Motorcycle Diaries

Harbour circle, stage 10: Balmain loop (part 1)

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 07:52:39 GMT

The Balmain loop is very large. Given that I have to double back to the car each time, it will probably take me 4 weeks to get around it. Today I walked from the Iron Cove Bridge northwards, more or less along the western foreshore of the Balmain peninsula to Birchgrove and back via Darling Street. Since much of the foreshore has been privatised, this involved a large amount of going up and down stairs and zig-zag paths on the relatively steep cliff. This necessity to zig-zag meant that I didn't cover a huge distance. The weather was quite windy, otherwise it would've been too hot.

The housing development known as Balmain Shore, located on the site of an old power station. I absolutely could not stand to live in a place like this.

Near the campus of the Sydney Secondary College, I found a couple of old containers full of graffiti. I wondered if they were something related to 'art class' ;)

The area, used to be very working class, but it has been gentrified and there is a quite amazing mixture of delapidated as well as renovated Victorian architecture.

When I could get down to the water's edge, this was the view.

This kind of thing kept preventing me from continuing along the waterfront. Then I'd have to climb a million stairs to get up to the road.

Before I got to the dead end at the slipyard I had been walking through a narrow park in front of what looked like a row of Housing Commission flats (I'm not sure about this, but I deduced it from the architecture and the fact that the Housing Commission used to have a policy of putting such buildings in great locations). Towards the end of the row, the people had taken a narrow slice of park for their vegetable garden.

I climbed up between the buildings to the road, where I found this decoration of the facade. "Laugh, dream, live, utopia" it said.

Following the road, I came to Elkington Park, full of giant old figs and back down by the water front, the Dawn Fraser pool.

In my youth, Dawn was my number one hero. She still is in fact. When I was 14 or thereabouts, she lived in Adelaide and had the same swimming coach that I did, Harry Gallagher. So I met her once or twice. She was working as a department store shop assistant and breaking world records in her free time. She had won gold at the Melbourne Olympics for the 100 metre freestyle, and then again in Rome. She did the same again in Tokyo and, either there or shortly before, became the first female sprinter to break the minute mark for the distance. In addition, in Tokyo she swam the moat of the imperial palace and stole a flag. The Australian swimming bureaucrats gave her a 10 year suspension which, given that she was already 29, was the end of her swimming career. Later she joined the Labor Party and became a state MP, but she fell out with the machine and spent some time as an independent, before eventually losing the seat. She's a native of Balmain and the above pool is where she did her early training.

In Elkington Park the path follows the waterfront for a bit and then I had another climb up to the street above. I don't know what the chimney is - possibly some relic of Balmain's industrial past. There were once coal mines in Balmain, but they were closed when coal was discovered closer to the surface at Newcastle and in the Illawarra.

The four faces look vaguely familiar, the other one not.

St John the Evangelist. It was near here that I turned back towards the car.

Birchgrove Public School

The Riverview. This is one of the most famous of Balmain's many pubs (its main competitor would be the London). Dawn Fraser ran it from 1978 to 1983. Naturally I had to go there when she was behind the bar back then, but I haven't been back since. I'd have gone in to have a look around today, but I didn't think that being over-heated late into my trek and sitting down for a chilled wine would go together.

Rozelle Public School, established in 1877. Where the Rozelle weekend market is just winding up for the day. This is at the southern end of my walk. From here it's just a short stroll back to the car.

Harbour circle, stage 9: Harbour Bridge and Circular Quay

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 05:35:03 GMT

This was a shortened route, in the opposite direction from the one I've been going earlier, because I really wanted to visit the No Berlusconi Day gathering at Circular Quay in front of the Italian Consulate.

Here's a view eastwards from the Bridge, coincidentally including the same sailing ship as in last weekend's photo - this time under sail.

At the demo, this young man gave me a leaflet.

And this woman interviewed me for SBS.

She asked me why I was there so I said that I had lots of Italian friends (a bit of an exaggeration) and I felt sad for them because Berlusconi is such a pathetic old man (she burst into a wide grin). Moreover he symbolises a revival, that is spreading across Europe and the West generally, of officially sanctioned racism and sexism.

