Caddies Creek - the dark side!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A shopping trolley in the creek, and a tastefully decorated toilet cubicle. It is Western Sydney after all. There's only so far upmarket a suburb can go.

Coming soon: a suburb near you

 

There are lots of enormous suburbs taking shape in western Sydney, where used to be scenic farmland. Easy to lose track. This one's called 'The Gables', and it's one of lots of them in the Box Hill area.

Much of it is on the site of a lake or swamp, which seems to have been drained. Looks like it could be a nice enough place one day. Lots of parks and things taking shape. 

 

 

It'll be hot in summer of course, and there might be flood warnings to think about now and again.

Queen St, St Marys

Not so rooty hill

The western Sydney suburb of Rooty Hill does indeed have a hill called Rooty Hill. I climbed it for the first time today. It's only 74m above sea level though. Not a really challenging hill.

And it's  not very rooty. In fact if we had to name it today, we'd probably call it Bald Hill.

But it's got great views all around. Here's the view to the Blue Mountains, specifically to Mt Hay and Mt Banks, the most identifiable peaks from all over Sydney.

You can just see Rooty's other famous landmark: the Rooty RSL. Or at least, its 'Western Sydney Performing Arts Centre', a $100 million theatre built mostly with the profits from the RSL's poker machines. They say it's a community arts centre, but you'll have to walk through the club, and past all those gambling machines, to get into or out of it!

Sydney's Great West Walk - the surveying

The Great West Walk is a recently inaugurated track across Western Sydney, linking Parramatta and Penrith. It joins various parks, creekside tracks and bushland reserves, though there's plenty of street walking involved too.

It's 65km long, and I decided to explore it and put it onto my bushwalking club's programme. I divided it into four stages, each around 14 to 20km long:

1. Parramatta station to Seven Hills station
2. Seven Hills station to Rooty Hill station
3. Rooty Hill station to Ropes Crossing shopping centre
4. Ropes Crossing shopping centre to Penrith station

During stage 2, you get to see the northern bit of the Western Sydney Parklands.


My surveying trips were mostly done last month. It was very dry, rather hot, and bushfire smoke was in the air. I felt a bit unsafe in some of the parkland areas. I made a point of being aware always of which way to run, should a fire break out nearby. And the fact that I was usually the only one out and about, and I was alone in abandoned shopping trolley central, didn't exactly help. I came through unscathed though! 

One of many bright spots:  Rooty Hill station, with one of the finest rows of Crepe Myrtle trees (aka Pride of India).

Here's Whalan Reserve, home to a majestic collection of  high voltage transmission towers. Thought there might be a few dog walkers, joggers, cyclists etc. But no. They don't seem to do much of that round here.

Ropes Crossing was a pleasant surprise. Ponds and creek, tasteful housing, and a rather nice little shopping strip.

Then there's Wianamatta Regional Park. This used to be an Australian Defence Industries site. It's largely unspoilt Cumberland Plain bushland, and a nice place to be walking through. But here too, I was absolutely the only person there. A bit spooky.

To the west of Wianamatta is another brand new suburb: Jordan Springs. Again, quite promising, with creeks and ponds, and a central lake.

Eventually I hit the Nepean River at Penrith, and was welcomed by friendly fairy wrens and historic bridges.

Nurragingy

It's 15 years or so since I last visited the Nurragingy Reserve. At that time it was probably in its infancy as a local attraction, and my memories were of a patch of scrubby bush with a few picnic tables and an uninviting bush track or two. Plus a couple of blacksmith's huts, I remember.

Since then it was in the news because of a prominent 2010 murder case - a young child was murdered and her body was dumped here. Not something to enhance one's image of a beauty spot.

Well it's actually come on quite a lot, as we discovered the other day. It's now very inviting indeed, with lots of appealing facilities. The blacksmith's huts are still there, and there are now lots of lawns, picnic areas, specialist gardens, a good value for money kiosk, playgrounds, cycle paths and water features.

We didn't have time to do justice to the place. Just enough time to have a quick lunch and a brief sojourn into the Chinese Garden, but we plan to return soon to explore it all a bit further.

Nurragingy Reserve is in Doonside in Western Sydney, and is managed by Blacktown City Council.

Attack of the killer magpies!

Every year about this time the lovely, friendly Australian magpie - the ones with the heavenly lilting song, the very essence of Australian suburbia - undergo a terrifying transformation. They all get together for a motivational session where they watch Alfred Hitchcock's training video. Then they get out there and wage war on us.

A couple of years ago one of my cycling companions was knocked unconscious by one of them. She initially had no idea what caused her to be on the ground beside her bike with an ambulance crew in attendance, but later remembered the dreaded black-and-white feathery presence that had nearly caused her demise.

This year it's the turn of another of my fellow bikers. Bob reported being swooped by about eight separate birds within a couple of hours the other day, with one of them taking a piece out of his ear. So I joined him on a mission to track down the offenders, get the photographic evidence, and expose their heinous crimes publicly. We retraced his route along the Western Sydney bike paths, with me following him at a safe distance, my camera ready.

This time we encountered four of the warrior birds, defending their separate territories. All of them swooped him without warning, one giving him a thump as it passed. In two cases the bird went back for several more goes, resting momentarily on branches or power lines between attacks. Needless to say I was never quite ready enough with the camera for the impact shots, but you can get the idea from this series of pics.

We noticed that the attacks all came on his first run past the bird. When he came back for the staged re-enactment photo shoot, the bird would hold off, just watching moodily from a distance. I think that by turning round and coming back, Bob had won the battle and shown he was top bird. And the thing had noticed Bob had a friend with a gun (camera actually).

It's said that magpies identify particular humans, dividing them into friends and enemies on some unknown basis. They have very long memories too, and once you're down as an enemy, you're marked for life.