Sunday Run (4)

Endomondo Running Workout

A really beautiful run; inevitably, since I have no sense of direction, I got lost in the back streets of Erskineville; green, cool and not as straight when you're on them as they appear on the map, but getting lost when you're running east in the early morning isn't really a problem because it's not that hard to run towards the sun. And so it proved; although I don't know the EW roads I do recognise all the major NS roads (Bourke, South Dowling, Anzac Parade) and eventually I knew where I was. Once on Alison St (which I have driven on maybe 100 times without knowing its name - this is Sydney, we don;t navigate by street name here) it's impossible not to end up at Coogee. The runner-friendly path involves turning right at Belmore St, which of course has no street sign (actually, it has one that says "Cook") so I missed it on the outward bound path, Belmore St being a relatively smooth gradient down to Coogee Bay Rd which continues relatively smoothly down to the beach. Alison St has multiple extremely steep up-and-downs; I almost had to walk down one hill to avoid the knees exploding.

For all that, the first moment when the sea becomes visible at the crest of one of the Alison St hills almost justifies the effort; in a second the amount of light seems to triple and the water is invisible behind the reflection. I guess if you live in this light all the time you get a little blasé about it - maybe only a little - but the contrast with the Inner West and the suddenness of its appearance on this route magnifies the impact. I can't imagine living in one of these beachside suburbs, because I like the Inner West a lot, particularly the rich Asian cultural layers, but running through this extraordinary morning light it's easy to understand the Sydney real estate problem.

Anyway, fifteen years in Sydney and I think I see a way to integrate the beach into my life. Not counting school excursions, that's probably only the fifth time I've visited a Sydney beach of my own free will in the fifteen years we've been here. Seems bizarre.

One of my favourite authors, Alan Garner (steer clear of Thursbitch, Strandloper & Red Shift until you've read at least three of his others) has a character in Stone Quartet who reminisces about walking from (near) Manchester to the ocean on a holiday during his stonemason's apprenticeship in (my guess) the early-to-mid nineteenth century. That's a long walk - about 100 km return, I think - but it's a great example of Garner's ability to do an enormous amount or narrative work with a very simple incident. The character only has a moment to stand on the sand before he has to return, but the incident captures his personality (determined, visionary), his world (strict, limited in opportunity and confined in space) and something of the power of the ocean as a force on the imagination: that it can both inspire such efforts and richly reward them. Imagine what it's like to see the sea for the first time as a young adult, to see it for five minutes and know that you will never see it again. And for the experience to reward you with it's unforgettableness.

Sunday Run (3)

Endomondo Running Workout

We ran upstream along the Cooks River this AM, up to South Strathfield, by which time the river is a mere drain, enclosed between concrete banks, with, I should say, provision for a deal of overflow, none of which was in evidence this morning. So far, Sydney's inner west remains resolutely unflooded. It's really an excellent run, most of the time the parkland around the river is broad enough to exclude the suburbs; when it's not, well, the suburbs provide a little relief from all that green. Not that the 20th century is invisible; the whole left bank (looking downstream, that's the tradition apparently) is built over a high-pressure pipeline, of which the only evidence is numerous signs saying "Do not dig". Nonetheless, dogs are not banned. At various points, high tension pylons occupy odd weedy corners, but I quite like them. After all, the electricity has to come from somewhere; it would be odd to live in a world that was wholly indistinguishable from the 19th century.

Mind you, some of the paths under the multiplicity of bridges were built for 19th century heights. It is quite difficult, at the 16K point, to have to run bent double to avoid breaking one's skull on the bottom of a bridge. (It was more manageable at the 4K point on the way out) Running over one bridge we heard a splash of such magnitude that we felt obliged to stop; there was a school of fish (not in itself so unusual) the largest of which was well up to the 50 cm. mark - I didn't stop to catch it, so you can assume that's more-or-less true. That is much bigger than anything I've seen in there before, they're usually around to 10-15 cm. mark. Suddenly the fisherman don't look so pointless, although it remains to be seen whether you could actually eat it safely. I caught a flathead in the George's River once, and the person who ate it (not me!) is still alive. Still the George's River is wider, and the pollution presumably less concentrated.

