last couple of weeks

 Morning glory is one of the curses of the Wolli Creek bush, particularly on the human-natural borders, which, given that the whole strip of bush is squeezed in between the back gardens of Homer St and the railway line, means that in some areas it's winning. There are a couple of volunteer groups slowly working their way along the track eliminating the stuff, and doing a fantastic job. So, anyway, it's a pestilential noxious weed, why am I photographing it? Because I have been under the misapprehension that this is the flower from Hartley's Go-Between, and I felt I'd finally captured the

threatening quality that the book completely failed to convince me of. 10 minutes of research have just remedied my ignorance, so now all I have a faintly menacing picture of a faintly menacing flower - perhaps symbolic of its invasiveness. This other picture captures something of the glow of early morning sun; so I'm pleased with the pictures as pictures, even if they're slightly misinterpreted.

Reflection pictures; another weakness. Mangroves along Wolli Creek, although it was the steelwork that caught my eye. It's the bus depot; well, a bus depot for one of the private companies that survives on Sydney Rail's inability

to run a rail network, and school excursions. They're probably just holding on to the land so they can sell to a developer. I haven't included any pictures here, but the south side of Cooks River / Wolli Creek is being swallowed by high rise high density housing. Ten years and I think between the developers and the road builders none of this will be left.

It seems like lose-lose. If we accept the flats, it should be as a public-transport serviced (and it is, very well serviced) alternative to freeway commuting to low density outer suburbs. On that basis, I'd make the compromise; bush + flats-as-backdrop is better than a freeway which will eliminate this bushland pretty much completely.

The bats have moved across the river - they've pretty much destroyed their homes on the south side of the river and they're settling in on the north. Let them back into the Botanical Gardens, I say. Why shouldn't the eastern suburbs share the pain?

Of course, everybody has to be somewhere, in the immortal words of Eccles.

Beautiful day. I'm typing this waiting for the next hailstorm. An hour ago we had 21 mm of rain in about 20 minutes. Factory roofs have collapsed under the weight of the hail. I had 9 bowls out

collecting water in the kitchen - beyond a certain intensity, it just doesn't cope. Like Sydney's storm water system generally.

Finally, a picture I'm immensely pleased with. A tribute, I suspect, to having a real camera - well, anyway, a camera with a real lens. Light, spiders' webs, framing; this part of the TVT really washes up well. The week's rain is still making its way down to the creek, so there are pools and baby waterfalls and lots of green everywhere.
Normally I run along here and it's bone dry. Today I felt that discretion might be the better part etc. It was a nice walk.

Later on I took out my boat, which is this silvery thing you see here, a construction style called "barracuda" - I don't know why particularly, although I guess it's to do with the fabric underlying the fibreglass. This is heavier and smaller than Liz's kevlar composites, but not much.

The bottle is a small part of the debris post-flooding from Tuesday's storms. Bottles and plastic bags are the bulk of the evidence.

 I enjoy the built structures as well as the natural world - this is the bridge carrying oil and gas pipelines over Wolli Creek, not the bridge in the above picture carrying the Princes Hwy. The bricks have an extraordinary patina, almost convincing you that they're contributing their own light to the show. I'm not sure if this is an old railway bridge that has been re-purposed for the pipelines; I have a faint idea that I read that somewhere, and I've noticed elsewhere that early 20th century railway brickwork is often very high quality.

I took a lot of these kinds of pictures; this is the best. The bush in the Wolli creek walk pictures above is about 20 metres up from these mangroves - this is the lower of the two daily high tides. Another metre up and you can see the plastic bags at flood level. If you come down here at low tide (the creek is navigable all the way to the weir at Turrella, even at low tide, but the rooks are more problematic) the smell of the anaerobic bacteria around the roots can be a bit startling sometimes.

This is the exhaust stack from the M5 tunnel. Apart from wondering why it's set in a valley, ponder that fact that the creek is actually flowing over a 4 lane freeway tunnel. The State government wants to double its size; except it's going to be hugely cheaper just to plough over the top than expand underground. And, even assuming that we all want to bear the cost of an underground expansion, the collateral damage above ground, both in construction and on-going support infrastructure (more smokestacks, emergency exits, access roads) isn't going to leave the landscape unscarred. And it's borderline now. It won't stand a lot more stress. You can see the difference in the bank vegetation on this side (the south); almost 100% weeds in the space between the depots and factories just behind the treeline.