The prudish element ;)

Slogans. I asked why purple? One of the guys told me "viola per che viola" or "purple (violet) because no respect" and also it isn't the colour of any political party.

This guy bought a T-shirt and texta across the road and made his slogan on the spot. At one stage they were shouting something like "Viva Silvio la potenza" - I couldn't understand most of the other chants, but many of them seem to have been equally humorous.

Silvio joins in to poke fun at himself!

Sydney's "finest" were on hand.

The Kirribilli markets were starting to pack up by the time I got back, but these guys were still going strong.

No-Berslusconi Day tomorrow

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 10:22:38 GMT

I'm planning to go. I don't know what will happen, but they say it's a non-political thing (how can that be so?).

The weather should be good, so I'll walk over the bridge to get there.

#28 Shane Maloney, The Brush-off

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 08:33:23 GMT

Among the many recommendations that cover the inside and outside of this book, one of the reviewers describes Maloney's style as 'literary'. I think that is a massive over-rating, but the language is certainly colourful, clever and often very funny. Very much in the Paul Keating tradition (PK is an PM who made us all laugh by calling his successor, John Howard, 'the dessicated coconut' and so forth.) Maybe it's the Irish Australian tradition. The plots of Maloney's stories are usually devices through which he can take the piss out of Australian political life and, in this one, the arts scene. 'Comic futility' is the description I like best.

Virtual walking

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 10:38:14 GMT

It hasn't been going very fast the last couple of weeks, due to the heat. Basically my average distance per week has dropped by half and I only covered 16 and 18 km each week. So I'm currently a few km past Elizabeth Beach.

Things are winding down a bit at work. Maybe I can get back in the habit of going to the gym. And if the weather would only oblige by reversing its recent pattern of hot weekends and cool weekdays...

Ooh Lah!

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:30:05 GMT

They had a meeting this morning and elected Tony Abbott by 42 votes to 41 (and one of Malcolm's mates was in hospital and the by-elections this weekend would probably have delivered him a couple more votes).

They have a death wish. But don't worry, Tony will fix it as he's a religious Catholic Hillsong Official RW Nutcase. In other words, even the Liberal Party has the Right to Life. Only Kevin Andrews (who has the additional advantage of hair dye) could do better.

To show how committed they are to euthanasia, they voted for the candidate who is Most Unpopular with the voters - by a large margin.

Thoughts related to my day

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 09:48:10 GMT

1) New Zealand sauvignon blancs are a lot fruitier than Australian ones.

2) Walking home from the bottle shop I was overtaken by a bunch of youthful 'Mexicans' off to a party for the end of Movember at Luna Park. Struck me that Movember, as a thing to do in November, is worthier than Nanowrimo.

3) In the late morning there was a drizzle of rain that set off those wonderful earth odours. Later on, when I walked over to the shopping centre, I was hit, in the middle of the median strip, by a strong smell of lemon-scented gums.

4) I stocked up (not that I needed to) on whodunnits and Australian fiction at the 3 for 2 stand in Borders. You can get Miles Franklin winners at the 3 for 2 stand :(

5) Finally replaced my Swiss Army knife - lost somewhere on the way back from Adelaide in May. This one is the first I've had that is made not by Victorinox, but by Wenger. It has some features that seem better than the Victorinox one - notably a more sturdy spring in the scissors - although in all other respects it is the same. I have had a Swiss Army knife, and carried it everywhere, pretty much continuously for the last 25 years - this is my third - and I've long considered it the most useful purchase I've ever made.

6) Speaking of Wenger, he really has to rethink how he puts a team together. Last night was unbearable. Arsenal had well over half the possession and the BBC commentator was raving about their play in the second half, but they couldn't score (except for the other side in the case of Vermaelen) and F...g Chelsea got 3. He very publicly told them that now was the moment they had to step up, and they didn't. They already know how to play football, now they need to learn how to kill. On Wednesday night they have to play Man City in the League Cup. The form of the latter has not been great recently (not since the Adebayor misbehaviour at Eastlands), but this match is also at Eastlands and Adebayor will be there.

7) The good news from the middle of the night was Barca's victory over the Royal Madrilenos.

