Woronora Bridge

This is the Woronora Bridge, built by Bob Carr and co. way back when - roughly 2000 - and a very impressive piece of architecture it is. Of course if you live in Bangor (at the top of the hill on the right) your peaceful isolated bush home now has the roar of a six lane highway less than 50 meters away. But you can get to work quickly. The old bridge can be seen at river level towards the background - it's two lanes wide and has a 15 km speed limit on approach.

The walkway under the bridge is broad and handsome. Wooden planks underfoot make it a pleasant surface to walk on, a little springier than you might expect.

The view isn't bad.

Finally an in-focus picture of a spider's web. (Turns out the phone has a "manual" focus facility)

Gum trees from above. Doesn't quite capture the oddness - from the ground the leaves dominate the canopy, but from above the tree seems almost leafless, well on the way to being dead.

The old road, also from above.

TVT Wolli Creek

Twin Valley Trail

The link goes to a not particularly good video; I have a lot to learn about editing. It's very bumpy. It's taken the 4 days after the heavy rains, so it looks pretty lush.  Usually I run this trail but I'm managing an injury at the moment, so this is at walking speed. Sadly at this stage the running videos are just too bumpy for viewing.

I think it gives a feel for the different elements. It's a heavily compromised landscape; quarry, earthworks, drains, parks and paths. For all that, it has charm.

 After a pruning frenzy, the back garden currently looks like this. This is the two lower storeys; the tops of the two tree ferns and the eucalypt have been cut off. I must say that I quite like the way the tap has held up as an aesthetic feature over the years. It started off as a water feature (and a lesson in the physics of cheap pumps), but now it's just there, gleaming gently. We've just picked a dozen oranges from the tree - considering that we do nothing to really maintain it.

 On Tuesday night Liz and I went to a classical concert at the Angel Place recital hall - this is the lane (China Lane, I think) outside. It was very interesting; a series called "Discovery", with the conductor, Richard Gill, discussing the piece in some detail first, with the aid of both a piano and fragments of the orchestra. The piece was Mahler's "Wanderer", three songs for baritone and orchestra. The orchestra was the Sydney Sinfonia, a training orchestra associated with, and mentored by, the Sydney Symphony. I'm no bigger fan of Mahler than I was previously, but I undeniably know more about what I'm not a fan of.

It was also interesting from the point of view of an educator, because the style was very much what I enjoy, which is a barrage of high speed information, but a well-illustrated barrage with both theory and practice. It wasn't to the taste of all the audience, though, because I heard one punter agreeing with another that the "first bit" had been incomprehensible.

Ability has taken over the whole of the building that we have been occupying for the past seven years now, and thanks to the corporate photos, I got to visit the second floor balcony (senior management). Reflected in the windows are the street trees and the UTS library opposite. I didn't quite manage the light, and the reflection from the upper two thirds has somewhat darkened the lower third.

Tempe Reserve at sunset - Liz is off running somewhere. This is the building site at Wolli Creek station. In the bottom photo you can barely make out the head and tail lights of the traffic on the Princes Highway. Members of the Tempe Motor Boat Association have turned in for the night. It's very tranquil.

Wet Sundays

 It was wet down at Woronora (Burnum Burnum Reserve) this AM, and has been all week no doubt. There were a lot of fungi on the casuarina litter behind the car park. I had a bit of time to kill post run and pre the Liz return, so I tested the camera's macro abilities. It struggled in both of these to sort out the auto focus; the background seems to be winning. Still, call it art, who knows?

I don't claim to be an expert on fungi - neither of these are familiar to me (not that I pay that much attention to my feet generally).

It was wet for the running, too. I posted some shots from here a few weeks ago - so imagine those rocks with water on them. In fact, pretty much every path was a small stream, causing me to wonder which came first, the path or the stream, in fact, so I ran fairly gingerly. Plus the uphills are hard work; the ridges are very steep.

I've lost track of the rain. The rain gauge has overflowed twice. One night I had 9 pots out collecting the drips coming through the kitchen roof. Factory and office roofs over the city collapsed under the weight of the hail, so 9 pots sounds like an art house movie by comparison.

Saturday AM we had a respite, just enough to get the washing out on the line. And I managed to get out to the inauguration of a new parkrun, at Rhodes, on Canada Bay. The sun almost shone. It's a very nice flat course, roughly half in Bicentennial Park, next to the Olympic stadia, and the other half along the recently reconstructed edges of Canada Bay. My gym is in Rhodes, oddly enough, so I know the area quite well.

This whole area has been built by real estate developers; the land is reclaimed, some amount of toxic industrial residues removed. I was never here before then, so I can't tell you what industrial ambiance has been destroyed. I do know that there is a degree of racial tension between the Asian-Australian flat-dwellers and the European-Australian house-owners. It's a little disappointing that a nation of immigrants has so little respect for immigration other than their own.