That's the one threat, and below is the other. This is just one of the tens (and I don't think 'hundreds' would be much of an exaggeration) of blocks of flats springing up along the river and the creek. None of them are any more architecturally distinguished than this.

You can just make out a crane on the left; another block will be going in between the railway line and the block you see now. It's not easy being a bird in Sydney. This white-faced heron probably nests on Fatima island in the Cooks river (roughly behind the photographer), so its family has been coming here for a long time.

Below, a link to a much better photographer than me, and a fine collection of  shots of Cooks river bird life.     Cooks River Birds

 Finally, since the title says "...couple of weeks...", here's the approach to the finish line at St. Peters (Sydney) park on my record breaking run.

And below, the official result.

Next: 10 km sub 40, and a handicap score over 80% (which equates to a time of 19:23 - not so far to go). If you think about that handicap score for a second, you'll realise the record it's based on is around 15 minutes!

Prince Edward Park

 When Liz goes paddling at Woronora, I usually take the opportunity to do a bit of trail running, but today, Easter Monday, is a rest day post the Sunday long run, so it was more bushwalking than running. When we work out how to fit two canoes on top of one small car I may join her on the water - it really is stunning landscape.

I need to find out what these lumps in the trees are called, and the first cause of them; students always ask me when I take them bushwalking and not

 being able to answer damages my reputation for omniscience. I don't think you can make out the white cockatoos that were entertaining themselves in the vicinity, but I swear there is one behind that trunk in the left foreground.

I don't quite feel that I've caught this picture as I wanted; the sunlight which makes the spider's web so strong an image in reality has to be shielded from the lens and the lack of exposure control on the phone camera makes it a bit dark.

But it's not too bad. What you also can't see is that the spider is actually weaving the web as this image is being shot - the hole in the middle is diminishing quite quickly. Almost certainly a golden orb - I saw plenty of other mature webs by the side of the path.

Another failed photography challenge; again, shooting into the sun. These "red" leaves - as seen by my eyes - are actually dead brown leaves

 rendered almost phosphorescent by the sun, but the camera doesn't reproduce the contrast that I saw in the scene. Probably with photoshop and a camera with more manual controls something could be done; on the other hand if 100% of a walk could be captured on "film", who'd go walking?

Spectacular rock formations, in a low key way. Sydney sandstone is everywhere, north, south east and west - I don't know what makes some parts of it more resistant to erosion than others. The path through here is concrete, which is not the style of the big national park walks; I wonder if they represent an older approach to bush tourism, or the difference between a council seeking cost-effectiveness, and a forestry department seeking minimalist intervention. Could easily be both of course. The concrete was what I - knowing nothing about the topic - consider "old-fashioned, by which I mean heavy on road-metal aggregate, which I see in the older footpaths around the inner city.  Newer pavements wear quite differently.

There's probably a book to be written on pipelines in Sydney. There was a time when they were buried (there's one running under the TVT along Wolli Creek/Bardwell Valley), and then there was a time when they weren't. Obviously a lot cheaper just to run them above ground. I'm thinking though, that probably they are now buried again, if any more are being constructed. I don't mind them - up to a point, I didn't enjoy crawling under one on the Manly run - because it

 seems foolish to pretend that there aren't actually people living in Sydney. The contrast between civil engineering and bushland is at least thought provoking. And, since the pipe itself is a kind of graffiti on the landscape, why shouldn't it in turn be inscribed? Really, there's a fantastic opportunity for a concerted attack of decoration here. Maybe I'll apply for a grant.

The banksia flowers are in a more open area, to the South. Again, the light hasn't really been captured as it is in my mind. If you were curious about trail running, this picture gives a reasonable idea of a typical downhill, although it probably

 isn't as rocky as it might be if we were in one of the northern parks.

Two pictures of Forbes Creek (possibly), which runs into the Woronora. In the picture to the right it's almost impossible to distinguish the reflection from the banks and the rocks of the ford; the picture below, downstream, is a simple 180 degree pivot - amazing the difference in the light in a matter of 20-30 metres. Well, the difference in light is in a way obvious given the difference in vegetation, but the sudden change in tree cover is unmotivated by anything I could see, other than the ford.

Easter Sunday saw me in Liz's new boat, at the Regatta centre in Penrith. You don't see me in a lot of boat pictures, but this particular boat is very persuasive. It's very easy to move through the water (my personal boat is a bit of a tub - for stability reasons), and it has a rudder for steering. It was a very warm afternoon.