Monday, March 22, 2010

The folly at Tambourine Bay

Things I like about Sydney No. 16: the folly at Tambourine Bay.

Whilst the systematic eradication of foxes continues apace at Berry Island and in Balls Head Reserve, Sniff and I have had to find some alternative pleasure-grounds in which to go rambling. Our current favourite is the sweetly-named Tambourine Bay and its finest attraction: a peculiar mauve and yellow folly...

To reach Tambourine Bay you drive in the opposite direction to the fox murder crime scenes along the winding River Road, through a large stretch of nature reserve (forbidden to dogs), past an enormous Catholic boys school and into a small car park in front of the bay. A house is being built just on the edge of the bay and the car park usually has a few builders vans in it but otherwise it's often empty and we rarely encounter anyone else on our walks.

There are two directions you can go from the car-park: left along the waterfront, past a Sea Scouts Hut and a derelict open-air pool into the woods and a walk along a creek just like that at the bottom of our garden, or right along the waterfront towards a place called Riverview. Sniff and I prefer the latter direction for its boat sheds, strange rock formations, Crimson Rosellas and scuttling crabs.

The first thing of note you come across is the Tambourine Bay Well. This is essentially a square hole carved out of sandstone in 1883 by one Thomas Duckworth to collect water for the locals from a natural spring. I bumped into Mr. Duckworth's great-grandson here one Saturday -  I have a feeling he lingers about the well on weekends specifically to buttonhole unsuspecting walkers, to tell a long-winded story about his petitions to the local council to get the well uncovered in 1991, about his great-grandfather's hard life, about the local council's stupidity in getting things wrong on all their plaques etc. etc. In fact, Mr. Duckworth's great-grandson followed me and Sniff on our perambulations for over half an hour pointing out Aboriginal middens and the like in order to tell us how the council had destroyed this that and the other, about his great-grandfather's hard life, about the local council's stupidity in getting things wrong on all their plaques etc. etc. I was secretly cursing Mr. Duckworth for having any children at all let alone great-grandchildren after only ten minutes of his company. Therefore I cannot pass on any of Mr. Duckworth's great-grandchild's riveting information to you as I was simply thinking: Go away, go away, go away you annoying little man and not listening at all...

Here's Sniff in imitation of Narcissus, standing at the edge of the well and staring at his beautiful self:























Beyond the well there is a lovely grove of trees to meander through before descending to the shoreline and passing a couple of boat sheds. I do vaguely remember Mr. Duckworth's great-grandson telling me a complicated story about all the local boat sheds being burnt down once by an arsonist who was never caught by the police but who he was convinced was a student at the Catholic college nearby. He started drawing a map in the dirt with a stick to explain all his theories whilst complaining about the stupidity of the police, the local council and the local government etc. etc...I was by now thinking very violent thoughts about Mr. Duckworth's great-grandson and as he continued on and on and on I started pondering the possibility that if he was right and the police were so stupid perhaps I'd get away with doing him in...

Anyway, back to our idyllic ramble, for normally we are, after all, alone. And we're coming up to the subject of this week's blog: a folly.

Past the Macquarie University boat shed which is always locked and devoid of activity, past the St. Ignatius College boat shed where you may encounter the occasional sea-faring type polishing an oar or oiling an engine or tying a complicated knot, as well as the occasional catholic schoolboy clambering into the boat he sails to school each day (it's another world, really), down an elevated pathway taking you back amongst the trees and the lizards and before your eyes appears this:






















It's perched, as you see, out upon the water, a folly with no discernible purpose (which is after all the definition of a folly is it not?). Painted in yellow and a maroon that speaks of congealed blood its vaguely Moorish appearance sits strangely in its Sydney surroundings. There are no plaques (probably just as well because the local council apparently get everything wrong - ask Mr. Duckworth's great-grandson...) telling us who built it, who owns it, who looks after it. It's a mystery. And that's why I like it.






















I also like to think that the blood-red paint, which looks fairly new, was chosen specifically to reflect a local natural phenomenon which I photographed just round the corner....the bleeding of gums...






















