Project Wren

Mural Painting by Thomas Jackson 2019

Sydney’s Councils are valiantly trying to save Australia's beautiful blue, tiny birds.

Sydney City Council has plantings in the Blackwattle Bay area to encourage Superb Fairy Wrens (great title for a tiny bird) and New Holland Honeyeaters (black & white markings with bright yellow touches; small but not as small as the fairy wrens). The Glebe Society, an activist group which this year turns 50, has a Blue Wren Subcommittee. The foreshore parks are full of signs about council’s intent to create habitat… but sadly I've never seen a wren nor a New Holland honeyeater there. At the exhibition in the Tramsheds in June, I learned that in spite of their efforts, alas no wrens have been spotted in the Glebe area for several years.

Waverley Council has recently pitched a program for residents (mainly in Bronte and Tamarama), to plant yards that encourage fairy wrens. The Wentworth Courier (April 24, 2019) notes that wrens live on the cliffs in public parks (you’ve probably seen them if you’ve been on the coastal cliff walk). Some wrens and New Holland honeyeaters live in Centennial Park, so the idea is to make a plant corridor where they can live in between. Waverley's website has a page re: Bushland and Wildlife/ Living Connections.

They are offering a lecture ($5) plus plant giveaway on 10 September 2019. 

I’m not quite sure if the lecture is only for residents who live inside the target area, or for anyone. Contact Waverley council if you are interested.

Inner West Council's ‘Greenway Corridor’ along Hawthorne Canal aims to help birds, but I don’t think Inner West has a specific wren targeted outreach. The Rozelle Bay Community Native (Plant) Nursery, located in Whites Creek Valley, gave out free native plants at the council ecology festival in 2018, and hopefully they will do the same this year. Here’s the date: Sunday, 25^th August 2019. 

Randwick Council conducts events about local birdlife and how to identify and encourage it. Most councils probably do – now that I’ve checked this handful of councils, I’ve been encouraged by all their stated intentions. Other information sources: websites – Birds in Backyards, and Backyard Buddies.

Native plant seedlings

The problem: moving from council’s intentions to residents’ intentions. Especially in Bronte and Tamarama, where high-cost property and renovations present ongoing environmental factors. People sometimes save a large tree, especially if they are asked to. But saving low growth has not been a priority. Low bushes are where wrens live.

Trying to ‘re-establish’ rather than save already established habitat is difficult. But I hope people get on board wherever they live, and help our little birds. If you have a dog, please don’t let it run into the bushes on the coastal or harbour walk. (And if you do plant some habitat, try to keep pets out of it.) 
Another benefit from these plants: they feed insects, which are struggling to survive. And these in turn would be a food source for the birds. It’s great to walk around in summer listening to the crickets and cicadas humming. I hear them more when passing some gardens than others, but haven’t pinpointed exactly which plants or environments they prefer.

I’ve sighted fairy wrens twice lately in the Inner West, both times on Whites Creek. 

Around six months ago in a sort of bushy patch/old garden on the Railway Parade nature strip. Then about a week ago, I was standing in a similar place looking at the canal when I heard and saw a pair of Willie Wagtails. They often live and hang out in similar places to wrens: both eat insects and live low to the ground. While watching Willie, I spotted a pair of wrens just across the water, in the bushy area that runs alongside the light rail there. This is probably a very good spot for them where no dogs can access.

But who knows if that area can protect them: the M4 West Connex continues apace, with the intention of destroying Burrawan Park (only meters away), to improve access for cars driving between The Crescent and the CityWestLink.

Books and Jet Lag. Bonus Section - Sydney Writers Festival

Went travelling for about 4 weeks. The jet lag coming home in winter is murder. Below is a recipe for getting through Sydney’s short days and cold nights when the body clock is upside down:

Ye Olde Factory /upside down

Hanson Concrete, Blackwattle Bay

1.       Toasted sandwiches. Butter two pieces of bread on the outside. Make the sandwich inside with slices of cheese and tomato; (add pickles or mustard or ham if desired). Cook in a cast-iron skillet, on medium heat. Turn sandwich over with tongs and brown the other side.

2.   Make one of these whenever the stomach calls for it. The beauty of this meal is it fits any time of day or night without seeming too obviously out of place. Toasties can be eaten for breakfast or in the middle of the night.

3.       It’s warming food for cold weather, and comforting. Helps with adjusting to missing the good times and people you saw on your trip.

4.       Delve into a stack of books. I load up on them in the USA because they seem cheaper there. I get them at bookstores, airports, wherever I see one that I haven’t found in Australia.

5.       A trip to one of Sydney’s libraries for backup supplies also helps. Because what else is there to do besides read in the middle of the night when your body thinks it’s daytime?

I’ll share some thoughts on books that helped me through recent weeks.

Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, new nonfiction, by Casey Cep. 

Mystery, history and biography, my favourite genres, combined. The book also shines light on the craft of writing (a focus of ‘Australia Road’).

Poor Harper Lee, who couldn’t get out her next book after her prize-winning best-seller To Kill a Mockingbird. She tentatively titled the next book she was working on, ‘The Reverend’, about an African American man in Alabama who apparently murdered quite a few relatives before he died in the 1970s.

Reverend Willie Maxwell wasn’t officially convicted, but the story is quite chilling. First, Casey Cep drip feeds us the crimes. (Don’t read the prologue, btw, if you don’t want a spoiler. I only read prologues and introductions after finishing a book, because I like everything to be a surprise.)

The events took place in Lee’s home state, and called to her as a perfect topic for a nonfiction narrative book in the style of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Lee’s thorough research and her meticulously typed notes for her friend Capote had helped him write his true-crime masterpiece. She wanted to try to repeat the process, for herself this time.

