Teenagers!

God bless ‘em. I really did think that they’d be onto the newly painted wall of Opalescent Signs much more quickly than they did, but in spite of their appalling Gen Y work ethic they eventually they got there.

I was walking back up the creek with Old Mate the other evening when I heard a load of yahooing and shouting coming from Chatham Road. Not surprisingly, Old Mate takes a cautious approach to mobs of teenagers running around in the creek. To my relief, my phone started ringing and it turned out that one of the yahoos was my son: “Is that you with Old Mate?”. I got him and his buddy to give us a big wave; not all teenagers are thugs!

This adolescent, however, was pretty full of himself. He was in the casuarina in my front garden, strutting around with his chest all puffed out and singing at the top of his voice. I walked up and took his photo; his parents were calling out to him from the safety of the red gum but he wasn’t fazed. Not one bit. He just stood his ground, gave me the eye and warbled a bit more. I can almost see the speech bubble: “You want some, granddad? Huh?”

The other truth about teenagers – that they’re permanently starving – was proved about two seconds after I took this photo of a dead bream. The four-legged teenager in my life, Jambo, appeared from nowhere and scoffed the lot (head, tail, entrails) in about two gulps before swaggering off all pleased with himself. He’d just had breakfast!

Before they’re teenagers, they’re children. I came across this olden-time baby’s highchair amongst a stand of dead lantana in the gasworks. I know someone who knows someone whose father was the manager of the gasworks in the fifties and who grew up in the house (now part of the ELGAS admin area) that was the manager’s residence. I doubt that this was his, it looks too recent (sixties or early seventies maybe) but I do wonder who it belonged to, and how it ended up here.

The highchair reminded of something else I came across last November, another sign perhaps of the social side of life in the gasworks. This old-style golf caddy still had tees, balls and a score card in the wooden storage box. Was it part of a works thing? Did guys hit a few balls around the site of a lunchtime? Guess I’ll never know.

Finally, me and Jambo took Murray, Django and Trigger the dog out for a tour of the creek and the gasworks. Visitors always like hamming it up by the old pull-shower. Get in that bath, boy!

 

Happy Jambos!

Hearts of Midlothian, the Jam Tarts, the Jambos, the only Scottish football team to be named after an Australian cairn terrier, are a happy bunch tonight!

The low down

Walking through the gasworks of an evening I’m often exasperated at how many rabbits I see and that Jambo doesn’t. Nose to the ground, he’s so involved in scenting them out that he doesn’t look up to see them scampering past not ten feet away. It put me in mind of the Metamorphoses, Ovid’s 2,000-year-old collection of poems about greedy, brutish humans and the wrathful, vengeful gods who punish their transgressions by turning them into trees or fish or spiders or whatever is deemed suitable.

Last year I read Ted Hughes’s translation (or, really, rewriting) of the poems, Tales from Ovid, which is absolutely brilliant. Acteon, returning from a hunt, stumbles across Diana bathing naked in a pool. She’s so furious that she turns him into a stag; when he leaves the pool his hunting companions see him and hunt him to the death. You get the idea. There was another (but I can’t remember the name) about a person who is turned into a dog and the description of this stupid mortal transmogrifying from two legs to four, being condemned to forever viewing the world from low down, is a perfect account of Jambo and my contrasting world views. I tried getting low down this week to see his world.

The lorikeets have been stripping a mandarin tree near the creek, tearing open the unripe fruit then discarding them as though disappointed to find them too tart and bitter, then moving on to the next one.

Richardson Park has been home to a large flock of ibis (Australian white and straw necked) this week, stalking around the fig trees and probing the thick mulch.

But find of the week was this long-necked turtle down by the beck. I think he must have journeyed  from way up towards Kotara, where it’s more turtle-friendly. He was struggling here, occasionally plopping back into the water (when he thought I’d gone) and trying to swim, without much success, against the current.

There’s always something pleasurable about seeing an unexpected creature or thing down the creek. There are places in Newcastle where you can see dozens of turtles but one, here, is special, like the occasional dotterels or bitterns that I see further downstream.

I hope he doesn’t end up as cormorant fodder. But, then, that’s nature. Like Ovid’s gods, nature doesn’t muck about.