The only problem with running along rivers is that I live on a hill. Assuming the technology is not lying, the river gets down to 10m above sea level (how does that work, given tides? There must be some theoretical sea level that doesn't move around) and I have to run over a 72m hill to get home. I realise that to a Sherpa a 60-odd meter rise is probably still within the definition of flat land, but people who know me will be aware that I am not a Sherpa. Those 60m are hard work, especially since you have to run up them multiple times. And running downhill with my knees doesn't constitute a reward, either. If you look at the link you can see the gradient of the run; it feels as steep as it looks!

photography (1)

This is not really altogether about photography. Still, why do I take photographs, and do the photographs I take satisfy those reasons?

I was going to divide the motivations up into two, narrative and art; then I thought of a 3rd, to wit, technical. I think I could make a case for conflating technical and artistic, but I'm not sure it's going to be critical, so I won't try,at least not here.  Anyway, divisions into 2, 3, or 4 categories all feel equally natural. Curious, isn't it? Is that a feature of the world, or a feature of humans-talking-about-the-world? It's amazing to me how quickly philosophical questions raise their heads, and how easily, having done so, they get ignored. In fact, leaving out one - as a category - isn't at all fair to the monists, whom I suspect of being able to mount the most logical - if not the most useful - case. Once you start to play this game, you can quickly start making a case for five and seven (prime, like two and three), six (1+2+3, 1*2*3), eight (2 to the power of 3), nine (3 to the power of two), and I'll stop now, admitting that it's an arbitrary point to do so. I think once you get past six fundamental categories, you need to re-think what "fundamental" means.

I'm talking about photography, and I've divided the reasons for doing it into, technical, artistic and narrative.

We quickly move from three types of photo to seven, narrative-art, art-technical, you can expand the series.

I like taking pictures, and I would say that art is the dominant motivation. Narrative too, no doubt; I took plenty of photos at Christmas, but the narrative is generally burdened with art, minimally includoing composition. Digital photography offers the benefit/temptation of ex post facto composition, so art becomes, in a way, easier. I take the photos for narrative reasons, but I keep them for artistic ones; some are kept for narrative reasons. Perhaps digital photography invites the question, why do I keep photos, rather than why do I take them. Perhaps they are similar, but subtly different questions. The Cooks River series http://andrewsville.blogspot.com/2011/01/slightly-more-about-cooks-river-than.html is another example of the narrative/art combination.

But most of the time, I take pictures because something catches my eye as visually interesting. It turns out that what's visually interesting isn't that easy to photograph; often when I look at a picture I don't feel the same interest as I originally felt when taking the picture.

A couple of examples:

 Above is the shoreline at Roseville marina, taken from the restaurant (a narrative shot) and right is the umbrella under which I was sitting to take these photographs. What attracted me to take the picture on the right is the combination of the light on the underside of the umbrella from the ripples on the water with the illumination of the advertising slogan by the sun from the top of the umbrella. There is another feature which I noticed later, and that is the contrast between the engineered structure of the umbrella stand and the randomness of the ripples. There are some technical defects with the picture - handshake being the major one because the clarity of the ripple light is very important - but they are not what interest me here.

The problem is, can a viewer identify the relevant features? When I took the picture, I had both these pictures available to me, I could see the water and the ripples and the unobscured sunlight at the same time as the reflected ripples and the canvas-filtered sun. I had a lot of contextual information available. There is no way to take one photograph which combines these two pictures (I tried) because the light levels are completely incompatible. The top picture is probably around 1/512,  the umbrella around 1/64. That discussion is complicated by the way digital cameras juggle with ISO numbers from shot-to-shot, but the point remains the same; one shot can't combine the differing technical requirements of these two shots...but my mind can.

Enter one solution: technology. I haven't quite got the blending of the two images right, I don't think, it's a non-trivial exercise, but now you can at least infer the connection between the water and the pattern on the canopy.  (You probably need to double click on the picture to expand it to a size where the water is visible through the canopy.) The combining of the images also "excuses" the blur, which could now as easily be an artefact of the production process as a defect in the capture process. Even if I haven't quite managed the technology correctly, the principle is illustrated; image reproduction technology can, to some extent at least, replicate the mind's ability to be simultaneously aware of the environment at different scales.

