Ashfield sights (and Shanghai nights)

I lived in Ashfield for a couple of years when I first arrived in Sydney in 1998. It was well on the way to being one of Sydney's premier Chinatowns then, and I liked it a lot.

I headed back the other day to check the place over and see what's changed lately, and as the Sydney Morning Herald reported recently, it's gone further down that road, and especially down the road of a Shanghai food and culture Chinatown. There seemed to be lots of 'Shanghai', 'New Shanghai', 'Shanghai Night', and 'New Shanghai Night' restaurants, and I suspect they're all excellent. See http://www.smh.com.au/national/business-booms-as-old-ashfield-becomes-new-shanghai-20110617-1g7vg.html

There's also a monument to Mei Quong Tart, the 'Ashfield Mandarin' of more than a century ago, and there's a Chinese temple there too.

I checked out the Ashfield Mall shopping centre too, and was pleased to see it's looking up again, with a smartly renovated food court, and a new Aldi supermarket to complement the Coles and Woolworths ones there.
The new civic centre looks OK too. It's funny, but I remember going to a big rowdy mass meeting once, presented by Ashfield Council, where they told us that private developers had promised to provide us with a renovated shopping centre and council chambers, but the only way we could have them was if we agreed to let the developers build 30 storey tower blocks on top of it all. Well, guess what? No sign of any tower blocks. The Council must have called their bluff after all.

One thing hasn't changed though. There are still a lot of big, noisy airliners passing overhead on their way up after take off from Sydney Airport. The last few before the 11pm curfew tended to be the fully fuelled, heavily loaded ones heading for distant Asian destinations. They probably still are.

Ashfield's supercalifragilisticexpialidocious park

Ashfield Park has lots of nice little surprises. There's the Mary Poppins' statue for example. 

Mary's creator, P L Travers, lived rght next to the park between 1918 and 1924. This was her pen name. She had been born Helen Lyndon Goff in Maryborough, Queensland, in 1899, and attended boarding school in Ashfield during World War One, and then stuck around for a while. Later she moved to England, where she took up writing children's stories about spoonfuls of sugar and perfect nannies. It seems she tried to cover up her Australian origins. That's how it was in those days.

She was a rather cantankerous old thing by all accounts. She fought fiercely with Walt Disney about his adaptation of her book - this was the subject of the 2013 film 'Saving Mr Banks', starring Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks - and when she died, in 1996, her grandchildren allegedly said no one loved her and she loved no one.

What else do you find in Ashfield Park? 

There's the memorial to the Bangladeshi martyrs who gave rise to the celebration of International Mother Language Day - 21 February. On that day in 1952 three students were gunned down by police in Dhaka for demonstrating in favour of having their language - Bengali - accepted as one of the then Pakistan's official languages.

And there's the Explorers' Park there too. It's got plaques illustrating the travels of all the main early explorers. Native born Australians all learn about these people at school, but I had to learn it in explorers parks.

I like this park. It's one of the best.