8) Joe Hockey is being put forward and possibly is putting himself forward as a leader who can unify the Liberal Party. That's what they said about Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull before they were elected. You can't unify a party that has an excitable minority hell-bent on self-destruction. They are filibustering in the Senate at this moment. Hockey is my local member. He is a rugger bugger with an interest in politics. The idea of Joe Hockey as prime minister is only slightly less hilarious than the idea of Tony Abbott as PM. Nelson, bad as he was, and Turnbull, arrogant as he is, at least have grey matter inside their skulls.

Walking in the heat

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 10:00:16 GMT

The past couple of weekends have been so hot that walking more than a few hundred metres is unpleasant. During the week, on the other hand, it has been pleasantly cool and looks like that's what will happen tomorrow (monday) as well. So I've abandoned the Harbour Circle for a bit and will resume when the weekend weather improves.

Today I just took a stroll down to Blues Point in the early evening. Despite my deliberately slow pace I still worked up a sweat. The air is thick with moisture, like in the tropics, so everything is seen through a mist. In this case, Observatory Hill and the Walsh Bay finger wharves.

The Bridge has already been got ready for New Year's Eve. The square thing in the middle will be part of the light show. Luna Park doesn't believe in saving energy. Their lights are on in broad daylight and I wonder how many carbon permits they'll get, or if they'll be one of the many exemptions.

I know it's a tourist boat, but in this light it is just possible to imagine a different era.

End of a hot day.

Hot again

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 03:25:22 GMT

I just opened the back door and got a blast of hot air. It's going to be 41, already passed 39, and the humidity is 89%. Worse than Adelaide where at least it was dry. It's like Bangkok before the monsoon.

Adelaide and Melbourne have both had record November temperatures. Out of curiosity, since people in parliament are saying there's nothing going on, I looked up the average monthly daily maximum temperature data for the last 150 years for the Sydney Observatory. The green line is the average from 1861-2000. The red line is the average for the 30 years from 1971-2000.

Now here's the same 150 year graph plotted against the 30 years from 1941-70. Same pattern. Summer is heating up less fast than the autumn and winter months.

Again for the 30 years from 1911-40 - pretty much bang on the long term average.

Now here's the period 1881-1910. Summers are still average, but autumn, winter and spring were much cooler back then. Same picture if I go to the 1861-90 data. For the months of May and August the mean daily maximum has risen by 2 degrees between 1881-1910 and 1971-2000.

You can find data from your own nearest observatory by going to http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/

ETA: OK so Sydney could be a heat island (in fact it is!). Here's the data for Macquarie Island. It is in the middle of the Antarctic Ocean and has a population of seals and penguins as well as a handful of visiting humans. They only have 60 years of data, starting in 1948. As before green line covers the whole 60 years, red line is 1971-2000.

The annual average maximum has risen by 0.2 but that also disguises the uneven pattern, with warmer autumn-winter periods. These months are up by more like half a degree.

Some unreliable memories of Istanbul

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 10:58:25 GMT

I was there only for a few days in about April or May 1970. I remember that I felt for the first time that we had arrived in the West (we'd been backpacking across Asia). Istanbul felt like a western city, but I can't really put a finger on why it felt like that. Perhaps it was because we knew we'd set foot on European soil for the first time. The grand bazaar or whatever it is called, was an unpleasant experience. Men would come out of their shops into the narrow alleys, grab you by the arm and attempt to drag you into their carpet shop. I'd never encountered such behaviour before (nor have I since). I did buy a ring (long since lost). It had four interwoven strands in silver and was very popular among the backpacking fraternity at the time.

We took a ferry to a village where I was stunned by the beauty of the old wooden houses. The ferry dropped us in a cobbled square with large shade trees and benches, surrounded by these timber architectural masterpieces. All along the waterfront there were huge timber palazzi right on the water's edge. Pamuk recounts how frequently they burned down. I remember that the ferry went crab-wise across the current. I used to have a photo of my then partner, wearing the sheepskin coat he'd bought in Afghanistan, sitting in this boat crossing the Bosphorus.