When a single chapter of Lee’s ‘The Reverend’ was finally seen 40 years later, by an heir of the Reverend’s lawyer, it was a fictionalised account, not nonfiction. No other pages were ever seen by anyone, apparently.

The second half of ‘Furious Hours’ covers biographical details of Harper Lee’s life. Cep has done some great original research and it is a springboard into my own views of ‘what went wrong’ for Lee.

Everyone Lee met in Alabama, during her years of researching The Reverend, said she was a really nice person. It probably didn’t sit right with her, as a well-bred Southern woman, to write freely about living persons. Although she was outside of society’s norms in some ways, she still considered herself well-raised.

And she knew the little fictional lies Truman employed in his opus. She told people she scrupulously wanted to avoid telling anything other than the exact truth in her planned book about The Reverend. But it seems it made the book impossible.

Harper Lee had been threatened with a lawsuit by some neighbours after ‘Mockingbird’ came out, so she knew she had to be careful about libel. She had set ‘Mockingbird’ 25 years prior to the time of its publication; but ‘The Reverend’ was to cover the present and immediate past. So there was no shirking possible legal ramifications.

I believe an insightful, fictionalised book about such frightening and dramatic events in an Alabama town would have been welcome. It’s really too bad Lee couldn’t see a way out of her puzzle. It isn’t known if she actually wrote the book (perhaps in a fictional style) and then destroyed it (there were rumours of destroyed manuscripts). Or did she get bogged down in notes, research, and an insistence on perfection?

Cep’s book ‘Furious Hours’ is a cautionary tale for writers. It shows how deadlines and money influence a writer’s output. Prior to ‘Mockingbird’, Lee was working in New York City, doing a daily commute. She had published some short pieces, dreaming of completing a longer work. Then, a couple of her friends gave her a large chunk of money for Christmas, with instructions that it was to support her while she wrote a great novel.

She got down to business and finished her now-famous book in a short time. (She also had a great agent and editor whose insights shaped ‘Mockingbird’). Importantly, Lee viewed the Christmas money as a ‘loan’, promising to pay her friends back. She used her time fruitfully, aware of a time limit, and with a drive to be successful in her writing.

Sydney author Mandy Sayer wrote an interesting article on ‘The Writerly Advantages of Having a Day Job’ for the NSW Writer’s Centre magazine ‘Newswrite’ (Autumn 2019). Many famous authors, including Australian writers, feel that having a ‘day job’ keeps their lives whole and their writing inspiration intact. Debra Adelaide took two years off to write after getting a big publishers advance, and wasn’t productive; Peter Goldsworthy confessed that a two-year grant to write, inspired in him instead, two years of writer’s block.

As Cep describes it, Harper Lee was able to write ‘Mockingbird’ using a deadline and a financial commitment to her friends. Then, after she made bags of money from the book, she couldn’t keep the same sort of commitment or deadline for HERSELF that she had once made to her friends.

Open-ended free time seems not to lead to good writing, at least for many people. 

Especially, open-ended free time that contains no drive to make money. More limited segments of time seem to be ideal (I’m mixing observation of Harper Lee with Sayer’s discoveries).

One other observation: Cep says Lee wrote letters to nearly everyone of the thousands of people who wrote to her saying they loved To Kill A Mockingbird. Lee was too polite not to acknowledge mail. Think of all the time that took. It’s like today’s temptation/obligation to get caught up in emails and social media…*

*Note: any mistakes I’ve made in facts about Harper Lee while interpreting Casey Cep’s book are my own, not Cep’s.

&

Another book I read during the wee hours of jet lag was ‘Calypso’ by David Sedaris. I had picked it up in one of those great two-story Barnes and Noble bookshops in the USA. (I know they aren’t ‘independent’ sellers who deserve support, but I love the atmosphere in such a big retail palace of books. A kind of Bunnings or Home Depot for book lovers. But with lots more windows, comfortable chairs, and carpet.) In paperback on one of the featured tables, ‘Calypso’ looked like a bargain. And it’s pretty short, an added attraction.

Sedaris has the power to make readers laugh and cry. 

His memoir-type stories are mostly ‘true’ but he does give hints that he exaggerates for comic effect. Maybe he exaggerates for sad effect too, because sadness is certainly an element in some stories. (And I hope he is exaggerating for gross-out effect because one chapter in particular is truly disgusting and I needed a lot of time and space to get over it. I can only hope it wasn’t true.)

For writers, his book can be an inspiration. He sometimes describes his working habits and it sounds like he carves out a space for himself and his work, even while on vacation. He keeps a desk and writes every day. Perhaps one aspect of his success is: the short-ish episodes he writes are usually published as standalone essays (in places like the ‘New Yorker’) prior to being collected as a book. So he isn’t trying to make a huge opus where hundreds of pages need to hang together, the work dragging out over months and years.

One chapter had a moving description of how he and his siblings, as children, would tell funny stories to their beloved mother, vying to make her laugh. She encouraged them and instinctively helped them craft their delivery, as they learned to emphasise which parts were funniest, and how to pace. (The usefulness of trying to please someone.)

Sedaris’s mastery of comical writing is unparalleled, I think. I first heard of him when I stumbled into a free session at Sydney Writer’s Festival around 15 years ago. He was being interviewed, and he read a segment from one of his books. It was so funny that I was intrigued and became a devoted reader. Now he travels the world giving readings to audiences who pay top dollar for tickets.

