A Vivid and vivacious Opera House

Gymea: Looking for lilies

 I went to Gymea looking for Gymea Lilies. That's Doryanthes excelsa, the rather spectacular Sydney area flower that the southern Sydney suburb takes its name after. 'Gymea Lily' is said to be an approximation of the Eora word for the plant.

It's a big red flower on a spike up to 6m high, and the spear shaped leaves are about 1m long. It's indeed quite a plant.

 So where were they all? I emerged from the station to find a very busy street full of interesting shops, inviting cafes, and a supplements megastore. The supplements had obviously worked wonders on the big black four wheel drives parked outside, They were positively bulging with......something.

I walked the nearby streets for a while, expecting to find enormous lilies in every garden. No such luck. Maybe it's the wrong time of the year? I figured I'd recognise them anyway, flowering or not, and they weren't there. Get your act together, Gymea.

Then, back at the station, about to board my train home, I spotted it. Possibly the only one in the whole suburb. Coyly hiding away its full charms, it was impressive nonetheless.

For more pictures of the thing in full flight, take a look at https://www.google.com.au/search?q=gymea+lily+images&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&channel=sb&gfe_rd=cr&ei=Cb6BU_qDAsjC8gebuoHwDQ

For one that looks awfully like my Gymea station example, take a look at the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doryanthes_excelsa 

The Riverboat Postman

Here's Dangar Island's daily postal delivery, being wheeled onto the island in a wheelbarrow!

There are several little communities in and beside the Hawkesbury River, that depend on this waterborne service, both for the mail and for transport, for those without their own boat at least.

You can watch it unfold around you if you go on the daily cruise that's grown up around it. On a day like the other day it's a very pleasant experience.

I'd been half planning to do the trip for a long time, and jumped at the chance when a friend organised a small group recently. It's only $50 ($44 for seniors) and leaves Brooklyn every weekday morning at 10am sharp. You get morning tea (with the owner's homemade Anzac biscuits) and a nice cheese and ham salad lunch. And the scenery is great.

For some reason I'd expected to head downstream and cross to Pittwater and The Basin. Maybe this used to be the route, or maybe there's another Postman Cruise. Anyway, after Dangar Island we turned left and headed upstream. We passed Long Island, went under the railway bridge and the highway and motorway bridges. We turned right, left, and right again, passed Milson Island and Berowra Creek, Bar Island and Bar Point. We called in on Kangaroo Point and several places I've forgotten the names of. I'd had no idea there were so many little populated pockets.

Other sights included wildlife such as various birds of prey and enormous magnificent jellyfish, flying boats coming in and out of the water, and the HMAS Parramatta, or at least part of it. The Parramatta was Australia's first warship, and after a meritorious military career it came home and was chopped into bits. The bow and stern were put on display in Sydney and in Parramatta, but the middle bit continued to be used (for prison accommodation would you believe), until it ran aground one day. It now grows trees through its hull, and looks rather sad.

We got back to Brooklyn on time at 1:15 pm. Not a bad way to spend a few hours.

Barangaroo brawling

One of the biggest building sites in the country right now is Barangaroo. Construction has recently slowed right down, thanks to a massive basement fire and contamination by asbestos and suchlike. But here's how it's expected to look when it's finished. Most of the left half of the model to the right is Barangaroo. I was shown the model, and a video explanation, by a very personable and helpful PR fellow at the site, who pounced on me when he saw my camera and my curiosity.

Barangaroo is going to be the redeveloped Sydney dockland area. As sometimes happens with these things, there was a competition to find the best design, and the winning one was a finely crafted, much admired mix of commercial buildings, public facilities and public open space. As also often happens, things subsequently changed rather, and the original architects were left wringing their hands in dismay. the buildings proposed got bigger and bigger, and a totally unexpected and unwanted-by-almost-everyone enormous 6-star casino-hotel got plonked in there too. Sometimes it's in the water and sometimes just out of it. One way and another, the commercial floor space has more than doubled since the plans were approved, and the public space has been shrinking rapidly. The process is what's been dubbed 'concession creep', and it's all such a very Sydney story.

The man behind the casino is one James Packer, the second or third richest person in Australia. In a democracy we'd decide whether we needed a second casino or not. If so, and if it fitted into the master plan, we'd advertise the fact, and we'd put the project out to tender. None of this happened of course. Things don't work like that in Australia. As it happens, James has been in the news quite a lot lately. He's had a bit of a rough patch in his private life. Then last week he got into a rather public street fight with an old friend. Media organisations dubbed him the "Bondi Brawler", and there have even been unkind calls to reconsider his gaming licence. For instance here: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/smh-letters/reconsider-bondi-brawlers-gaming-licence-20140506-zr5k6.html    The Northern Territory News, always outdoing itself for attention grabbing headlines, produced one about a Packer-Up-My-Clacker. See this and other coverage here, courtesy thenewdaily.com.au:  http://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2014/05/06/media-cover-packergyngell-clash/

Back to my tour, I also took a look at the work going on in the northern part of the area. A new, artificial headland park is being built. It's meant to pretty well recreate the form of the headland as it was before European settlement. It was the brainchild of former prime minister Paul Keating, and though it too doesn't quite conform to the original plan, I think it will be rather good, just so long as we are still able to get to it with all the offices and casinos blocking the walkways.

Barangaroo, by the way, was the wife of Bennelong, the local 'cross cultural envoy' in the early settlement days. She was a powerful Cammeragal figure in her own right, and opposed her husband's co-operation with the developers of the day. She exhibited displays of anger and was deliberately difficult. Maybe she's still exerting her influence in the area? Maybe there's more she can do still?

Some birds (and a beast) of the Mid North Coast

Pelicans fight over fish guts

Immature White-bellied sea eagle







 I think this is an Osprey





A dolphin in full flight

More Mid North Coast beaches!