This morning, a strange new type of ball came bobbing down the beck. It’s bright orange and looks like a golf ball, with a hard plastic skin. Not very bouncy and is about the size of tennis ball. It had the word “UNI” scrawled in Texta on the outside. I’m probably typical of most men in that I’ll watch almost anything on TV that involves other men chasing a ball around, but I’ve never seen a ball like this before. What is it for?

Generation mash-up

Countless times I’ve found myself in the creek staring up as a train rattles past from Newcastle to Telarah or back again. In the morning or late afternoon, which is generally when I walk Jambo, the carriages are full of commuters reading their books or iPads or newspapers, or staring glumly with their chin cupped in their hand. If anyone does see me I wonder if they’re wondering “What the hell is he doing down there?”

On Saturday I had the rare opportunity to be the face on the train staring down into the creek. It was Groovin the Moo day at Maitland and, in time-honoured tradition, I got the train up from Hamilton Station with the Young Folk. I must have looked a bit odd as we neared the creek, taking photos of all my favourite landmarks: the gas tower with POAS and CUBE on it; the points shelter; the rail easement.

And finally – TA DAH! – Styx Creek.

And then Clyde Street. It was nice to be on the side causing the queue rather than in it.

Groovin the Moo was good fun. Highlights were Public Enemy’s mash-up of AC/DC’s Back in Black, and the set by Kaiser Chiefs.

But it’s not just the Young Folk who are creative and inspiring. On Sunday I got to mix it up with a different but equally inspiring generation. I’d had a call from Allan and Pamela Carruthers as Pam wanted a copy of the book for Allan. The Carruthers own a property in Kotara South that backs onto the Styx, very near its headwaters. Allan’s a real goer and has led a bush regeneration project in  his street, drawing in his neighbours and Newcastle City Council’s Bushcare team to help him tackle a patch of what used to be lantana and bramble.

His efforts are remarkable; the lantana’s been beaten back and massive numbers of indigenous natives have been planted. The creek’s once again become home to wrens, water dragons and a red-bellied black snake called Sam, and is visited by some of the larger prey animals, such as powerful owls and peregrine falcons, that base themselves in nearby Blackbutt Reserve.

One of the Bushcare team reckon that this is not natural tearing in the bark of this turpentine, below, but is a scar tree, a tree that’s had bark removed in the recently ancient past by Aboriginal people to make a coolamon or shield. All this and barely a kilometre from Garden City!

Such fun. Thanks, Steve and Rod, for GTM. And thanks, Allan and Pamela, for showing me your corner of the Styx.

Autumn noodling

A glorious autumn day, the kind that makes you feel glad to be alive. The grass-cutting crew was out and about.

Huge clouds of swallows swoop around the tidal pool. There have been large squadrons of black and great cormorants on the litter boom but in the last few days they’ve all gone, to be replaced by one or two little pied cormorants. I’m not sure whether the pieds prefer saltwater to the brackish and fresh water but I rarely see them this far upstream. But I did see this lonely Ug boot.

Here’s the answer to one of the missing cormorants. I didn’t see it; of course it was Jambo who sniffed it out. It’s been dead a while and, from a distance, blended perfectly into the bleached dead stems of a lantana bush laid flat by blades of the tractor slasher.

I also found a lucky rabbit’s foot. I’ll bet the three-legged rabbit it belongs to doesn’t feel very lucky.

On the way back, a tale of contrast. Firstly, this little sprig of broccoli. (Sprig? Node? Nub? Clove? Nodule? Stalk? Stem? Please advise.) I’ve seen just about everything in the creek but this little piece of bright green vegetable just looked plain weird. It was so bright and fresh!

And so, secondly, this inspection cap. Not only did it have the usual spangled, tarry, bituminous gump coming out but today a sick-looking kind of frothy ooze.

The benefits of working for myself are many. I can go to aikido at lunchtime, for a start, though the down side is that it can cut a two-hour hole in my day by the time I’ve cycled there, been flogged around, gotten home, showered and back in front of the glowing monitor. I had to catch up on a job and I was late finishing, and so late walking Jambo.

Dusk fell on the gasworks just as we arrived. This picture doesn’t do it justice but the gloaming through the seed heads of the grasses created a mauve carpet that hovered three feet above the earth, foregrounding a spectacular sunset pierced by a single vapour trail.