The folly has two pillars standing sentinel to guide you towards its centre, except they are only a couple of feet high. Methinks that someone somewhere ran out of money or possibly inspiration. Or perhaps pesky local catholic schoolboys have stolen whatever originally rested atop the two pedestals...


















The folly is a great shady spot in which to sit and read the odd chapter of one's latest book leaving Sniff contentedly meandering about sniffing, sniffing, sniffing. (Unlike the other dogs we have encountered he is not enamoured of the sea and refuses to take a dip, content with simply listening to the waves beat against the shore. He's a lot like me in that regard...) Looking up from your page, if you turn your head back the way we've come, you can see the towers of central Sydney in the distance, framed by our folly's  arches.






















But do not fear, the bustle of city life cannot be heard here. Instead it is the sudden stillness of midday when all of nature seems to pause for breath and the only sound is that of the water gently lapping against the shore. I shall leave you there sitting with your back against the folly, shoes kicked off, reading. There you are, look, I can just see you...

Thursday, March 11, 2010

The Marjorie Propsting Library

Things I like about Sydney No. 15; The Marjorie Propsting Library

Some buildings look like they haven't been changed or altered in any way for the last thirty or so years - the twenty-first century might be speeding along but they're still in the 1970s. Our shack in the bush is a case in point: it still has its original built-in cupboards, its original bathroom and kitchen, its original (now rotting) woodwork verandah and its original (now collapsed) gate posts.

The Marjorie Propsting Library, but five minutes from our front door, is another time-warp destination but this time from the late 60s. It is also a shack, close to rather than in the bush, with hideous decorative concrete blocks built into its external walls and a flat tin roof. It's extremely small for a library and built on a slope so that you look down upon the building from the pavement. It reminds me of the mobile library that used to come once a week to a car-park near our house in St Albans when I was a child and so I keep expecting the Marjorie Propsting Library to rev its engine and move on.... However, it's a comparatively solid proposition that's simply ignoring the whirl of modern life going on around it.

Here it is in all its glory.























The wonderful thing about this place, if you can get your head around its very peculiar opening hours, is that, despite being a shack in the woods, they can pander to your every bibliophilic desire...

I joined Marjorie's library soon after moving into Glenview Street in January after Daniel pointed out to me that we would never be able to afford to freight all the books I am buying back home to London. He does have a point - my collection of Victorian novels has grown exponentially since living in Sydney because you can find things cheaply here that would cost the earth back home. (George Gissing's The Odd Women in its first one-volume edition of 1894 for twelve dollars anybody? - a novel I highly recommend you all read). So I am allowing myself to continue to buy the old stuff but when I want to read something written after 1900 I must turn to Marjorie Propsting.

I phoned up in the afternoon after the morning I'd joined (for FREE) and asked whether they could get three books for me which I had found in the catalogue on-line of the larger neighbouring Lane Cove Library. Next morning they phoned me back, on my mobile, to tell me all three books were ready to collect from Marjorie's but five minutes from my door. What service! The best (and only good) service you get in Sydney!

I thought I should push them further. Test their stamina. I phoned them up again a few weeks later (having read and returned the first pile of books) and asked whether they could buy some books for me that weren't yet in their or any of the other local libraries' catalogue. Of course, they said. Just tell us what they are and we will process an order...But they haven't been published here yet, I said, only in the UK. That's fine, I was told. We can still obtain them for you.


I love the Marjorie Propsting Library. I love librarians. Marjorie herself was a librarian. And a mayor (so being a librarian is obviously not a dead-end job but the first step on the political ladder). Marjorie set up this particular library shortly before dying of myocardial infarction in 1972.  She had been elected mayor of Lane Cove in 1963 after years of work on various councils and committees but once in office always refused to be called Your Worship. She preferred the honorific 'Marj'.

So 'Marj', thanks for setting up our local bookshop, I mean library. I will do my utmost to keep it running whilst I reside in Greenwich by putting in endless requests for obscure and not so obscure books. May your mailbox always be full to bursting.






















Postscript.

