's notebook says the memorial is marked "AD 1925" and addressed "to our boys" from "the citizens of Woy Woy". There's half a dozen memorials all up in the park. The park is right next to the baths. The mangroves on the left are Pelican Island.


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Memorial Park Woy Woy. The road in the background is Brick Wharf Road, the main part of my final walk of Woy Woy's streets and prime Woyan real estate.

Woy Woy gets a fair amount of tourists. It's not like it's hard to get to here from Sydney. You just get on the train at Central and the train does the rest. The fast train takes 70 or 80 minutes. Sydneysiders make up most of our tourists. They swarm up here on the weekends in summer and have fish and chips by the water and lay on the uncrowded beach and shit like that.

I lived in Sydney for a few years. It's orright. Unless you live somewhere swish with a harbour view or in a nice 19th century suburb, it's just a city. I was sharing a flat near Parramatta with a long succession of fuckheads and I needed to find a place on my own. Came up to the Coast for a weekend holiday and I was sold. Started looking for a place here about ten minutes after I got off the train.

Rawson Road jetty

Bright sunshiny autumn day today. Good day for walkies. Wandered about for a bit then found myself at the Rawson Road jetty. That's where we all went to gawk at the fires on New Year's Day.


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Private jetties, the hill the railway goes under and the end of Correa Bay on the right. I prefer its old name: Deadmans Bay.


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Horsfield Bay. Behind the lights you can see some of the damage from the New Year's Day fires. This is one of the jetties where the evacuees came in their boats.


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Phegans Bay. Can't see much fire damage from this angle. Most of it was up in Horsfield and Correa Bays anyways.


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Looking along Woy Woy Inlet, Gurdon Park on the ridge on the left, Woy Woy laying low across the middle to the right, Saratoga is the small hill in the middle distance and that's Green Point in the background.

The weird clouds're probably caused by the tail end of former cyclone Glenda. Glenda crossed the Western Australian coast a few days ago. No lives lost but a couple of tourists got a bit damp.


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Someone's dingy parked at the jetty.


(Taken November 2005, big version)

The local rag says this nice old boatshed at Phegans Bay is on its last legs, Stebbing Lane is now called Stebbing Lane and Pearl Beach has updated its website. Balls. No update can be called an update when it doesn't get rid of those fugly frames. There's some pretty pictures though.

Ocean Beach Road

(Holiday walkies)

Today's walk was brought to your by the letter Holiday. I'm having a couple of weeks off from the every-street walkies. When I get back to the every-street walkies I'll be bussing it back up to Gosford and right now I can't be fucked bussing it up to Gosford. So it's random walkies in search of fifties houses and other stuff and today's random walk was down Ocean Beach Road, one of the main roads of the Peninsula.


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Most of this shop is seventies but the front looks quite fifties with its row of small windows across the top of the main window and the air vents on the side wall. The shop is next to one of the two petrol stations on the corner of Rawson Road. Cinema Paradiso is the Peninsula's only cinema. It's ten minutes away down near the beach at Ettalong.


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The rainbow lorikeets have eaten all the lemon gum flowers and stopped waking me up at sparrow's fart. But there's still bottlebrush street trees for them to eat.


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On the corner of Erina Avenue, next to Rogers Park. A lovely place, well-maintained (except for a gutter you can't see here) and the big windows suit it well. They look big enough to be sixties windows but the more I look at them the less I'm sure. Maybe the original owners just bucked the fifties trend.


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Same house, different angle. This is my favourite fifties house on the Peninsula.


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Not a very exciting example. Neat and tidy but with cladding over its original fibro and fugly seventies windows.


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Another scarcely-decorated house. Fairly well-maintained but small.


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Neat and tidy. The stunted pencil pines or whatever are rather heavy and forties-looking but it's still got its fifties fibro and those fugly windows look like they've been fitted into the original window frames.


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Still with its window awnings and with an extension out the back doubling its original size.


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It's hard to see the slope on the roof here but that, the depth of the eaves and the shape of the front of the house say fifties to me, despite the seventies brick-over. This one is in Umina, just past Gallipoli Avenue, the boundary road between Woy Woy and Umina.


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Second or third fifties place I've seen in these colours.Maybe they are fifties colours after all. I thought they were too strong. This place is opposite Bourke Road and the end of today's walk. On the ridge in the background you can see damage from the New Year's Day fires.

Beautiful weather all weekend and today. Nice nippy mornings and sunny afternoons. Proper autumn weather. At bloody last. I'm revelling in it. Got the ugg boots out and a fat quilt on the bed.

End of the lane

(Woy Woy walks #89 & 90)

That's right, peeps. I finished the lanes of Woy Woy. I've now walked every road and lane of the Peninsula. I now know it a lot better than when I finished the streets last September. I had two walks left to finish up, one long one medium length. I wanted to finish before April (tomorrow) so I walked the long walk this morning and the medium one this morning. My feet ache and I got pretty warm but I finished.