However, that's not the only difference between the way we see the world, and the way we look at a picture of the world. Take this, one of my favourite pictures:

This was the only deviation from the red brick, green grass/shrub background in a block of four or five houses between home and the local supermarket. I'm very pleased with this picture because I think it captures the real attention-grabbing nature of the solitary explosion of colour; walking home with the shopping through suburban streets, the mind drifts, and then, wow... However, as with the pair of pictures above, it's been decontextualised; problems of scale mean that I can't present the four-house background without reducing the bloom to a size which, for all its uniqueness of colour, is not going to impose itself on the viewer as the focal point of the picture. No amount of composition will solve the problem of incommensurate scale. Again, I could use technology to superimpose the two scales, but it's a trick that could easily get boring with repetition. Perhaps there's enough brick-and-lawn in the picture to supply your imagination with the background. Or maybe, the picture stands alone and requires no context. That decision creates its own tension between the apparent realism inherent in the photograph and the fact that, decontextualised, the image is not actually real in any way. That tension is inherent in all photography, of course, not just mine. Photographic images claim an objectivity that is not justified.

If you're lucky of course, and scale and light are not a problem, depth of field is a traditional photographic technique for isolating the subject in its background.

Because the individual blossoms are small the shallow field allows a lot of the back and foregrounds to be present as well. (A different lens would have allowed me to intensify this effect further). Of course, this is not actually how I see the same vista myself from the front porch. Either the back, fore, or middle-ground are in focus, one at a time. My attention is unfocussed, but my vision is not.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

Sunday Run (2)

Endomondo Running Workout: "23.42 km in 2h:16m:27s"

This one nearly killed me, phew, the last 2K was not fun. Still, the time/distance much better than I thought, so in fact, what I thought was a bad run turned out to be a good run. Maybe I set off too fast.

It had been raining all night, so the intensifying effect recent rain has on smells was very evident. There's lots of eucalyptus en route and the gummy aroma was strongest along the river; lucky really, because so was the not-so-vaguely faecal smell of mangrove - is it the swamp itself, or does the swamp just trap the passing drainage overflow? The odd thing about smell is that it's really the change that you notice; after a while a constant smell, no matter how vile, recedes into the back of one's consciousness.

After the river there's the smell of a bay beach, salty like an ocean beach, but danker, more earthy. A surprisingly large number of people out, given the early morning rain.

Best though was, just coming up to Marrickville road on the final stretch, a massive blast of incense mixed with yeast, just behind the strip of shops near the Victoria St intersection. The yeast is easy to understand, there are two excellent bakeries at that end of the street (see the "Croissants" entry elsewhere), but here's no obvious source for the incense. There is a Buddhist temple in Marrickville, but it's on Livingstone St., just opposite the Orthodox church. This was domestic incense, a reminiscence of muggy mornings in the inner city of Guangzhou, a solitary foreigner on a private journey.

Slightly more about Cooks River than you probably expected.

 It is a presumption that the Cooks River is in fact Cook's river; the "pleasant stream" that he thought would water a new colony and which had effectively vanished when the First Fleet arrived. It seems a perfectly reasonable assumption, but the foreshore in the 18th century was extremely swampy so other watercourses may have temporarily existed. I haven't myself checked, but I assume that it's perfectly possible to exclude the other major rivers (Georges & Hacking) based on Cook's log. The Georges river looks like a much better bet for a colony to me; it's significantly larger.

The internet disappoints with Cooks River information; Canterbury City Council website has the best potted history; Marrickville City Council is the current home of the activist community groups driving a lot of the reclamation activities. The photo above is looking upstream (west) from the Illawarra Rd bridge. On the right bank, a little bit further around the bend, is the golf course. The left bank features a broad cycle/pedestrian path running to Canterbury & is a popular recreation spot. There's a lot of dense accommodation in Marrickville & the public space is well used. I don't know if it's possible to enlarge this photo (*it is - double click on it), but it's possible to make out the tops of the concrete banks that define the (artificial) current course of the river. There have been many engineering efforts imposed on the river over the years - these banks date from the 30's, so far as I can work out.