It’s soon dark in May; a quick circuit and we were in darkness, without even the waning Super Moon to guide us. Just the floodlights in the ELGAS depot.

A cold change is forecast. I’ll soon be pining for days like these.

Gdoof gdoof gdoof

Opalescent Signs on Chinchen Street in Islington backs onto Styx Creek. They have a fence made out of concrete reinforcing mesh; it’s overgrown with a kind of purple-flowering vine but I can still see in, and the guys can see out. If I’m taking the eastern banking down under  Chinchen Street bridge, past Islington Public School and as far as the TAFE then I go past Opalescent Signs, and this compressor. It’s endless g’doof g’doof g’doof sound is the backdrop to my mornings.

I like it though because it reminds me of some wild Harley-inspired steam-punk time machine or something.

Opposite Opalescent Signs, on the western bank, is a place with huge, tall sheds. There are great tall stacks of pallets and guys beaver around in forklift trucks, moving them back and forth. Jambo is fascinated by them, these forklifts – fascinated, I suspect, in a “capture and kill” kind of way. I reckon it’s a scale or perspective thing; he think they’re actually quite small, like rats or baby rabbits. Capture. Kill.

The steam-punk compressor kicked off a minor vehicle theme in my head. Behind Phillips Street is this renovator’s delight. There used to be a show on ABC when my kids were little in which the characters were all toys; there was inevitably a truck called (from memory) Diesel and it looked just like this.

Or this.

I looped round the creek, the gasworks and back up Clyde Street on Friday morning. I think it’s a crying shame that the centenary of the beautiful old Gas and Coke building slipped by unnoticed, and I feel annoyed with myself for not having pushed to make something happen.

On Chatham Road we came across an entire falafel, not the usual half-eaten job thrown from a car window at a passing cyclist (he said, speaking from bitter experience). What happened? Late night high jinks, on the way home from the Kent? Or did it fall out of someone’s backpack? That would have been annoying! So many streets, so many stories!

Steam on the creek

Late Friday afternoon and I watched in bewilderment as a long line of olden-time railway carriages trundled up the line and through the Clyde Street lights. Then the light bulb went on: they were getting ready for Steamfest!

I don’t know how I could have forgotten. My later father-in-law, born in the railway town of Werris Creek to a railway clerk father, was steam mad. (Don’t call them trains – they’re steam locomotives!) He built scaled-down versions, which he ran on the track at Edgeworth, and each year he’d be up at Maitland with all his steam-mad mates. So I felt duty bound to make the effort to watch at least one of them on the commute between Maitland and Newcastle. This is the 3526, crossing Styx Creek and pulling carriages backwards. I’ll bet there’s a proper railway term for that; Kev would have known.

The train (whoops, locomotive: don’t call them trains!) looks like it’s standing still here but I can assure you it wasn’t.

The toot of a steam loco is so much softer and more melancholic than the harsh parp! of a modern diesel (or “diseasel”, as Kev dismissively called them). On my later afternoon walk I caught this coal train, the 9010, thundering through Clyde Street. Maybe in forty years’ time I’ll feel nostalgic for that harsh parp!, but not yet.

The weather cooled on Monday. The creek was too slippery and so I took Jambo round the streets of Hamilton North, always a Plan B walk as far as he’s concerned as it means being on the lead. We came across several dead birds on Newcastle Street, as though they’d just dropped out of the trees. Perhaps they had, perhaps they’re the frailer and aged ones who couldn’t handle a sudden chill.

As winter looms it seems that birds are seeking safety in large groups. A flock of perhaps a hundred sulphur-crested cockatoos flew over my house today, and I counted eighteen cormorants by the TAFE litter boom. Though, after Jambo had tried to round them up, there were eighteen less.

Even the herons and egrets, normally solitary birds, appear to be grouping together.

There are still lots of wanderer butterflies in the gasworks, though fewer dragonflies. Certainly one fewer than before after this orb spider caught him. What must it be like to be trapped on a sticky web while you have the juice sucked out of you? Ugh!

This morning was one of those lovely fresh days. A day when you get out on your ladder and do some sprucing up. When this nice man’s finished, hhis black will make a beautiful background for some aerosol-based artwork. I’ll give it two days, max.