@

And now for a story about the Sydney Writer’s Festival, which continues to bring audiences to authors and artists. And it mixes books with built heritage! Too good.

I attended in May, before my recent travels. Usually one of my most favourite events of the year. But I didn’t go in 2018, the first time they held it at Carriageworks. I pined for the magic of the Wharf, the old location where venues hovered over sparkly water, combining danger and dreaminess. ‘I don’t like change’, my inner whinger says. With this year’s festival being at Carriageworks for the second year in a row, I realised the change wasn't temporary so I better suck it up.

The new venue is those iconic buildings you see from the train out of Central toward Redfern and the west. 

Row after row after row of brick warehouses with repeatedly zig zagging roof lines, and endless arched doorways, plus delightful round windows. Formerly they were workshops filled with people (I’ll guess they were mostly or all men) working to fix our trains and keep the railways in top order. Now, an example of ‘adaptive re-use’ of heritage buildings, they are fairly access-friendly, grounded spaces with enormously high ceilings.

Carriageworks - Eveleigh

photo by Petrina Tinslay, published at Afar.com

Saturday 4 May 2019. The authors I went to see were not familiar to me – that’s one of the great things about the festival, exposure to new writers.

3.00 to 3. 40 pm. I listened to Australian author Sophie Cunningham, and watched her fascinating sign language interpreter. She shared ideas ‘On the Bloomsbury Set and Ideas of Bohemia’, which have absorbed her while she researches a book (as yet unfinished) about Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia. I have never read anything by Cunningham, but I appreciated her thoughtful, rational and engaging approach and it felt like the session ended too soon. Her latest book ‘City of Trees’, nonfiction, might be good to check out.

Funny things I noticed: festival organisers wanted us to simultaneously turn off our phones yet send twitter messages and insta and other things with particular hashtags. A later session didn’t say ‘turn off phones’ it said ‘turn down screen brightness’ but keep up the twittering. They really want us to help with their advertising! I don't comply. Furthermore, I admit I do my best not to spend money there.

Although I hadn’t previously been to the Carriageworks venue for the festival, I’m a seasoned visitor from the Wharf, and I knew the drill about lining up for free events. I asked the woman manning the velvet rope if I had time for a coffee and she said ‘probably, if you don’t go far’. When I got to the coffee cart there seemed to be dithering so I said ‘please give me a coke from the fridge, here’s my money now’ and eventually they did, which was quicker than waiting for a coffee. I knew I had to get back to the queue and seconds mattered. You don’t want to be that person who the rope lady blocks, as she says ‘I’m sorry, we have to stop here, the venue’s full’. I’ve been that blocked person, which is why I was rushing and nervously drinking a coke when I would have rather had a hot coffee since it was cold outside.

But that made it weird because later I was the only person drinking a coke. I don’t normally even drink it, so I was drinking it slowly, kind of nursing it as the saying goes. At one point, Cunningham paused then randomly mentioned ‘Coke drinkers’ in an example of something she was saying, and I felt self-conscious, like she was singling me out (she probably wasn’t).

But yeah, so happy I got in and happy I got a seat, even if I had to perch with a coke on my knee. The lady next to me had a few bags of books and a big bunch of gum leaves wrapped in brown paper at our feet which she asked me if I minded. No way do I mind.

Nothing’s getting in the way of my joy at being at the writers festival.

Not even the atrocious sound system (later I heard the media criticised this) which I actually thought was a mistake, ‘Surely this won’t last, the session next door with loud applause is ending and soon we’ll have our peace and quiet’. But no, it seemed that on the other side of the curtain, the microphone was passed from speaker to speaker, each of whom we could hear. If I had paid money for the session I was in, I would have been annoyed. But since it was free, nothing was a problem, and really, our speaker was so engaging and her sound levels seemed alright so I was able to tune out the other hall talk. And I was so lucky with a good seat pretty close to the front. Lucky, lucky me to be at the writers festival.

4.30 to 5.30 pm. Nigerian author Oyinkan Braithwaite with interviewer Rebecca Harkins-Cross, chatting about Braithwaite’s novel ‘My Sister, the Serial Killer’. This session cost money but the ticket office had a kind of half-price, last minute sales system in place which was great. It seemed like a good chance to hear a speaker from Nigeria, so far away.

Not having read this book, I had heard critics say it was good. I thoroughly enjoyed seeing and hearing Braithwaite, a very likeable author.

As I listened to the interviewer describe the book, it brought to mind the ABC tv show Killing Eve. A beautiful young female serial killer; lovable yet despicable, extracting devotion from women, and luring men to their deaths. The interviewer seemed to think this was a wholly unique idea, but I was thinking to myself, ‘have you not seen Killing Eve, then?’ (I confess a fascination with that tv series.) Whether unique or not, this kind of plot is certainly startling.

The weirdest thing that happened in the session: two different people– first the interviewer, later an audience member – asked identical questions about parallels between ‘My Sister’ and the book Jane Eyre. Were the similarities deliberate? No the first time and no the second time. Braithwaite said however, that she has read that classic a lot because it’s a favourite.

In the lobby I got a free Sydney Morning Herald and a Gleebooks Gleaner (it’s always free, a great resource listing new books). I reminisced about the old daily festival paper ‘The Far Queue’, lol (get it? You may have to say it out loud.)

I didn’t see the ‘@thefestival’ newspapers, the free, UTS student-written paper (which might be entirely online this year. Actually they’ve probably been replaced by twitter etc). A few years ago I contributed stories to ‘@thefestival’. That was fun: writing about authors and books, not being paid but getting credit and publishing experience.

