A small photographic update to the "denizens of our garden" post

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...

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...)

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....

A small update...

Disaster has struck at Berry Island. There are to be no more walks with Sniff bounding leashless along. This wretched warning sign appeared all over the island at the end of last week.

Distraught, Sniff and I continued on further, on to the next peninsula, to Balls Head Reserve. Only to be confronted by the same warning sign, inked with the same dates....

Damn those foxes. No more careening along the beach. No more peeing into the aboriginal waterhole. No more carefree fun. For over a month...

I am led to ponder what happens to all the dead foxes which accumulate throughout March. Is it part of the Ranger's job specification to search through the undergrowth and drag out all those 1080-poisoned corpses. And how can 1080 poison be lethal to cats, dogs and foxes and not lethal to possums or any other native creature? Very clever bit of science going on there.

Anyway, Poor Sniff is now reduced to this until April:

 

Here's something to help you all get your bearings as to where we are now living in Sydney. Our road, Glenview Street, becomes Vista Street at the end of which is, indeed, a vista -  a spectacular one of the CBD which Sniff, Daniel and I admire of a night whilst being besieged by Flying Foxes which mass alarmingly close above our heads in great numbers as dusk falls. Here it is, a blurred photo of the vista. The nearest wooded peninsula you can see snaking out into the water is Berry Island around which you accompanied me the other day and the peninsula to its left closer to the city is Balls Head Reserve, from the left hand side of which you get brilliant opera house and bridge views (coming to a blog near you soon). Both peninsulas are for now, miserably, ringing with the cries of dying foxes...

Berry Island

Things I Like About Sydney No. 13: Berry Island

Let me take you on a walk.

We'll just hop into the car for a few minutes, driving in what seems like the wrong direction just to get over the creek and the railway line, past Wollstonecraft station and then down Shirley Road lurching steeply downwards, suddenly reaching a dead end and thus arriving at the entrance to Berry Island.

There is a neat, green sign telling you where you are in case of confusion. To the left, over the sea, you can see Ball's Head Reserve and beyond that, the Sydney skyline. The Harbour Bridge peeps out behind Ball's Head Reserve far to the left.

You will have to wait a while before we head off on our gentle amble (this walk won't overly tax you by the way) so that Sniff can tear around the grassy area in front of us, sniffing at and peeing on every prominent tussock and stalk before choosing the perfect spot in which to roll around on his back with all four paws in the air. Once he has once more mastered the green we can set off.

 Here's the beginning of our walk: a small set of stone steps and a post declaring that all dogs must be kept on a lead on this bushwalk. The steps we climb, the sign we ignore. Sniff rarely strays from the path anyway...

Hopefully the sun is out but not too fiercely. Hopefully it's not raining. But more than likely it is either too wet or too hot and we just have to deal with it, juggling with the sun cream, insect repellent, umbrella and water bowl for Sniff in our bags. Much of our walk will be shaded and it's neither steep nor difficult so you can relax...honestly. 

We watch the ants crawling up the steps in steady streams and contemplate once more just how many ants there might be in the world before plunging on into the trees ahead.

Suddenly, it's like Picnic At Hanging Rock. We're in the bush. Cicadas fill the air with their whirring sound, the light filters sharply down through the eucalypts, panpipes start playing and your muslin dress floats behind you in the desultory breeze. There's no time to contemplate this phenomenon though as Sniff is charging ahead towards the aboriginal carving of a giant fish eating a stingray.

The fish is too large to capture in one photograph but you can see some grooves in the stone to the left of the watering hole, which were created over time by the sharpening  of tools. There also seems to be a carved boomerang shape to the left of the water. The faint outline of the fish extends across a much larger surface of stone, perched here with a great view down to the sea, where, now, industry has taken its toll on this particular piece of coastline. There seems to be some gasworks and several industrial-looking ships espied down there through the trees and, a few hundred metres on, we come across this monstrosity. It's the sort of ship that makes you wonder whether or not you are going to be arrested when taking photographs of it...It's definitely on a secret mission, hidden here behind Berry Island, invisible to the bustling city beyond.