Also bumped into this very dapper gent on his way to TAFE. Very chic! I said, “Can I take your picture?” and he said, “Sure!” If I’d asked some older person (and I probably wouldn’t have even asked) I have the feeling that I’d have been met with suspicion and a refusal, but young people don’t mind. It might be the ubiquity of smart phones, blogs and Facebook but I think that this will be the most photographed generation ever. Till the next one.

Finally, if Kotara Under 16s would like to know where there ball is, simply go to the litter boom by the TAFE.

An explanation at last

I went to see Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams at the Newcastle Film Society on Sunday night. The images from the Chauvet Caves in France, thousands and thousands of years old, were spectacular, absolutely breathtaking. I wonder if my eyes were opened to new visions by seeing the film, because the next morning I saw this piece of repaired concrete in the creekbed, which I’ve walked over countless times before, and immediately thought of the paintings of the Chauvet cave lions. Perhaps it was the chance placement of a dead leaf that made an eye; I minute earlier or later and wouldn’t have seen it.

And here’s a photo of a spider, for no other reason than that I nearly walked into it and it scared the bejaysus out of me.

On Anzac Day evening I addressed the Booklovers, a group of people who meet every month at Cooks Hill Books. Derby Street just after dark was full of young men with the unfocused eyes and wobbly gait that’s a direct consequence of overdoing your remembrance. I cool wind blew in off the harbour and I wondered whether anyone would turn up to hear me prattle on about the creek and A Year Down the Drain.

I needn’t have worried; there was a good turn out and extra chairs had to be dug out from the back room. And apart from having a good conversation about books and drains I learned, at last, just what it is that I’m doing wrong by being in the creek.

I’ve been told many times that walking in there is illegal. However, when I’ve fronted up to Hunter Water’s offices and asked exactly what law I’m breaking I haven’t found anyone who’s been able to tell me. Explanations are garbled and convoluted; I know that Newcastle City Council have the rights and responsibilities over some of the creeks, Hunter Water over the others, and that there are various agreements and easements that allow NCC and HW to allow buildings and developments to take place over covered drains. But there isn’t, as far as I know, a map that a member of the public can go to to find out exactly who has rights over what.

This dog, for example, and his skateboard, is a CRIMINAL but does not even know it.

And this ballooon!

Seriously, I finally found out that this stretch of the Styx is held in freehold title by Hunter Water. It has a DP number (is that the correct term?) and a lot number. It’s private land, from the bankings down to the bed, and so to walk in there is equivalent to walking into someone’s back yard. Not all of the Styx is like this, and many of its tributaries are treated differently, but that’s the basic information that applies to the bit that I’ve been toddling along twice a day for several years.

It was like a great weight had been lifted from shoulders. At last I know what I’m doing wrong! Hooray.

Having said that, it won’t stop me, at least it won’t until I get the summons.

Finally, a photo taken on the way home from pub quiz at the Gateway last night, one of the last trains into Hamilton from Telarah. My eyes were as blurry as those young guys staggering up and down Derby Street on Wednesday. We came second and I won an ice bucket in the raffle. Apparently the person who delivers the meat trays didn’t turn up. Does anyone want an ice bucket?

What’s the buzz, cock?

I’m a nosy old git. If I’m walking down Styx Creek and I come across someone else down there I want to ask them “What the hell are you doing here?” I don’t mind them asking me what I’m doing: for one it’s self-evident (I’m walking the dog, of course!) and for another I don’t mind people asking blunt questions.

But wanting to ask these questions doesn’t mean that I actually do ask them. This morning, a crisp, breezy Anzac Day, I came across two guys under the Chatham Road bridge. I don’t mean standing on the creek bed, having a bit of a look round; they were hunched up in the scrunchy little gap, where the banking angles into the support beams. They were both in their late twenties, I’d guess, maybe early thirties. Well dressed. Clutching notebooks. Old Mate was under the arch on the opposite bank, asleep (or pretending to be). They were quite cheerful, these two, and we passed the time of day as though we were outside the post office in Beaumont Street. But screaming inside me all the time was the question “What the hell are you doing?”

Being British I carried on, of course, as though what they were doing – right here, right now, squashed into a narrow gap under the Chatham Road bridge on Anzac Day morning – was completely normal. But the further I walked towards Islington the more I resolved, on my return, to demand some answers.