Walsh Bay wharf/ piers, old Festival location

Photo by Majestic Water Taxis

Here is a random list of great international and local writers I’ve seen through the years at the Sydney Writers Festival: Kate McClymont (SMH muckraker), Michael Connelly (LA mystery writer), David Sedaris, Sarah Blasko (song writer). Caitlin Doughty (undertaker-writer), Federal MP Chris Bowen (he had written his autobiography). Susie Orbach (‘Fat is a Feminist Issue’), Gloria Steinem, and Louis De Bernieres (Red Dog).

Aboriginal elders Ruby Langford Ginibi, Archie Roach, and Pat Dodson. ZZ Packer, African American writer. Australian author Ashley Hay interviewing an English woman who wrote about women locked in castles or towers in medieval times. (The range of subject matter is astonishing.)

Australian icons Ita Buttrose, Don Watson, Helen Garner. Jennifer Kent (The Babadook, film); and prize winners Ali Cobby Eckermann and Carrie Tiffany. Two then-Best Young Writer award winners: Alice Pung, and Michael Mohammed Ahmad.

Aviva Tuffield (Stella Prize co-founder), Kate Mosse, (British founder of Women’s Prize for Fiction), Tim Soutphommasane (Race Discrimination Commissioner for Human Rights Commission at the time).

Looking forward to next year's festival.

History Week will be 31 August - 8 Sept 2019

Annandale Aqueducts and Viaducts

A walk/talk illustrating this year's History Week theme of 'Memory and Landscapes'

90 minute tour given by author of Australia Road blog (Robin). The Walk/Talk will be given on two dates (same walk & talk each time).

Tour Dates, choose one:

Wednesday, 4 September 2019

10.30 am to 12 noon

or

Saturday, 7 September 2019

10.30 am to 12 noon

Location: Smith, Hogan and Spindlers Park

Taylor Street, Annandale

Meet under the arches of the white-coloured aqueduct, half-way into the park. (Approx. half a kilometre from Light Rail Station Jubilee Park.)

We'll take a look at this landscape where classical arches add beauty. The park's landscape has transformed many times in the last 250 years. Waterways used by Indigenous residents were taken over by industry; today you can see ecosystem restoration. We'll hear about people who devoted themselves to influencing the landscape here.

History Week is sponsored by the History Council of New South Wales

If you have a question you can leave a comment below and I'll get back to you. Or check the History Council's History Week website listings. 

Standing up for our Environment and Heritage

It’s the last day of April and I’m determined to get a blog out.

My blog teacher Thang Ngo (blog: Noodlies) talked about ‘the 5%’: people who continue blog-writing three months after they started. In the second month, lethargy or self-hindrance descended on me like fog. 'Socked in' as the saying goes. I don’t want to drop out with the 95%!

One week, or at the most two, was supposed to pass before I posted again. But the first week of April, some maintenance tasks reared their heads: walls to wash, paint to buy and apply, curtains to sew and hang.

I toyed with using ‘the writing process’ for a blog post. I suffered road blocks laid by computer gremlins, which I thought other people could relate to. At another point I thought it was a great revelation to share that maybe I would get a cleaner. A friend of mine who works from home, said important advice from her mentor was: hire a cleaner.

The second week of April brought more projects: finding tax docs, playing with spread sheets, making appointments.

In the third week of the month I needed to read some books in my spare time, for book group and other goals. One disturbing book knocked me so flat I had to take time to recover.

I was also reeling from news that our freshly re-elected state government planned to get rid of the New South Wales Environment and Heritage office. Focussing to write wasn’t happening for me.

April’s fourth week brought Easter, coinciding with Passover, and boy did Australia hit the holiday spirit hard. Good Friday, Easter Saturday, Easter Sunday, Easter Monday (my American readers might not believe that these are all actual holidays), and by coincidence, Anzac Day fell on the Thursday after Easter Monday, so there was another day off that week. (For Americans: it was like having Memorial Day and Thanksgiving in the same week.)

Easter and Anzac have sombre overtones, even if you aren’t religious. The holiday week didn’t inspire me to write. Besides, I had eggs to dye, and more blogs to read by other bloggers, and swimming to do because it was oh-so-warm for this time of year and it would be a shame to waste the opportunity.

So somehow a month passed without a blog post from me. It’s not that I wasn’t thinking about it, believe me, writing crowded into my mind with things I need and want to do. I’m not ready to axe the blog: some of the characters that I’m driven to write about, haven’t yet been introduced!

I’ve decided to share some thoughts about heritage.

You might or might not know we are in the midst of the annual ‘Heritage Festival’, 18 April til 18 May this year. Walks, talks, and open days are available, from galleries and libraries, to National Parks. Heritage weeks celebrate our origins and who we are. Enjoy!

My pic of 'Leathers With a Reputation'

In February I took this picture in the heart of Sydney. Later I wanted to know more about the intriguing phrase painted on the side of the old building. I googled, as you do, ‘Leathers with a reputation’. Only modern leathergoods sellers came up, so I added ‘old building sign Sydney’ to the search, and voila, a link to the NSW Heritage Office database appeared in the top responses.
https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/heritageapp/ViewHeritageItemDetails.aspx?ID=2424180

Going to the Heritage link, I read the entry for the old building on Castlereagh Street where this ad was painted. I learned about the building’s occupants (Dixson’s tobacco factory, later Johnson and Sons leather merchants).

This great database lists all the ‘Items’ protected by heritage laws at state and council level. By the way, a ‘Heritage Item’ is the formal name for listed places, because protected places aren’t only buildings: they can be cemeteries, caves with Aboriginal paintings, gardens.