Thoughts of spies and wars and bombs crowding your mind, we look round for Sniff and realise he's trotting ahead along the path towards the headpoint of the island where we can sit and contemplate the city skyline ahead of us and the iconic Harbour Bridge through the trees to the right. If you fancy, you could clamber down the rocks to the sea and indulge in some illegal fishing whilst I have a little snooze.

Depending on the tide, we now have the choice of either continuing around the path through the trees, listening to the occasional kookaburra calling whilst scaring lizards into hiding, or of descending down to the sea and continuing around the shoreline, clambering over rocks and scaring strange-looking beetles into hiding. Either way we're going to scare something.

As Sniff loves the smells of the shoreline we'll opt for the sea. 

As we climb over the rocks you notice all the broken oyster shells and the limpets suckered on to every surface. We ponder the possibility of bringing a knife and trying to pry some of the whole oysters off for tea. There is a loud voice calling through a megaphone and we briefly wonder if someone has spotted that Sniff isn't on a lead and that we're about to be fined. It turns out to be hailing from a military-looking boat moored over the sea by Balls Head Reserve and once more our minds fill with thoughts of conspiracies and covert operations.

Sniff bounds along happily back towards the green ahead in order to chase some odd-looking birds. "What are they?" you ask me. "Masked Lapwings" I knowledgeably reply. "So-called because of their flappy yellow dewlaps..." You then remark upon how green the grass is just as the rain begins to fall, eager to make it even greener.

We scoop up the dog and hare back to the car, pleased with the timing of our walk and the rain. We drive the crazy-seeming loop back home where I put the kettle on for a pot of tea. We then sit sipping tea and munching cake, sheltered on the verandah, watching the rain fall and fall and fall...

Let me take you on a walk.

Our first creekside downpour...

Things I like about Sydney No. 12: Our first creekside downpour.

I have always loved the rain in Sydney: it is often violent, appearing suddenly and heavily, causing flash floods and torrents of water to gush down the streets. Last night was our first downpour creekside and, as the rain persisted throughout the night, we woke to the sound of a raging torrent outside the bedroom window: our creek now seems to have pretensions to being a river which is rather magnificent.

There were consequences of all this water however which, although I can't say I liked, were most entertaining.

There we were, Daniel and I, sat on the verandah looking out into the night listening to the sounds of the rain thwacking down on the canopy of tree ferns and eucalypts, feeling secure in our little wooden haven with Sniff safely asleep in his basket within. We congratulated ourselves on our new-found home, bade goodnight to the bats and retired inside.

Daniel then lay on the carpet to feed his ever-increasing appetite for The Guardian obituaries which he can now dangerously peruse daily on his iPhone when he felt something crawling up his sleeve. He brushed away idly at the itch only to then see, to his horror, a three-inch leech fall to the carpet by his face. It and Daniel thrashed wildly about, the leech sadly thwarted in its mission to sucker itself into the folds of Daniel's juicy inner elbow. I, alerted by the sounds of the screams, ran through into the living room and then myself yelped in disgust as we watched how the leech raised itself vertically up into the air, extending its fabulously vile shiny body, waving about like an extending periscope looking for humans (ie. us) to latch onto and suck dry.

Daniel bravely scooped it up and perched it on the banister outside. At a safe distance we then watched its evil progress for a while, its constant undulating search for blood. Once back inside the house, our wooden haven didn't feel quite so secure any more and Daniel soon confused the scratching on his back caused by the tag in his underpants for another leech and sought to rip his clothes off in a frenzy of panic...

Ho hum.

Here's a few photos of our house and the verdant and dripping view down to the creek after last night's deluge including the balcony whereon the leech no doubt still lurks...the raging torrent that is Berry's Creek is hidden below the path in the last picture...