Walk #89 - this morning

To get to Patonga and Pearl Beach from West Street you go down Sydney and Hobart Avenues then along Mt Ettalong Road and over Mount Ettalong.

Tucked away between Hobart Avenue and Mt Ettalong is the tail end of Umina. At the Calypta Road end it's mostly forties and a few fifties houses, then it moves into the seventies (ugh) then up around Cowper Road it's nineties and noughties.


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Albany Square sounds like some Georgian close or the place where the BBC films Eastenders.

Albany Square in Umina is three or four 1940s houses beside a small creek smack bang in the middle of suburban Woy Woy. Past the wee white posts there's a footbridge over the creek and behind the camera is a standard suburban street, albeit full of cackling kookaburras.


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This house in Burdett Place is only in the picture to show how close the New Year's Day fires got to this part of Umina.

The biggest version shows the regrowth sprouting directly from the trunk on the big tree behind the house. Pretty standard stuff for gums. They're tough as old boots.


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Ettymalong Billabong and Wetland, on Etta Road Umina at the corner with Mt Ettalong Road. Another small reserve in suburban Woy Woy. Billabong means waterhole or deep hole in a creek. This one's part of Ettalong Creek.

Behind the trees in the foreground the creek's full of bamboo and lantana. Both imported plants making a nuisance of themselves in the Australian bush. The local bushcare crowd meet just across Mt Ettalong Road and they're the crowd you see in there on the weekends in their gardening gloves ripping out the lantana by the roots and hoeing out the bamboo.


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I'd forgotten how many fifties houses there are in this part of Umina. It's the part behind the caravan park, off Mt Ettalong Road and before the road goes up Mount Ettalong.

This one's a little worse for wear but still has its original fibro. The rusty stains are from bore water. The "No through road" sign points in the direction of Albany Square. The street sign says "Elanora Road".


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Looking scruffy but there's nothing there a lick of paint and the ripping off of that cladding couldn't fix. Mt Ettalong Road.


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It's heavily overcast today and this photo's still pretty dark even after a tweaking. In the flesh, the house had a gentle glow to it. Nice cheerful colour and looked good beside the blue of the house on the right. Yarrabin Road.


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Another well-maintained house off Mt Ettalong Road. The reno windows and cladding are the standard stuff but the colours look quite smart. Also Yarrabin Road.

Walk #90 - this afternoon

Did the final walk of the Peninsula lanes after lunch. Across to the Paperbark Forest. A beautiful spot.


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The Paperbark Forest is a tiny pocket of bush between Kerrawah Boulevard and the golf course. Kerrawah Boulevard snakes alongside it but it's an out of the way road only used by the locals. You can hear a few cries of anguish and victory from the golfers but they're quite faint. Last time I was there I could see a pond through the trees but that was in winter. Couldn't see any water this time but it's only autumn.


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An escapee or a feral rabbit on the run in Kerrawah Boulevard beside the Paperbark Forest. It was nibbling on the grass beside the road and bolted when I came along.


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The spider is sheltering from the sun in the leaf. St Andrew's Cross spiders are common on the Peninsula.


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Even with the cladding and the seventies windows this place looks very fifties still. It's the palms and the colours.


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An odd little house in Dorothy Street. A likely contender for Least Decorated Exterior on the Peninsula. It looks very unfinished. It's pretty small so maybe the original owners intended to extend it when they had a bit more money and never did.


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These trees are still flowering all over the Peninsula though they're starting to look a bit tatty now. They're a big favourite with the Dear Old Things, partly because they can see them even if they've lost their glasses.

Doing the two walks today was not much of a problem. I took my time and walked slowly.

In all the walking I've done in the last year, my motivation has rarely flagged. A fair few times I've been fairly crook (sick) and I've cut walks short but only so I could recover to walk another day. On the few walks where it's been hard-going (like the Long March) I've just fallen into a daze and plodded along. Today I did a bit of that towards the end of the second walk and my feet are still aching now at 11PM. But I finished the lanes in the month I promised myself I would.

I'm looking forward to having a wee holiday and wandering pretty much at random looking for the rest of the fifties houses on the Peninsula.

Where next?

Now it's autumn and I've finished the lanes of Woy Woy, I can go back to West Gosford. Had to break off there in December due it being too hot of a morning to fuck about in buses then walk in the hot sun then back in another hot bus.

I'd hoped it'd be cooler by now than it is. Seeing it's not, I'm going to have a little holiday. Instead of going back to West Gosford on Monday I'm going to keep walking in Woy Woy for a couple of weeks. I'll wander about collecting some more fifties houses and other stuff that takes my fancy. I'll go back to
West Gosford when it's nice and nippy every morning.

Cyclone Glenda

Glenda finally crossed the coast of WA (Western Australia) yesterday. It'd been hanging about off the coast since before Larry and giving everyone the heebies. It was a category 4 when it crossed, the same strength as Tracy. No-one got killed or even hurt apparently but they're still battened down waiting for the flooding.