Heading East, i.e. downstream, this handsome former railway bridge has been taken over by high pressure oil/gas pipelines. It's possibly not at its best in this picture; on Sunday AM it looms up suddenly in the gloaming (can you have gloaming in the AM & if not, what is the dim pre-dawn/post-dawn ambiance  called?*) just at the start of the regular run when everyone is still feeling fresh enough to appreciate it.
[* Dawn, apparently. Twilight possible but obsolete for the AM. Gloaming is strictly PM]

A lot of work has gone into replanting the banks in the last fifteen years; it didn't look this good when we moved here.

 

 This escarpment is on the left hand side of the path of from which the above picture was taken. The escarpment runs continuously all the way to Tempe, where it stops suddenly at the Princes Hwy (possibly the effect of dynamite). It emerges from the spur on which Marrickville Rd. runs - well, "spur" may be a little grandiose. Anyway, Sydney sandstone, in its native state. (I took this while actually moving, so it's not entirely in focus)

Due to the wonders of perspective, here we see the Bayview St bridge in the foreground - rather an optimistic name, although the street does actually start climbing up the Bardwell escarpment so once there may have been an actual, as opposed to a real estate agent's, bay view - and a brand new train crossing the railway bridge in the background, maybe half a kilometer away.

There's been a lot of high density accommodation (beyond the train) approved along the Princes Hwy & Marsh St (Airport Drive). Still, through the trees and across the river, it doesn't seem too ugly.

Same bridge, different angle. The Canoe Club was either founded by, or served as a stamping ground of, Paddy Pallin. I thought it was just a brand name for outdoor gear, but no, it's also the name of an Australian "adventurer". It's still active, although one, not very, and two, mainly with kayaks not canoes. Liz and I have launched from here, but never seen anyone else on the river. In fact, in several months of running along here, I've seen one kayak. It's a waste. There is  a monthly kayak trip, apparently, organised by the Wolli Creek Supporters Association, but I don't think it can be very popular.

This is the Wolli Creek entrance; there's plenty of reclamation/greening going on along it as well. There's a lot of pleasant parks, integrated quite well with the ends of residential suburban streets. Eventually it turns into some pretty wild/untamed/natural bushland vegetation which makes for good cross-country running. On the left is the railway bridge which previously featured the train. It's low tide, perhaps not the most picturesque time of day.

This is Tempe station, which I haven't quite captured photographically as I see it in my mind; it needs a wider angle lens to get in the twin footbridge accesses and a car eraser to eliminate the foreground (which isn't usually there at 6:30 am on Sundays). In the nineteeenth century this would have been a busy weekend station as the Cooks River was, at that time, a major boating & bathing destination. Letters to the editor were penned indignantly in the 1870's protesting at the nude bathing. Hence, "rude colonials", I presume.

Just past Tempe station, you can almost see (I could see, in real life) the incoming tide meeting the current to give this extra frisson of turbulence - it's normally a very, very placid river. You can see the mangrove roots in the mud on the far side; at low tide the swamp smell, in places, is pretty noticeable.

Low tide - I don't think I've ever seen this island before. The view is to the south west; it's pretty remarkable that in the inner suburbs there is a view so unobstructed by human constructions. In some ways the above pictures over-represent the built; up to here the overwhelming impression along the river, walking, running, riding, is of a natural - managed, but natural - environment. That's about to end, because we're coming up to the Princes Hwy bridge.

The bridge (not worth a picture) marks the end of the "old" Cooks River. Past the bridge the banks become straight lines, mainly (I assume) as a result of the airport building, one side effect of which was moving the mouth of the Cooks River 1.5 kilometers south.

To wit: one airport building. To my right out of picture is the rowing club - I may have only seen one kayak, but I've seen NO rowers - I guess this might have been the major recreation reserve of the 19th century. It's difficult to see where else they would have fitted a lot of people, and it's a trivial 19th century walk to Tempe station. The bridge in the background is Airport Drive. I have an idea the building is the new international terminal parking lot. Channel markers mark a channel for the power boats that use this as access to Botany Bay. Again, I've only ever seen one boat using it. Mind you, most of them aren't "toy" boats & professional fisherman keep very uncivilised hours.