Things of which I have no recollection whatsoever include where we stayed, the railway station where I know we took the train to Edirne and Bulgaria. I don't recall going to any of the famous mosques or the Haghia Sophia, though I do have a vague recollection of the famous Istanbul skyline which they dominated.

By the time we arrived in Istanbul, we'd been travelling by bus across Turkey for a couple of days. We'd stayed in a cheap, but unnerving hotel in Erzerum. They put us in a room with 10 beds - there was no choice and I was the only female in a room with 9 men, 5 of whom were total strangers and two more I'd known for only about a week. There was a shower in the bath down the hall (more of a labyrinth than a hall), but the bath was full of bricks, so not really usable. The bus dropped us there - obviously a deal the driver had with the hotel owner - and it was night, so we didn't have much incentive to go looking for another place to stay. Looking back on it, I think that as a female I simply wasn't supposed to be there.

One of our group (a friend with whom my partner and I had been travelling since we left home) was whipped across the back by a passing cart-driver as we left the bus to go into one of the roadside restaurants for lunch. The food was fantastic. I don't think I'd ever had such good food as in these cheap Turkish roadside eateries - but it was hard to find the same stuff in Istanbul. We must've gone from Erzerum to Istanbul in one day - I have a vague recollection of Ankara, of passing a bunch of concrete tower blocks.

#27 Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:46:13 GMT

This was one of those books that I began slowly and then, reaching a certain point, found that I was unable to put it down until I'd finished. In this case, the turning point was chapter 22 'On the ships that passed through the Bosphorus, famous fires, moving house and other disasters'. The first part of the chapter was about two tankers that collided in the strait and exploded, one of them drifting into another and setting it alight as well. Then, as the waterway was lined with old wooden houses, some of them went up too. The story is woven into the theme of the book - a city that used to be a splendid world capital in the process of decline and decay - so beautifully that, instead of finishing the chapter and turning out the light, I ploughed on to the end.

Some things made me uneasy. Pamuk comes from a wealthy family (also in decline) and I always wondered whether the Melancholy (hüzün) that he describes as the pervading mood of the city is more of a class thing than a popular thing. Anyway, as basically the only (or so he claims) Turkish writer to have written in such depth about the city and, as a Nobel Prize winner whose work has been translated into many languages, Melancholy is sure to become the common depiction. Paris, to which he often refers, may be the City of Light, but Istanbul is now the city of black and white, of melancholy. There are lots of black and white photographs to emphasize the point. Moreover, it's easy to see why he is not very popular with the regime: it's clear he doesn't think a great deal of Ataturk and the Republican 'modernization' program (or 'westernization' as Pamuk would put it). While the Ottomans may have blown it, they left behind a legacy of cosmopolitanism that Ataturk destroyed. At the same time, I read on p. 221 about the Muslim refugees fleeing from "ethnic cleansing in the new Balkan republics" after the First World War. This was new to me - it's not something that pops up frequently in the western media in the way that the ethnic cleansing by the Turks - of Armenians, Greeks, Jews, etc. does. Pamuk's grandmother was Circassian - they originated in the north Caucasus and migrated to Turkey (among other places) after a war with the Russians in the 1800s. So opposition to 'Turkification' is possibly somewhere in his roots.

At least among Pamuk's social circles the hüzün that he sees as the 'essence' of the city is best found in the poor neighbourhoods. He scarcely talks about the major tourist highlights that all westerners go to see (I don't remember going to see them myself though, apart from the great bazaar, which was awful.) He talks about the 'picturesque' parts (the description comes from John Ruskin) and how they capture the real decline of the city in the 20th century and give it its true identity. But "none of these things look beautiful to the people who live amongst them." By 'poor' he means old, because since 1950 the city has expanded 10-fold in population. Yet these were the same areas apparently visited by Nerval and Gautier, two authors whose accounts he admires, a hundred years before he was born.

The final chapter recounts arguments with his mother about his future career. (The book is dedicated, possibly because he is dead, to his father who seems to have been a complete wanker.) She wants him to continue his architectural studies that he has already decided to drop, rather than have a career as an artist. Her reasoning is that nobody in Istanbul respects artists and he would have to spend his life crawling and dependent in order to live. He links this argument of hers to the decline of the city - its lack of interest in and inability, through poverty and global provincialism, to support people who are 'different'. The arguments took place in the early 1970s, and what is really nice about this chapter is that a year after this book was published in English, Pamuk won the Nobel Prize. It's almost as if, at last, through people like Orhan Pamuk the city has turned its fortunes around.