I was talking about the creek with a friend a while back, moaning about the litter, and he asked me if I picked it up. He remembered how, as a boy, his father would always take a plastic bag to the beach and pick up litter as they walked along and how, being a boy, this filled him with an appalling sense of shame and embarrassment but now, as an adult, he found himself stuffing a plastic bag in his pocket whenever he set off for the beach. I must admit that I’m a sporadic picker-upper of litter, usually stung into action when the creek hasn’t flowed for a while and the drink cans are building up. (My best effort to date is 14 bags of the stuff.) This morning there were only big things, such as this bundle of cellophane:

And this busted paddling pool:

But I was doing a bit of an emu bob as a looped back through the gasworks and towards Clyde Street. A brightly coloured wrapper caught my eye and I bent to pick it up. Then stopped.

It’s not every day you find a 5″ glittery lady’s finger on the footpath and, though I’ll cheerfully pick up Jambo’s poo there was something about this that made go … hmm. What sucked me in though (and here’s the “nosy old git” link) was the bit of paper sticking out the side: “instruction manual”. Now that captured my imagination! An instruction manual? Surely you just, well, you know …

Apparently not! As well as the instructions for general use there’s a “warning” section, a “cleaning and care” section and even an unnervingly titled “electrical malfunction” section, from which I quote:

Excessive usage … will cause wear on the motor and cause the motor to overheat. If this happens and the vibrator seems alarmingly hot, switch it off immediately and allow to cool down before using again.

Alarmingly hot? Bloody hell.

A clanging of bells brought me to my senses and I realised that the gates were closed. A queue of traffic was banked up on Clyde Street and the drivers, one and all, were watching me, perhaps waiting to see what I’d do with my 5″ glittery lady’s finger. This time my sense of Britishness served me well and I did the right thing: put the wrapper in my pocket so that, later, I could separate the plastic casing (red-topped, general rubbish bin) from the instruction manual (yellow-topped, recycling bin).

I still had work to do. Those two men, under the Chatham Road bridge: would they still be there?

Annoyingly, they’d gone. Now I’ll never know what the hell it was they were up to. I’ll never be able to ask: what was the buzz, cock?

[Post script: all males of my age and ethno-cultural background will know that "What's the buzz, cock?" was the heading in Time Out, ahead of a review of TV show Rock Follies. It's the heading that famously gave Peter McNeish and Howard Trafford (aka  Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto) the idea for the name for their new band, Buzzcocks. Did you get Rock  Follies in  Australia? It was a show about the seedy side of the music industry and launched the careers of Julie Covington, Rula Lenska and the other woman whose name no-one ever remembers*. My cousin Andrew had the LP and I can still sing most of the theme tune.]

* Charlotte Cornwell. Thank you, Google.

A foggy morning

Sunday morning. A thick fog, which is just starting to lift as I hit the creek.

Sounds are muffled. The cars crossing the Griffiths Road bridge sound as though they’re much further away, but the bubbly ragtime of Eric Gibbons’ trombone over at the farmers’ markets sounds as though it’s coming from inside the drooping branches of the fig trees in Richardson Park.

It’s been raining and the water’s dark. Since the start of La Nina last year a little “beach” has appeared at the confluence of the Styx and the Chaucer Street drain. It’s only a few feet long, maybe twenty feet by three feet, but it has the dappled corrugations of a real beach. I thought it was topsoil being washed down from the playing fields upstream but now I realise that it’s made from the sandy silt that leaches out from behind the concrete bankings.

There are gaps appearing in the soil behind the concrete in some stretches of the creek, holes that you could stick your arm into (if you were foolhardy enough to want to do so).

Wherever you have a hard material up against a soft material you’ll have some kind of erosion. Down at Throsby Creek they’re tackling the issue by removing some of the concrete bankings and replacing them with battered-back rock revetments.

I’m not sure that this would work for the Styx, if only because the banking is so much steeper and deeper, but at some point in the future Hunter Water is going to have to engage with this problem. It’ll be interesting to see what they come up with, given that the Styx (unlike Throsby) isn’t surrounded by well-visited, highly used parkland.

In the meantime, Jemena Pty Ltd, the owners of the derelict gasworks, have installed a couple of new inspection caps.

That’s interesting.