Looking up to see the bats sleeping

A place like Centennial Park shows that cultural heritage can consist of natural habitat for animals and plants. ‘Cultural’ just means that humans had a hand creating it. In Centennial, everything is planted. Every. Single. Thing.

Fields and bushes feed ibis, fairy wrens and cockatoos. Overseas plants also thrive: sprawling oaks drop acorns at this time of year. And of course there stand occasional reminders that we are in a ‘cultural’ place, like this statue of Charles Dickens!

The environment and the buildings in our communities belong to all of us, in that we are affected by how they look and how they function.

A lovely sight in Sydney's Inner West

Delving into the Heritage website, I found a colourful digital publication, Portraits of New South Wales, issued in 2018 for the 40^th anniversary of the Heritage Act of 1977. 

https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/research-and-publications/publications-search/portraits-of-new-south-wales

The Heritage Act legislated that a Register or list should name places that must be protected, following community wishes and expert advice. (The National Trust had already created lists and these became a springboard.)

Before the Heritage Act, in the 1970s there had been reactive situations where community outcry demanded some sites not be torn up: like ‘Kelly’s Bush’ in Hunters Hill; and residential streets of the Inner West where an expressway was planned; and most of the old buildings and laneways where tourists now wander in The Rocks, which were to be knocked down under a redevelopment order. Living treasure Jack Mundey and his union workers are still revered for refusing to work at these sites, helping save them. After the Heritage Act, things were meant to follow an orderly course, not an ad hoc approach.

Over the years the Heritage Office has published guides to maintaining heritage sites and old buildings, among an array of resources, and they give advice. Long may they flourish.

Love For All, Hatred For None

You know you are grieving if you find your eyes welling up when you're standing in a shopping centre looking for JB Hifi. Or sitting on a train going to meet someone for dinner and suddenly you are crying and patting your pockets for a tissue.

The massacre in New Zealand shocked us. In Australia we feel pain for everyone in our next-door-neighbour country. Husbands, wives, teachers and classmates come from there. We especially feel deep sympathy for people of Muslim faith, there and everywhere. Our sisters-in-law, brothers, workmates, and friends are Muslims. How could an Australian do this. May we learn not to demonise people. Welcome the stranger.

During a big loss, you might suddenly think of someone else you've loved, who has recently passed. Or not so recently passed, but you will never forget. Grief can widen like a net and catch depression with sadness. After the New Zealand tragedy, buckets of rain came down in Sydney, making a physical gloom to match the mental darkness.

Putting one foot in front of the other can be a struggle. Stop to pat a friendly dog. Little things help us go on.

Walking past a school I get tears in my eyes when I see a banner on the fence. My friend later says "I watched the children and their teacher hang it. I gave them the thumbs up."
The banner says, "Everyone belongs here."

***

Our neighbourhood 'purple of the month' plants the Tibouchinas are gloriously full and can help mend the heart and eyes. I've noticed that when I stop to drink in their glow, other people share the love. A couple stops beside me, a woman saying "Isn't it beautiful, the blossoms are at their peak."

Her male companion points to a tree further ahead, laden with green buds. "That one will be out soon."

The woman says "That's a gum tree." It could promise to be a good one though... I'll check back when I need a dose of purple (or pink, or red) in coming weeks, after the tibouchinas have faded.

Now I'll share a short (true) story - My Australia Day (Invasion Day). 

Fear isn't useful.

26 January, 2019

I'm walking toward the beach in tropical north Queensland. It's a treat to be staying a week so close to sand; just out the back door, across the lawn. I go there all times of day: sundown, mornings, sun at my back, high tides lapping my toes (don't get your feet wet because of deadly jellyfish), and low tides so far out they expose a flat expanse of beach covered with sand dollar trails.

A sign here says big sea turtles nest on this beach, near the town of Mackay. The turtles don't lay eggs until they are thirty to fifty years old. Incredibly, when they are ready to lay, they return to the same beach where they hatched all those years ago. Mind boggling.

This particular afternoon I am heavy hearted. In the morning, a highly intelligent, sometimes unhappy, dear nine-year-old relative had asked, 'What's the point of everything if you are just going to die?' Flummoxed, his mother and I talked about finding fulfillment; following passions; work, love, commitment. We weren't sure we were helping. Afterward I am reflecting on the difficulty of 'finding your purpose'.

A discarded red can of 'Mother' soft drink lies amongst vines on the dune I pass through. I flinch a little - I don't like litter, and I find the jagged style of black lettering confronting. It conjures thoughts of the Third Reich. Some cigarette butts lie near it, yuck.

A group stands a few meters away. Noisy young people, partying hard. I feel nervous and uncomfortable, and veer north up the beach, to avoid them.

As I walk I marvel at the range of creatures and vegetation washed up on the shore line, things that don't often appear on Sydney beaches. Sea stars, huge cuttlebones, coconuts and palm hearts, clam, scallop and crab shells. I put flotsam in my pockets, a plastic cigarette lighter, water bottle lid, fishing line, and an encrusted thong. Even on this pristine-seeming beach, there are items that could choke a precious turtle.

A father and daughter in wetsuits skim through the water on boards. Another family is fishing. Besides these small groups, the huge beach is basically empty. I feel good not being in the city for this Australia Day - away from politics, crowded events, nationalism. I turn around and walk back.

When I pass the trail head where I've come in, the young people are gone. Something glints - a glassy phone lies on the sand! This is the second time I have found a phone on the sand this week. The previous find looked pretty manky from being in the sea and I had put it on a bench near the trail, where it sat for days. Just another piece of junk.