Hot

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:25:05 GMT

According to the newspaper, today's maximum was only 31. But at 10 o'clock tonight it was still 31. There was some thunder and lightning earlier and it keeps trying to rain. The few drops that do arrive are nice and cool, but the breeze is warm. I've had a headache all day.

A bit more on emissions trading

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:56:35 GMT

I just wanted to emphasize that, contrary to 99% of the discussion - in parliament, the media, etc. - the main achievement of this legislation, should it get through, will be to provide the country with the most efficient method of reducing C02 emissions. Nobody should be claiming that it will (or won't) reduce global emissions. It won't have much effect on these because in reality we emit a very small proportion of the total (despite having the highest per capita emissions). What is supposed to happen as a result of the ETS is only that some firms will find it cheaper to reduce emissions than to pay for the permits. They will therefore sell their permits to firms that find it more expensive to reduce emissions than to buy some extra permits.

As a result what happened in Europe should happen here. Emissions should drop rapidly, because basically two types of firms will sell their permits: (1) firms with low investment in carbon polluting technologies who can change relatively easily to lower emission levels; (2) firms that are high polluters but not very profitable anyway and will close down.

The main problem that can happen here is that firms are moving faster than the government permit allocators. In that case the market price of permits will be too low as low polluters flood the market with their permits. High polluters will be able to increase their emissions because they can buy permits too cheaply. The government won't meet its reduction targets.

We're not talking about saving the world here people. We're talking about starting the process of restructuring towards a low-carbon Australian economy. The argument that the ETS won't stop sea-level rising (etc.) is completely irrelevant. We're talking about giving the Australian economy a chance not to "do an Argentina" during the rest of this century.*

* In 1900 the two economies were at roughly the same level of economic development. Australia managed to keep up during the 20th century, while Argentina didn't.

The Olympic "movement"...

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:43:09 GMT

... is just big business run by and for big businessmen.

I wrote here earlier about the willingness of athletics officials to disregard people's basic human rights.

We are pretty lucky that this kind of organised sport only comes to a city nearby once in several decades.

Actually the IOC seems to be a mobile state! New concept.

The ETS debate at the Gasworks*

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:40:24 GMT

Sometime earlier this week the Senate began debating the Emissions Trading Scheme legislation. They will have a vote on it towards the end of next week I believe and then we will either get one or we won't. Absurdities are rampant. I was listening to one senator who hails from northern Queesnland. He had surveyed his constituents (not the ones in Brisbane though he is supposed to represent the entire state) and reported that 88% of them didn't know anything about it. A majority of them are also opposed to the ETS probably because he has been going around telling them that it is a new tax. I'm not sure if the speaker was Barnaby Joyce because I tuned in too late to hear, but Joyce has certainly been going around calling it a tax and I've been trying to work out how he arrives at this position.

The idea of the ETS is that the government sets a cap on permissible carbon emissions. Recently they said this would not apply to agriculture for the foreseeable future, so that already leaves out a large amount of the CO2 we emit. I'm not sure of the precise details (and the parliamentary debate is not helping), but I believe some polluters will be given some free emission permits too. The cap will then be set under the legislation to generate a 5-15% reduction in emissions from 1990 levels by the year 2020. It is the government's second attempt to get this through and the exclusion of agriculture is a major concession to try to get it past the Senate where they are short of a vote or two. Of course the longer the delay goes on, the harder it will be on polluters to meet the 2020 target.

Mechanics of a cap and trade scheme
Emitters of greenhouse gases need to acquire a permit for every tonne of greenhouse gas that they emit.
The quantity of emissions produced by firms will be monitored, reported and audited.
At the end of each year, each liable entity will need to surrender a permit for every tonne of emissions that they produced in that year.
The number of permits issued by the Government in each year will be limited.
Firms will compete to purchase the number of permits that they require. Firms that value the permits most highly will be prepared to pay most for them, either at auction or on a secondary trading market. For some firms, it will be cheaper to reduce emissions than to buy permits.
Certain categories of firms will receive an administrative allocation of permits, as a transitional assistance measure. Those firms could use the permits or sell them
(from the White Paper).