Olympic Park looms large in the background - it's not pollution (today, anyway), it's cloud. The weather is the kind of humid where you can't be sure it's not raining. This shot was taken by the marshal at the turnaround point, so it's halfway. Hopefully I'm looking relaxed, but the resolution on the picture isn't up to the enlargement required to check. I did manage a "negative split" - out in in 10:07 and back in 9:58, by my watch. That's quite pleasing, I almost always start too fast.

Autumn footpaths - the day after the storm

Back lane in the threatened Victoria Rd precinct

 On the subject of industrial ambiance, here are some pictures I took last Sunday afternoon, pretty much the first day out in a week. I've been having 2 weeks off running, so I went out for a walk instead. Three of these are in the area tipped for re-development; but whatever happens, it can't be denied that the area does have existing charm. Plus, contrary to some of the propaganda, people. Two printing factories were open. Two recording studios. A couple of shops, and several food factories; a lot of the city & inner suburban restaurant food comes from here. I wasn't the only tourist, either.

The Red Rattler studio/theatre/concert hall was conducting its Sunday afternoon "refresh".pending the Sunday show. And the bowling club was open. although admittedly, not for bowling. But socialising continues even when the rinks are sodden.

Hailstorm - Shepherd Street

Hailstorm - look what blew in!

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.

Manly Dam

Left-leaning, as always

The photographer has done a great job to get a feel for the light at 6:45 this AM. You can tell summer is past! In fact, it was so dark when I was coming up Pittwater Rd (I think - it changes its name about 10 times) that I missed the turnoff twice, heading North and then again going South when I realised my error. Apparently Many Dam isn't a sufficiently interesting place to warrant a decent - that is, large, reflective, well-lit - sign. Well, I guess that makes it all the better for the locals, because it's a fantastic spot. I'm a bit surprised I've never been here before; I did, however, recognise a couple of spots in the Garigal National Park loop from previous runs on this side of the harbour.

I should find some stock footage - I had planned to take the phone for picture taking purposes, but I left it out of the bag (hence also the navigational problems) - but I'm sure Google can do the honours. I don't have enough of a naturalist's eye to describe the vegetation; predominantly the typical Sydney sclerophyll, with a

Best knee forward

mixture of both the wet and the dry varieties. There was one section in Garigal where we ran through the wind-stunted ridge-top brush that I'm particularly fond of. I think it's the sudden light, and sensation of space after the passageway of a lot of the trails. Plus, the sound is very different in those open spaces, the city's sounds are more accessible so you have the awareness of being in the bush in the city.

I also got that bush in the city feeling crawling under a bloody great pipe, twice, just rampaging its way through the bush from suburban outpost to suburban outpost. I guess it's water.

Speaking of water, people say the nursery rhyme Jack & Jill isn't plausible, because who would go up a hill to find water? Well, all the worst puddles and wettest section of the track today were high up, so you can put that in the Funk & Wagnalls! I've observed this phenomenon elsewhere, also.

One good thing about trails is that they enforce a relatively slow pace on you. Of course they extract a massive toll on the uphill and downhill muscles, but there's always enough flatland muscle left for an eye-catching sprint to the line. I could hear these two guys behind me, and I was NOT planning to let them pass me at the finish. Two people had already out-descended me on the last big hill after I'd run past them on the ascent, so I was not in a charitable mood!

Woodstock is my new running club - this was the maiden run in club colours.

 I've linked the Garmin report (it's better than the one from Wentworth Falls, but still not perfect. The watch shuts down on hills because the horizontal movement isn't significant - particularly on uphill legs.

Course map and run details

It certainly didn't feel as brutally up-and-down as Wentworth Falls, but while there were no massive ascent/descent sections, there wasn't that much flat stuff either. Just a constant variety. I'm getting better at descending, without a doubt, for all the times I got passed today. I remember the first trail run I did northside (NOSH) I walked down the declines. Now, if possible, I bound, thinking - sometimes - of the Swallows and Amazons "galumphing" down the fells. In a bid for literary credibility I will mention that I also occasionally think about Japhy Ryder in Dharma Bums insisting that you can only run down mountains. It's true that your body does an extraordinary job of processing all the information, much faster than you can consciously think about it - up to a point at least you can really let yourself go, so long as you concentrate. I struggle a bit with my eyes - when it's cold, as in the early AM, they water uncontrollably which doesn't help the focus; and when I heat up, I sweat (profusely, as you will notice above) and again, that doesn't help the focus. But still, I was pleased with the technical side of the running today - very satisfactory.

After the storm...

With Grevillea...

...without Grevillea

Someone better than I am with post-processing software could probably have balanced the lighting in these two pictures (and someone better with cameras wouldn't be relying on the auto settings). It's actually quite difficult to see the Grevillea in the top picture; it's sort of left-centre-top, behind the Melaleuca. The Melaleuca had just undergone a vicious prune.

In the second picture the Melaleuca is growing back, and you can see the gap behind it which used to be completely filled by the Grevillea. Sunday's storm (last day of February) removed it partially, and Saturday I chopped it down completely. We can see a lot more of the fence - which is reminding me I have to get on to the neighbour about it.