Not so lucky in Iran. This has got to be the third quake around there in five years. Poor bastards.

29th of March

(Scroll down for the walkies post)

Today's the first anniversary of my Gran's death. I bought some flowers for her a couple of weeks ago. Might get some more tomorrow if they're still in the shops.

Gran's influence on my life is hard to put into words. With some much upheaval and crap in my family over the years, the well-behaved members have been a bit overlooked. When I was a kid Gran and Granddad were a safe harbour in a frightening world. They didn't wail and weep and make mountains out of molehills, the very opposite in fact. They were always calm and thoughtful.

You weren't allowed to fart in front of Gran but then she didn't go ballistic if you did, not like my grandfather on the other side of the family who went right off if you walked in front of the telly while the races were on. He died when I was small but while he was alive he was very irritable and quite scary if you ventured into his shed. And Nana was a drama queen and wrung every tiny droplet of drama out of every single bloody situation, so Gran and Granddad were quite restful in comparison.

After my other grandfather died, Nana gave her histrionic tendencies free reign. She was a noisy griever, which is fair enough, but she never got any quieter and she's never been happy unless she's miserable. She was quite miserable sitting on her bum waiting for someone to entertain her so she sat on her bum waiting for someone to entertain her.

When Granddad died Gran was in a bad way. They'd not long celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary and they had a happy marriage. But a couple of months after he died Gran demanded the family typewriter and taught herself to type. When she'd exhausted the possibilities of typing she was given a computer and taught herself to use that. She wrote emails to my aunt in America and looked up recipes and amusing homilies. She printed things out and stuck them on her pinboard. She went for a walk every single day and enjoyed other people's gardens and she didn't brood over things.

When I was a kid I hardly knew my aunts and uncles and cousins. We didn't associate with them much. When I left Perth as an adult I had even less contact with them. Gran was the steady only contact I've with my family for ten years. We didn't talk much about my father and that suited me right down to the ground. I used to ring her every week or so and we'd talk about small things, lovely plants we'd seen in other people's gardens, nice outings I'd taken her and Granddad on, history docos we'd seen on the telly.

We rarely argued. She'd quizz me about my eating habits and guilt me about not getting enough veggies and exercise but she never harangued me. I'd ask her about her health and if she'd been feeling dizzy again and she'd tell me her health worries, things she couldn't say to anyone in person. I'd help her word a note to (her daughter) Jean about it so Jean would get the message but Gran didn't have to say it out loud. The notes went on the pinboard for Jean and that way Gran got to the doctor when she needed to without having to expose her fears.

She was always quiet and neat and never gossiped, a typical upper working class Scot of her generation. She had a dread of making a fuss but she knew when not to hide things. She was always rational and calm. She didn't ignore the world but she knew when to shut it out. In the last year or so she started to forget who'd been born and who'd died but she was still the rock she'd always been. All my life, whenever things have been shitty, she's always been there at the calm quiet centre of the world.

Drop your pants

(Woy Woy walk #88)

Finished off the lanes at Ettalong today. There's a big wodge of them there, from Gallipolli Avenue-Maitland Bay Drive down to Palm Street. I've got stuff-all lanes to go, polished off more than I realised in the last couple of weeks. I'll be finished by the 31st.


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Another cocky for Suzanne. Not the real thing but an accurate depiction. They spread their wings like that and stick their crests up when they're squabbling with each other. The pet shop's opposite The Excrescence.


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The sign says "DROP YOUR PANTS / A SOUL IS WASTED WHEN THERE IS NO AIM". The 'drop your pants' bit is the dry cleaner's slogan. The bottom bit is some sort of homily I s'pose. While I sat there at the bus-stop I stared at the words until they lost all meaning then floated about in my mind like some strange eroto-religious stricture. More prosaically, the seventies building on the left is the Senior Cit's (Senior Citizens) and stands on the spot where the Ettalong cinema once stood.


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Don't know if this old shop is being used for anything more than storage but the old(er) house behind it is occupied.

I'd guess it was a butcher's shop, going by the nice big window and the position next to an older shop (green roof) on a busy suburban road. This suburb was once a village in its own right and is now part of the Peninsula's suburbia. You can still see the village in these old shops and the age of the houses around them.


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Despite the cladding and the windows this one still looks fairly close to original. Because the window awnings are still there I think. The one's without their awnings lose most of the fifties look.


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Finally got this bugger without the caravan blocking it. I like the smart green and white of this one, though I'm not sure a green that dark is a fifties colour. That's Blackwall Mountain in the background, by the way.


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In a lane off Lurline Street Ettalong. I'd love to transport this magnificent beast to the front garden of a nice fifties house where it could be admired to best advantage. It has a few translucent yellow flowers (big version) not unlike waterlillies. Didn't even know they flowered.

Bit muggy today. Cloudy this morning, as you can see from the photos. A storm on the way, the weather person said. Hope it happens. It was darkish on my walk and it's sunny now but there's a big front of cumulus coming in from the north-east.