Most of the debate has been, not about the ETS mechanism, but about the science. Bob Brown (leader of the Greens) for example, devoted his entire speech to arguing against the delusionists who say that climate change isn't happening. The Greens are opposing the legislation because they say we need bigger cuts. They want a minimum of 20% reduction by 2020. But he didn't devote any of his speech to saying why geting an ETS up and going at least isn't a good idea. After all, you can always change the target later. Anyway the Greens will be pretty irrelevant if the government can persuade the Opposition to vote for it. If the Opposition vote splits and some of them cross the floor, the Greens could become extremely relevant, depending on how many Opposition Senators are prepared to defy party whips.

The Trogs cannot decide whether they are against the whole idea of climate change or they should go for it if the Americans do. Their contortions are extreme. Driving home tonight I was listening to one guy disputing the idea that the firestorms in Victoria earlier this year were anything to do with climate change and, if they weren't, then this shows nothing is happening. Not talking about Arctic sea ice, or Darfur, or global temperature data, or long-term glacial melting, or anything important. It seems they cannot distinguish between the weather and the climate. Or, if they can, they say silly things like "the world's climate has always been changing and has never stopped changing". One woman, talking about the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, where they grow rice in an area that used to be a desert, said that their production feeds 40 million people in a world of increasing food shortage. She got this off the Ricegrowers' Association where they give annual average output at 1.3m tonnes.That would be 2.7 kg of rice per person per month - about a quarter of what your average Vietnamese person eats. So lets make that 10 million people. But when the Vietnamese were really poor they used to eat 21 kg a month, so we get down to 7.7 million people. On the other hand, "Australian rice is recognised worldwide for its high quality and is demanded by the higher priced international markets." So maybe it really does feed 40 million rich people. Not exactly the ones suffering from food shortage. Then she berated the government for trying to destroy the "lifestyle" that her constituents "have chosen". Possibly the rest of us just can't afford to pay for their choice.

Talking about weather while I'm here. Adelaide last week had its longest recorded heatwave in November (records go back 150 years). The previous longest was 4 days in 1894. I gather the concept 'heatwave' refers to successive days over 35 C. There was a break early this week, but for the last 12 days the daily maxima have gone: 37, 37, 39, 39, 39, 39, 40, 39, 32, 29, 39, 42... today was 42 (that's 108 F). The November average is 25. It should break tomorrow.

*Australians often refer to their parliament as The Gasworks. It's a reference to the hot air (not surprisingly, consisting mainly of C02) that is emitted there.

Virtual walking

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:19:41 GMT

Although I did a lot of walking over the weekend, my tally over the past week still suffered from the excessive heat of Adelaide and, on top of that (what I dislike most about holidays) the work had piled up and I've been pretty frantic on Monday-Tuesday catching up with the backlog. So I only made 27 km last week. A few kilometres past Bulahdelah I had to make a choice between three roads. I selected the Lakes Way and I'm now 10 km along the northern edge of the Myall Lakes National Park.

ETA: I should mention that every day I was in Adelaide the maximum temperature was 38 or 39 (which is 101-103 F).

Harbour circle, stage 8: Iron Cove loop

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 07:51:11 GMT

Iron Cove is one of the larger bays in Sydney Harbour that I've encountered on my walks so far. It is the estuary of Iron Cove Creek (now a concrete drain) and is about 3.5 km long and a few hundred metres wide. Iron Cove Bridge is also the fourth of the seven bridges on the Harbour Circle walk.

Since it didn't matter much where I started, I parked the car down by the southern end of the former Rozelle Hospital (I see that last year, although I took pictures of Rozelle Hospital, I only posted about it's grander neigbour Callan Park) at the Leichhardt Rowing Club. I set out in an anti-clockwise direction along the foreshore.

Towards the bridge which, in the not too distant future, will not be viewable from this side because they are constructing a new one parallel to it. The new bridge will carry the Victoria Road Busway - at least it will improve the public transport service, but will it look as nice?