This is the companion (north-facing) view for the previous picture. That's the marina for the fairly serious - small, but well used - fleet. If you use your imagination you can see the city to the left.

No more mangroves, it's the Sydney rock oyster. Mind you, no-one is eating these, no matter how hungry they are. Nobody knows, or, no-one is admitting, how polluted this water is, but even though some people are brave enough to fish in it, no-one has ever been seen harvesting the oysters.

There's a crab in this picture (possibly more than one) if you look hard enough.

Posts about nothing (1)

Something of a trope, the signpost picture, although they do come in different flavours. I walked daily past one in Melbourne for many years, "Melbourne/Sydney/Carlton", amusing both because it conflated a small suburb with two large cities, but also because, at the time, Carlton was a bigger place for my life than either of the other two places; Sydney too far and Melbourne too dispersed. This pictured signpost has something of that remembered one, a suburb, a city, a state, although that's not why I took the photo.

Another popular signpost photo is the "remote-place-many-cities" signpost, an artefact designed, really, as a parody of a signpost (which more usually provides information used to orient oneself on a journey) to identify one's current location relative to the rest of the world. Again, this picture has a whiff of that - it's in Marrickville - but the orientation for Edinburgh & Victoria aren't quite right, and again, that's not why I took the picture.

I noticed when I first arrived in Sydney that no-one gave directions with street names. All Sydney navigation is done with landmarks. After a while I realised this is because Sydney street signs are pretty hit-and-miss; if they exist at all, they're quite likely to be covered by tree. Another popular technique is to allow the sign to rust to the same colour as the surrounding brickwork so that a forensic X-ray is required to distinguish one from the other. Well, rust is inescapable in Sydney. Another feature of the Sydney street sign is the bewildering array of styles; it's not possible - OK, I really mean not sensible - to train one's eye to pick out - say - white writing on a green background. That would give less than a 1 in 10 chance of identification. Black on white, maybe another 10%. It just makes more sense to use landmarks. Or GPS.

Another feature of the Sydney streetscape that renders street names not as useful as might be expected is the propensity streets have to either change their name halfway along for no apparent reason, or alternatively retain the same name through right-angle turns and reverse hairpins. I've been told Sydney's road system makes sense if you think like a bullock; it certainly doesn't make sense to me. I wonder if a bullock is cheaper than a GPS? Maybe I could get a cow instead of a new car.

This street sign marks the point where Enmore Rd., having taken a right angle (left) at the Warren View Hotel and swept down the hill into Marrickville from Enmore, transforms into Victoria Rd. I've known about this name change for years, but I only recently noticed this memorial to the point where it happens. I had assumed it was a gradual metamorphosis, lost in folklore. Not so.

And there's more. You might think this sign marks a three-way intersection, but what it really does is conceal the fact that the fourth road "in play", as it were, is the continuation of Victoria Rd, turned into a one-way blind turn local traffic back street by some significant engineering of gutters & pavements. Once, it turns out, Enmore Rd was a minor little offshoot leading up to the minor settlement of Enmore, and Victoria Rd was the main road, sweeping from Marrickville to - well, if aerial photography holds the answer, absolutely nowhere. Nowhere, being, in this case, the Marrickville Metro, which is (no actual research done to support this) a much more recent development than either Victoria Rd or it's re-engineered intersection with Enmore Rd.

Not a street sign at all, then, more a signpost to a puzzle. Two puzzles; why was Victoria Rd built, and when did it lose its prestige?

Marrickville Metro is on the site of Vicar's Woollen Mills, which survived from 1893 to 1979. From that, you could hypothesis that Victoria Rd served as some kind of access to the mills, but the other end terminates in a  270 degree dogleg, nowhere in particular. Well, nowhere now, anyway. It's true the termination is close to a railway, but Vicar's itself is closer to the railway nearer to the city (i.e. on a section more likely to have been opened early). That strange dogleg termination is halfway between the current Marrickville and former Marrickville (now Sydenham) stations. I suppose it might have been a freight siding.