I leave this one where it is, seeing a man and woman in the distance. I walk south toward them, calling out, "Did you lose a phone?"
"No, but thank you" they say, sounding appreciative. They weren't with the group that was there earlier.

Walking slowly back, I wonder what to do. I start picking up cans, something I hadn't wanted to do initially because they're bulky. There aren't many, just some weathered 4 X tinnies. When I pass the phone again, I pick it up.

I swipe its screen, thinking I'll try to ring a number in its list, but it's locked. No can do.

Then it rings, my hand feels the vibration. Message on screen says 'Alana' is calling. I swipe to answer: the phone lets me. 'Hello' I say, 'I just found this phone'. 'Oh my god' she says into my ear, slightly shrieking, and then I see she is approaching me and talking to me, a young woman or girl, with a phone to her head. A tall young man (or boy) is approaching with her. They were part of the group that had been there.

'Thank you! My phone!' he says. I say I just picked it up, was going to try ringing someone at the very moment they rang. They are giddy and laughing and can't believe it.

Alana says 'We've been looking for this for over an hour' and 'I'm so drunk' she says, stumbling.
The boy says 'I'm from Moranbah, I need this phone. I'm so happy... My Dad will be happy - he paid for it.'
I laugh and say I'm so glad I found them, or they found me.
'Can I hug you?' the boy asks, and does. 'Sure' I say and hug him back.

They wander off toward the apartments. In this little interaction I feel I found 'my purpose' for this day. I brought joy to someone, and helped clean a beach at the same time.

I feel kind of silly for my reaction to the kids when I had first seen them. Was I afraid of teenagers? (Does a group equal a 'gang'/ was I worried because they were drinking and loud?)

Or did I think they were white nationalists because I caught a vibe off a 'Mother' label, and Australia Day often buzzes with negative connotations. All I know now is, after being inadvertently brought together with a few of the kids, we have good feelings for each other. I had pre-judged them from a distance. I don't know their political beliefs, if they have any, but they seem like decent people, although drunk.

When I pass the 'Mother' can again I pick it up. I take it to the bag where the apartments are collecting cans, with proceeds to benefit turtle rescue.

I acknowledge the traditional Indigenous owners of Blacks Beach who were dispossessed. 
I acknowledge too the sorrows of the Pacific Islanders who were taken in slavery to Mackay to work in sugar cane fields.

Paved Paradise

It isn't pretty but it's a subject I looked at this week: cement. Mostly it's not very aesthetic to look at, but sometimes it can be pleasing to the eye, like the arches on the Annandale aqueduct.

I found out more about some wayfinding aids (mentioned last week in 'Australia, Street'). When town planners 'set them in stone' on concrete footpaths, they clearly thought the designations would last forever. Little did they know the 'municipality' and council areas would be constructed, deconstructed and amalgamated many times.
  

A blink in time: 1906 to 1948. But the footpath sign lives on in 2019.

'Municipality of Petersham' was created in 1906, born out of the 'borough' created in 1871 from townlets Stanmore, Petersham and others. The 'municipality' lasted until 1948, when it merged and fell under the name of Marrickville Municipality. They were happy enough together for nearly 70 years - until 2016 when the 'forced merger' with two other municipalities created Inner West Council.

I'm trying hard not to discuss 'politics' in this blog. But it wants to creep in.

Back to concrete 'standing the test of time'. Its discoverers knew that. It is similar to ceramics: if you use very high heat to cook certain materials - types of mineral dust - they change and can be bound together almost forever. In some archaeological sites, pot sherds or shards are found more than anything else. 

The Annandale aqueduct has a plaque explaining it was made in 1896 from a revolutionary material: reinforced concrete. A royal commission investigated its use; and the builders were forced to post a large 'surety' and guarantee maintenance for three years. More than 120 years later it's fine.

At a California mission site I worked at years ago, we found fired-clay roof tile pieces by the bucket load. 

(The adobe blocks which made the buildings were only sun-dried, and 'melted' when exposed to rain.) Fragments of plates also made up great quantities, especially from dates closer to the present; the California Indians who lived in the area and were recruited to the mission did not make pottery as a rule since they had an incredible range of baskets that could cover almost any task.

I went down a research hole to understand the origins of pottery and porcelain. Travelling to England's Staffordshire District I visited pottery factories and the home of Wedgwood. Even while in England seeds of doubt were being sown, about whether this was the job for me. I thirstily went to exhibitions and free archaeology lectures. Sitting in one lecture about medieval shoes... the speaker droning about minutiae... something snapped in me and I lost momentum. I don't doubt the usefulness of all kinds of arcane subjects; I just found that even I had a limit.

Bowls and plates made from pottery or china last a very long time, or at least pieces of them do.

Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash.com

Another limit I brushed against was digging up bones. Some archaeologists dream of a day they could be privileged to uncover a human skeleton. I dreaded it, and luckily was never asked to do so. I believe in science but also feel unseen connections from past to present and person to person and I didn't want to cross that. I did shake a lot of bone fragments through screens, and tried to learn from experts to identify them, so as not to unwittingly handle human ones. (So many cow bones, fish bones, deer bones, bird bones.) 

I love handling a cool stone arrowhead, or glassy obsidian flake, or smooth grinding stone as much as anyone. But over time for a number of reasons I veered away from archaeology and into 'interpretation'. There is plenty of stuff already dug up, and more to come, and maybe I could be of use helping spread understanding of material objects.

This homeowner built their front fence from homemade concrete

 instead of buying shaped sandstone forms and pillars like everyone else in the street.