Actually they are calling it a busway, but effectively they are just widening the existing bridge by adding three more lanes and substracting one that will be closed to all kinds of traffic on the old bridge. In answer to my question above, no it will not look as nice. It will be a totally boring, engineer-designed bridge.

Small dog standing in the water and barking furiously at his human friend who kept, uselessly, saying "sssh".

Part of the closed psych hospital.

This whole area has been politically active for several years - first about the bridge construction and then about the various plans for the former Callan Park and Rozelle hospitals. In my progress around the bay today I found that the state government has decided to hand over 40 of the 61 hectares to Leichhardt Council. The latter have been saying they want to keep it as a park - now they're bleating about who will pay for its upkeep! I presume that Sydney University will keep the other 21 ha, part of which it already uses for the Sydney Art College. Did I mention that over near Figtree Bridge I saw signs of a residents' campaign to stop Sydney University taking over a nearby public park? Yes, I did.

On the bridge.

I like this bridge. Have driven across it many times without understanding the need for adding more lanes. The bottlenecks seem to occur elsewhere on Victoria Road. Anyway it was opened in 1955 and replaced a wrought iron structure dating from the 1880s. It is a steel truss bridge with what they call Inter-War Art Deco pilons. On a sunny day, driving under the steel trusses - alternating between light and shade in rapid succession - is fun. And as the light-shade passes overhead, the joints in the road deck underneath go ba dum ba dum, ba dum ba dum.

Birkenhead Point, where I bought my red shoes last week, with Cockatoo and Snapper Islands in the background.

Mudflats and boatshed on the western side.

I was intrigued by this house. It is right on the foreshore road, amidst big, rich looking houses. It badly needs painting and the garden is completely overgrown. Some speculator waiting to get permission to tear it down?

Here it seems as if somebody has created a little amphitheatre around a small bay. In summer, at high tide, it might be possible to sit on these steps and cool off.

I wonder if these berries are poisonous. They certainly look it.

Flowering reeds.

It was at about this point that I met one of my PhD students (about to graduate) with her husband and son. They were walking back home from a local fair. Strange coincidence - if I'd decided to walk clockwise around the bay I wouldn't have met them!

This structure, seen from a distance on a small peninsula sticking out into the bay called Rodd Point, I expected to be a war memorial. Instead it was the mausoleum of the Rodd family - Mr and Mrs Rodd being the first white settlers of the area. A sign nearby says that they've all been moved to Rookwood.

I think this is an Illawarra Flame tree. I'm not sure. Anyway it is unusual.

Pelicans are majestic birds. This one has just eyed a fishing spot in the weeds on the left. I watched it dipping, without luck, in the weeds a few seconds later. But the beak is already alert and prepared for action.

Along the southern end of the bay is the suburb of Haberfield, laid out in 1901 and allegedly the world's first "garden suburb" (to be explored). This is the Haberfield rowing club, which now belongs to University of Technology, Sydney.

Start of Haberfield Canal (aka Hawthorne Canal). For later exploration. I think it was once intended to connect Cooks River to Sydney Harbour, but it never got that far south.

Ibis.

Back at the Leichhardt Rowing Club (established 1886) where I began.

#26 Hypothermia, Arnaldur Indridason

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 08:47:45 GMT

Pretty lazy day today. Finished the whole book in one go. It is the usual rather gloomy stuff from Inspector Erlender - perhaps he's a little more cheerful this time than usual and seems to be getting on with his kids for a change. In which he solves a murder that everyone thinks was suicide and, at the same time, solves a 30 year-old missing persons case or 2 of them actually. Good one.

Virtual walking

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:09:46 GMT

Due to the high temperature in Adelaide I didn't get anywhere near 10,000 steps a day. Still managed 31 km last week, which all but gets me to Nerong. If one just googles 'Nerong' one of the first things that comes up is the national public toilet map.

#25 The Question of Palestine, Edward W. Said

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:53:11 GMT

Here in Australia it has taken us 200 years to begin the process of public recognition that white people are walking around on land that was stolen from somebody else. Not only that, but the descendents of the people it was stolen from are still here and only just beginning their long road out from being ignored, subhuman, fated to disappear. Citizenship rights were granted in 1967. Terra nullius was annulled by the High Court in 1992 - 204 years after the arrival of the first English settlers.