These beautiful Tiger Moths were mating (or dancing or courting or fighting) on the pavement just round the corner from Marj's library. They are less commonly know as White Antenna Wasp Moths despite their obviously black antenna and the fact that they're black not white...

(...oops, couldn't keep the nature out of this posting after all...)


Friday, March 5, 2010

The Golden Crowned Snake

Things I like about Sydney No. 14: Expecting the Unexpected...

As I walk down the drive of a morning, bleary-eyed and half-asleep, heading out for the first constitutional of the day, there are a few things I quite naturally expect. I expect that Sniff will be bounding ahead, peeing and sniffing as per usual, occasionally casting a backwards glance at me as if to say "Get a move on!"; I expect there to be the same two crested pigeons strutting on the lawn, pecking at the bare earth between the sparse tufts of grass for whatever it is that crested pigeons eat; I expect to stop and check up on the two curled-up balls of gray fur in the possum nest in the tree by our rotting gatepost to make sure they've survived another night of plunder; I expect Sniff to sniff afore-mentioned tree and to whine in frustration because he cannot reach the possum nest; I expect to be dive-bombed by a noisy miner or two squawking in their hideous fashion; and I expect to have to brush the odd cobweb from my face, built across the drive overnight by the ever-zealous golden orb weavers.

What I do not expect to come across, lying dead in the middle of the drive, is a snake. A SNAKE!!!!

After all, our neighbours, who I now obviously cannot trust an inch, told us in our first week here that the only snake they have seen in the neighbourhood in twenty years was a non-toxic python.

But this morning, lo and behold, there this was, spotted first by the eagle-eyed Daniel, then by me and then completely ignored by the mystifying Sniff:























Now there is something heart-stopping about coming across a snake: they are such rare creatures after all and unutterably shy, doing their utmost to avoid us humans if they can. So if you do see one it's normally out of the corner of your eye as it scuttles into the undergrowth. But here it was, this morning, revealed in its full, albeit deceased, glory: a snake.

Time for a bit of scientific investigation...

Once we had ascertained that it was indeed dead (it didn't run away, attack us or seem to mind the ants chewing at its underbelly) we turned it over carefully with a stick to see what the other side looked like...























This led Daniel, the native amongst us, to believe that it was an immature Red-Bellied Black Snake as the belly was indeed pinkish and the snake indeed rather small.

But I have done my research and can tell you that it is, as any fool would know looking at the markings on its head in the first photo, a Golden Crowned Snake...

Ordinarily the Golden Crowned Snake is exceptionally difficult to spot  because it is nocturnal, emerging at the same time as possums of a night to hunt for frogs, sleeping lizards and even other snakes. And not only is it nocturnal but it is also very secretive...which means that we could be surrounded by them without ever knowing. They are probably curled up underneath the house in their thousands; perhaps our drive positively writhes with them of a night.

The Golden Crowned Snake lays its eggs in January which then hatch in March. The young are 15 cm when born but this specimen was about 55 cm long which makes it an adult - one which sadly will never get to see its children...

But I know what you all want to know and.....YES! It is venomous...I quote from the Australian Museum, the natural history museum here in Sydney: "When cornered, these snakes flatten their heads, arch the neck strongly and make a series of striking movements with a closed mouth, but rarely actually bite. The Golden-crowned Snake is venomous, but not considered dangerous"  - presumably because no-one ever comes across the buggers...

I shall watch out over the next few days to see what happens to our Golden Crowned Snake. I've moved him (or her  - my scientific investigations were really rather limited) to the side of the drive so we don't drive over the body. Will it be eaten slowly by ants or swallowed whole by a magpie? Will there be a nightly vigil over the corpse officiated by its mate and offspring? Will our neighbours admit their foolish error when I point out the snake to them? Can you milk venom from a dead snake? Questions, questions.

For those of you thinking "Oh God, nature blah, blah, nature blah, animals, birds, blah, blah" I am going to be racking my brains to think of something I like about Sydney that has nothing to do with nature for my next few blog entries.

It may therefore be some time until you hear from me again....