Green Square 2017

Green Square was just a station on the Airport Line for quite a while. But there was a plan for a magnificent new suburb with 40,000 people.

I heard that things were happening there now, so did a quick tour of inspection. There's lots more to come, but some interesting things have appeared, and a town centre is indeed taking shape, right alongside that railway station.

One's the Infinity building, said to be described by some as a doughnut, a rollercoaster, or an armchair.


And there's the public library, mostly underground, and very avant garde. I spent a while searching for the free magazines to read, before finding them upstairs, in the cafe. Which is quite logical really.


I'll head back in a year or so for another progress report.

Pulpit Rock the long way

The legendary Thursday Survey bushwalkers were out in force again recently. We were surveying a new (for most of us) route in the Mount Victoria area of the Blue Mountains.

We started along the historic Berghofers Pass track on the Mount York Road, and spent the next seven hours traversing various terrains to work our way round and back to Mount Vic, with Pulpit Rock as the official destination.

At the appropriate point we crossed the highway and headed up the safety ramp and on to Mount Victoria proper (the mountain, that is).

Looking back down on the highway we just crossed.

Terrific views and easy off-track walking, heading generally southward along the ridges. 

One of which was a fairly narrow (almost but not quite 'knife edge') ridge.

Eventually it's down onto the scenic hobby farm area around Blackheath Creek. Then along the road for a while, and into the bush and up the Little Zig Zag Track, heading north again.













And on to pulpit rock. A great day out!

Image credit: Freda Moxom

Crossing the bridge on renewables

Otherwise known as 'Let's vote out Gladys and her troglodyte government'. It's State Election time this Saturday, and as your fearless correspondent is a staunch supporter of renewable energy and a member of Solar Citizens, he was happy to participate in a fun little piece of electioneering on the Nepean River at Penrith the other day. See here: Crossing the bridge on renewables

The great ice cream riot

The  schoolkids' climate strike was over. They'd rallied at Town Hall, marched to Hyde Park. Every one of them had behaved impeccably. Now they were dispersing. Some spotted the ice cream van parked there in Elizabeth Street. The vendor turned out to be onside with the students and their cause, and was giving away free ice cream!  Even so, it was all orderly and well-behaved.

And there was the Riot Squad parked over the road. (Just in case!)

Schools out! Reinforcements at last for the class of '69!

Yesterday the schoolkids went on strike for action on climate change. The Sydney rally was one of hundreds of such events around the world.

I've covered many political protests at Town Hall, but this was the biggest yet. Even the normally antagonistic Australian newspaper estimated the crowd at 20,000.

And it was so good to see it. It's wonderful that at last, after all these decades, a generation of caring youthful activists is at last emerging to rival that of 50 years ago!

There was the predictable criticism from the usual quarters. Children should be at school, 'learning stuff'! Well, they learnt lots here, and in fact taught their elders a lot too. The words on their placards said it all.

There were a fair few parents and other oldies in the crowd too of course. Some of the seasoned ones had signs like "Class of '87", and "Class of '69". Come to think of it, I was in the class of '69. I might be able to think about retiring at last.




Keep it up kids!

NSW's railway museum

After our walk at Thirlmere Lakes the other day, we went to check out the region's other big attraction: the NSW Railway Museum.

It's a very fine railway museum indeed. A big, comfortable modern facility. Packed with historic engines and carriages, and lots of informative and entertaining bits and pieces. Among the special carriages are a mail sorting one, the State Governor's, the Governor General's, and a prison transport carriage.

Some mighty powerful solid locomotives too.











And then there's the steam train ride. Who can resist a steam train ride? The bushwalkers couldn't!











It's all done by friendly volunteers of course. "We just love steam trains", they told us.

The trip lasts an hour or so, and takes you out to Buxton. There the main attraction is watching the crew unhook the engine and bring it round to the other end for the return journey.

Thirlmere - where has all the water gone?

'Thirlmere Lakes National Park, with its five freshwater lakes, is ....... perfect for enjoying picnics and barbecues, walking, birdwatching, or canoeing.'

So says the National Parks and Wildlife Service  about this once watery playground 70km south west of Sydney.

All five of the lakes used to be real lakes, where you could in fact do canoeing and other water sports. Now there isn't much water to be seen, and some of the lakes are bone dry. Above are my bushwalking colleagues the other day, probably saying "where are those lakes?!"

Seems like it's hard to find anything definitive, but it certainly looks like it's the nearby Tahmoor Colliery that's to blame for the missing water. It presumably went down the cracks they created.

Here the bushwalkers have found one of the slightly watery ones.

Mostly they're just sand, reeds, and mud though, like the one below. It's actually still a nice place to go for a bushwalk.

What lies beneath?

I've got a little corner of the back yard that serves as a vegetable patch. I get a regular harvest of tasty fare: beetroot, carrots, spinach, tomatoes. It's all labelled and in nice neat rows. I like to know what's what.

A couple of years ago the brush turkeys moved in, and it all changed. See here my post from November 2017, about my naive policing attempts: Gardener vs turkeys

This year my neat rows got utterly rearranged again. I distinctly remember planting beetroot, potatoes, and several others, all so tidily. What came up though was a massive tangled mess of greenery, with no sign of most of those things.

What lay beneath? Quite a lot, it turned out. It seems the turkeys aren't that interested in pumpkins, capsicums, squashes, and marrows, and there they all were in all their glory. In all shades of greens and yellows, and all shapes and sizes.

Bodalla: cheese and hippies

A bit to the south of Tuross Head, on the way to Narooma, you pass through Bodalla. It's best known for dairy farming and cheese making. It also does a good line in hippy nostalgia.










We went looking for Eurobodalla too. The sign pointed us 9km up a side road. What's there, we wondered. And what's the 'Euro' all about. Turned out there was nothing much there. It's just the name of the whole rural district (and the shire council). And 'Eurobodalla' means 'Land of many waters' in the local Brinja Yuin dialect.

Tuross Head

The New South Wales coastline is dotted with terrific and scenic little getaway holiday destinations. It would take a lifetime of explorations to both the north and south of Sydney to experience them all. And many of the finest spots are a few kilometres off the highway, so you can easily miss them if you haven't done the prior research.







We just spent a few days at Tuross Head, which is one such jewel. It's just off the Princes Highway between Moruya and Narooma, on the South Coast, and it's 330km south of Sydney.