Regarding concrete: in our 'throwaway' societies with great pockets full of money, we are able to finance the wholesale destruction of previous concrete buildings. I first saw a stadium demolished in San Francisco. In 1989 they tore down Kezar Stadium, standing since the 1920s on the edge of Golden Gate Park. In my walks, I would gape at trucks being filled with endless piles of white concrete rubble. I simply couldn't figure it out. Couldn't quite believe what I was seeing and hearing.

Kezar opened as a 50,000 seat stadium, where famous football teams played, and concerts. But it was superceded when Candlestick park opened in 1971. Reading this week to see if I could find why Kezar was demolished, I found this: "Cramped bathrooms, minimal concession stands, and most of all no parking were all problematic for Kezar." * 

(There is a rebuilt sporting ground there now, much smaller.)

The knocking down of stadiums has been in the news lately as a political subject, but as I said, not going there...

I used to not understand the material very well. Doing some home handy-work and wanting to patch holes in a driveway, I bought a bag of 'cement' and mixed it with water and poured it in. Later I was told by others wiser than me, 'you can't just use cement, you have to mix it with something to make concrete' - hence the bags of 'sand and cement' for sale that I'd overlooked. Plain cement sort of works, but isn't as solid as concrete.

They put this concrete around metal bars. That's usually what 'reinforced' concrete means.

Cement has been in the news recently, with growing awareness of its high carbon cost. Says someone who knows more about it than me, 'Cement is made of gypsum and lime. You heat them very hot by burning coal.' This makes white cement powder. Add water and it magically turns hard. (But first add sand or pebbles to make concrete.)

High fuel usage is needed to make the lime by burning limestone, or burning crushed shells. 

In early Sydney a lot of mortar for joining bricks into house walls came from Darling Harbour (Cockle Bay) shells. Researchers have pointed out that the shell piles there were middens from Indigenous living sites. Colonists desecrated these 'easy picking' places and when they were gone, people turned to the harder work of prising shells off rocks. If you've ever had an oyster cut, you know how awful this job would be. 

Modern lime for cement is often made from limestone instead of shells. In either case, pits or kilns are where it is burnt. Some old historic areas have interesting looking 'lime kilns'.

'If it were a country, the cement industry would be the third largest in the world, its emissions behind only China and the U.S.', John Vidal said in The Guardian, 26 February 2019. Making cement creates around 8% of global emissions. 

I think we all need to look at the materials we use and ask is there a way to 'reduce, reuse, recyle'? If something no longer suits our purposes, can we 'repurpose' it somehow? I wonder perhaps not how but why things like Roman-built stadiums and aqueducts still stand. We know the materials can last, but it's the will to continue using them that seems to fade so easily now.

* Website by Bob Busser. https://ballparks.smugmug.com/Kezar

Australia, Street

Australia Road writer's blog - thoughts on street names (and roads, and avenues)

I named this blog 'Australia Road' instead of Australia Street although I considered the second one. But I didn't want to steal from John Kingsmill - the late writer who documented Sydney so touchingly in his memoirs 'The Innocent' and 'Australia Street'.

Also, there is an Australia Street in the Newtown area of Sydney, and I wanted to give a nod to it but not be unalterably associated. (In coming weeks you will hear more from me about it.)

In Newtown the old street signs were attached to buildings.

I first found John Kingsmill's writing in a file at Waverley Library's local history room. The copied pages were included for their sharp detail about landmarks I was researching; Kingsmill grew up in Bondi and Waverley in Sydney's east in the 1920s and 1930s. But, in a file separated from their context, the pages didn't shimmer like the word-pictures the author paints in his books.

Later, in a used book store, I found 'Australia Street' and bought it, mistakenly thinking it had something to do with Australia Street, Newtown. (It's about Bondi.) I never discovered why he chose that title. But I did discover a good writer, concise and spot-on, like the ad man he was; with an eye for theatrical details, like the actor he aspired to be. Some parts of this book (and 'The Innocent') are so funny you will need a hanky, which is better than can be said for a lot of history. 

Maybe he picked 'Australia Street' for his title because of its implied meaning of a home base and a universality of experience. A sort of 'Anytown' idea. 

Another street sign on a Newtown building.

The words on the album poster say 'EVERYTHING NOT SAVED WILL BE LOST'.

Reflecting on 'roads' versus 'streets', I think 'streets' convey a sense of arrival at a destination. Like 'Easy Street', or 'Main Street, USA.' In England, people often call shopping strips 'the high street'.

In Stanmore you know where you stand. 

When I was growing up, I thought 'street', 'road', and 'avenue' were interchangeable.

I had a vague intuition that 'boulevard' was a larger street, and 'lane' was very small. Crescent and circle, obvious; 'parade' a delightful deviation found sometimes at coastal venues.

Kingsmill had a clear understanding of the differences. In one scene he went to visit his friend in Barracluff Avenue, Bondi Beach. "It was no more an avenue than any other Bondi street of the time - unless you counted telegraph poles as trees, in which case the regimented forest of grey posts, ghosts of fallen eucalypts, crowned with a bristling array of wires, turned every street into an avenue." * 

So, an avenue is meant to contain trees, apparently...

These wayfinding aids in Stanmore are comforting.

I'm so glad the letters have been preserved.

Recently I've picked up some other ideas. A 'road' is often the path you take to go somewhere. 'Road to ruin' or the Yellow Brick Road. Could it ever have been called the Yellow Brick Street?

You can be on Parramatta Road, Camperdown, but you must travel twenty or so kilometres before finding Parramatta. And in small, far flung Kandos, New South Wales, you can follow the Sydney Road; it will take a while, but eventually you'll arrive.