In an aerial photo from 1943 the intersection of Enmore and Victoria roads is a very handsome triangular intersection, with central grass plot. Equal weight is given to both legs of Victoria, as well as Enmore. So at least I can say that the "localisation" of Victoria Rd at the Metro end is post-1943, and the integration with Enmore Rd pre-1943.

Sunday Run (1)

Endomondo Running Workout: "was out running 17.04 km in 1h:40m:13s using Endomondo."

If the above link works it will take you to a map generated by a free internet service (the "Endomondo") that connects with the GPS in my mobile phone to keep an automatic record of my running. I don't use it all the time - because I mainly run laps of the the local oval - but it's good for the "street" runs because otherwise I would have no real way of measuring speed & distance. You can see the odd bits of doubling back - near Tempe station because the underpass floods at high tide, and the other off the Princes Highway where we tried to take a shortcut through St. Peter's cemetery. Perhaps unsurprisingly the only way out was the way we came in. Sydney manages its old cemeteries completely differently to Melbourne. Sydney allows them to return to parkland, stonework & all. It's a - surprisingly - nice ambience.

For the rest, it's quite striking how much running you can do through parkland, even around the airport. The planes pass teeth-rattlingly close overhead; it's probably possible to count the grooves in the tyres, if they have grooves, which I guess they wouldn't, since braking is their main purpose. Next time I'm out I'll check. Council has spent/is spending a lot of money on foreshore reclamation and shared bike/pedestrian paths. I'm a bit out of sympathy with the latter, but they are better than nothing & early on Sunday there's not much sharing required.

Another benefit of running around is that I'm developing a feeling for how the area fits together, something I don't get from inside the car. I don't really have a sense of direction; Liz can visualise where she is in relation to places she knows even when she is somewhere she hasn't been before - I can't. It's all completely new to me, if it's even vaguely off the beaten track. I'm quite capable of getting lost within a kilometer of home, but all the running is starting to help me to fit it together. Soon I'll have to be 5 kms away before I'm at risk of being lost!

This isn't the most scenic run that I do (in conjunction with another serious runner who provides the navigation). There's another one along the Bardwell valley that's almost 100% bushland. The last time we ran it was after a week of heavy rain and all sorts of unexpected waterfalls had appeared. Hard work, but good for the soul. They're hard runs anyway because of the hills. I'd like to carry a camera, but it just isn't practical to run & take pictures. Mind you, the technology is getting there. I accidentally videoed my feet with my phone a month ago.

It was much better quality than you might expect. It might be possible to run with the lens pointed in the right direction and get interesting shots; if there was a burst-mode still function it would be better than video. Generally burst mode only runs to about 10-12 pictures in cheap digital cameras, but with the 1600 ASA equivalent most of them get the sharpness would probably be OK. Still, between carrying water, GPS, keys, a camera just seems like the one thing too many.

One of the reasons for carrying a camera is that there are some really unexpected pictures; for example, I rounded a corner preparatory to running down the Bardwell spur and saw what I would have sworn was an olive grove, which, given that 50% of the flora is indigenous & the other 50% Anglo parkland/flower garden, seem completely implausible while sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb. I think only a good picture could capture the incongruity of it. Anyway, it *was* an olive grove, maybe 40 trees, all around 12-15 years old judging from our backyard experience. It will be a significant harvest for whichever of the locals can be bothered. UPDATE: The olive grove was planted by the Rockdale Council, in honour of the significant connections between Rockdale residents & Greece. I tracked it down on Google Earth; there are roughly 70 trees. It's in the middle of the Silver Jubilee Park; well, they do call Philip "the Greek" so maybe that's apposite. More likely though that it's a piece of grubby land that council couldn't think of anything to do with, so regularly re-uses when memorialism strikes.

Also, once, I saw a steam train chugging its way down past Tempe station. Now, I may get back there again to photograph it - apparently it's a regular Sunday service - but equally I may not. It would have been a nice picture; planes landing in the background. Tempe station looks pretty steam age, too. The old railway bridge across the Cooks River is in good order as well.