This bendy road doesn't lead to Salisbury, but it does lead to the Salisbury Hotel (pub).

Frenchmans Road** in Randwick aimed toward Botany Bay where French explorer La Perouse landed in Indigenous homelands. The road isn't straight, a distinguishing feature shared with some other roads, indicating the willingness of foremothers and fathers to follow landscape. (Most people want to save energy while traveling - why go up and over a ridge when you can go along the crest?)

I acknowledge and pay deep respect to the Eora people who always lived in Sydney and still live here. They knew the best routes and refined their paths over time. Later road-makers followed them. Frenchmans (which used to include Avoca Street) is one of the oldest roads in Australia, dating to 1788 and before.

In other places too, early 'roads' cut later streets at odd angles: Embarcadero Road in Palo Alto, California, presumably used to lead to a wharf (its meaning in Spanish) on San Francisco Bay. Now it's a quirk in a square grid imposed over it.

Australia Road and Australia Street are not common street names in Australia.

Unlike Oxford Street. People were saying during Mardi Gras that there are 123 Oxford Streets in Australia able to share Sydney's Oxford Street celebrations. And I would guess there's about one thousand Victoria Streets - my street directory shows more than one hundred in greater Sydney alone. 

Classical architecture was the favoured look for official buildings. 

This one is on the corner of Australia Street.

Australia Street Newtown might have been named because a lot of very old government type buildings stand there: court house, police station, town hall and more. In a similar descriptive vein, Church Street nearby holds the church and cemetery. 

I noticed through an internet search that there's an Australia Road in London, but it looks pretty limited so I don't think anyone should be confused by my using it as a title. Confoundingly, this  London example seems to go around four sides of a square area. Not sure what that says as a metaphor. Puts new meaning into 'Road to Nowhere'.

* p. 176, Australia Street by John Kingsmill, published by Hale & Ironmonger, 1991. Italics in quote are the author's. Note: Kingsmill is of his time, I won't pretend otherwise; some parts might not be 100% politically correct by today's standards, but his compassion for people is genuine and strong.

** Frenchmans Road is how it's spelled - the road names board wanted to keep things simple yet confusing. 

The First Straw

Australia Road writer’s blog

about old buildings, natural wonders, and some historical stories I can’t let go, like a dog with a bone. 

The First Straw

I walk because my life depends on it. 

I want what all walkers want. Solid streets and wide paths to plant my feet, greenery with birds and small animals, enchanting houses and colourful structures.

Previously I walked around Sydney’s East but lately I’ve been exploring the Inner West. In tree-lined cool enclaves and ancient lanes squeezed with giddy old factories and precarious terrace houses, murals catch the eye and something (the historic atmosphere, a child, or a singing magpie) is bound to touch the heart. 

Walking this morning I carried a re-usable shopping bag for the errands I had planned. And so, when I saw some stray garbage - a can here, bottle there - I started thinking, well, I could pick it up. But I really don’t want to.

In Tamarama Gully and the eastern suburbs, I used to pick up a lot of rubbish, on Clean Up Australia Day or just random Sundays. But in places like Leichhardt and Newtown, I’ve been more inclined to turn a blind eye. Strolling in a daydream this morning, I entered the grassy area alongside Whites Creek – and there I saw it: the red-striped plastic straw. 

FINE. If that’s the kind of thing that’s going to be tossed out on the creek side, I can’t ignore it.

 Photo by Mohamed Maail, on Unsplash.com

Whites Creek* has a small ‘wetland’ pocket with charming footlong turtles (30 centimetres) who rise to the surface and peer at you through the water weeds if you stand still and watch. I was planning to check them later, hoping to glimpse a foot or an edge of shell. 

Straws have been targeted lately as high priority trash. Whites Creek’s cement-lined waterway leads straight to Sydney Harbour, and from there to the ocean.

Unfolding my bag, I drop the straw in. Now I can’t relax but must stop every metre or so; finding plastic water-bottles, coffee cup lids, bottle caps, and water-bottle LABELS that have escaped their bottles. Ziploc bags, chocolate wrappers, a toothbrush, popped balloon tied to a ribbon, and Styrofoam pieces complete the stash.

I only pick up plastic – that idea started last year during a litter removal jag in Centennial Park. Glass bottles – meh. Metal cans or bottle tops – nah. These items might pose hazards, but are more ‘natural’, and can break down; they won’t join the great Pacific garbage patch one day. And they probably won’t get stuck in a sea animal’s stomach or nasal passage, or wind around its limbs. Besides, if I was going to pick up everything, I’d have to push a trolley. 

At the Great Barrier Reef two years ago, a huge sea turtle ate a wobbly white-ish jellyfish before my eyes. So I easily believe plastic looks like their food – clear or white, and flexible. The veterinarian on Better Homes and Gardens tv show,  Dr Harry Cooper, said in February that it's possible "in 40 years time there may be no sea turtles around". This is the year of the pig on the Asian calendar, but for me it feels like Year of the Turtle.

Passing the wetland later I notice part of the water surface is clear – it’s been very clogged recently – and a longneck turtle comes up to me. Its back and legs and neck are fully visible for the first time. One of its buddies swims close too - it has three normal legs and one smaller, damaged. If I can catch some straws and plastic bits before they hurt any water friends, I’ll do it. 

* Whites Creek is how it is written, even if you just want to put an apostrophe in there.

Clean Up Australia Day is Sunday, 3 March this year. https://www.cleanupaustraliaday.org.au/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI_PjO5-Pf4AIVjhmPCh0asQusEAAYASAAEgL0g_D_BwE 

[FYI this post is not sanctioned by nor related to them]