Reading Said's book - which is basically an argument for the existence and continued survival of Palestinians - I was reminded very much of this sad history of colonial Australia. The first part of the book is an eloquent study of how the Zionist project affected the Palestinian population, most of whom simply disbelieved that what was happening - the violence and dispossession - could become permanent. It must surely be one of the few texts in English about what it really feels like to be on the receiving end of a colonial invasion.

The book was originally published in 1979 (the edition I read had a short update written just after Gulf War I) and reading it as an historical document, I dared to become optimistic that - despite the evidently increasing intransigence of the Israeli settlers and their supporters in the state - things are in fact moving much faster there than they did in Australia. As Said himself points out Israel was founded as a European colony in Asia at precisely the time that European colonialism in the rest of the world was disappearing. It is an anachronism.

To found a state in Asia and people it with a largely immigrant population drawn initially from Europe means depopulating the original territory. This has been the simple desideratum of Zionism, with very complicated ramifications. Yet for the native Arab Palestinian and for the immigrant Jew who took his place, the mere fact of substitution has never really varied. And it is this fact with which the search for peace in the Middle East must begin, and with which it has not yet even begun to deal. [p. 181]

The last sentence here is important because it was written only 30 years ago and yet there have been tremendous changes. When Said wrote, the PLO had only recently achieved widespread recognition as the body representing Palestinians. In reality this means that the West (not just the Arab and other Third World states) had decided to accord Palestinians recognition as a people, and a people with national aspirations. Prior to that they were just 'Arabs' who should be equally at home in Jordan, Lebanon or even further afield. But even then, the so-called "Middle East Peace Process" was seen in terms of an international settlement between Israel, Egypt and the US (all of whom had pursued their own interests in the region without a thought for the Palestinians). It took another decade and a half for the PLO to be seen as an essential negotiating partner, i.e., for the recognition to sink in that the Palestinians could not continue to be ignored.

From this perspective it is easier to see why Arafat accepted the Oslo agreement. By establishing the PA, he forced the Palestinians to the centre of the "Peace Process". On the other hand, it has also enabled Israel and the US to treat the Palestinian nation as existing only in the West Bank and Gaza, and to continue to ignore the rights of Palestinians living in exile (mostly in Jordan and Lebanon). Thus, reading between the lines, Arafat also countered the danger, to which the Intifada had given rise, that Palestinian politics would be divided between those living directly under Israeli rule and those in the diaspora. It looks as if the latter is happening anyway, with the rise of Hamas for example. I wonder how long the diaspora will continue to share the national aspirations of those living in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. There is now a couple of generations who were born in exile and those who fled, who remember their old homes and their attachment to the country, are now in their 60s or more. It seems to me that the movement will rely more and more on the people who are still there and that's where the Zionist project is really ultimately doomed.

Waiting for take-off at the airport yesterday, I read an interview with the late Giovanni Arrighi. He began his academic career at what was then called the University of Rhodesia and Nyasaland and, in the interview, he talks about his studies of the southern African labour force, remarking on what I think is also true of the Palestinians in Israel. In both South Africa and Israel, the European settlers seized indigenous land for their own farms, cutting the indigenous population off from its livelihood. When people are cut off from the land like that they have to live by wage labour and they have to struggle against those who have power over their livelihoods. South African workers joined COSATU which became the backbone of the ANC. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are mostly unemployed and without prospects of employment (particularly in Gaza). Arrighi's point, however, is that when you try to control people by depriving them of a decent living, you have to increase the level of repression. Eventually your repression will backfire. Your victims will hit back at you and they will gain international support. This is the road Israel has set out upon. It won't last 200 years.

shoes

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 02:52:49 GMT

Harbour circle, stage 7: Drummoyne

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 07:02:42 GMT

Today's walk was a bit shorter than usual. I went from under the Gladesville Bridge to Iron Cove Bridge and back, via the Birkenhead Point Factory Outlet centre (where I bought a pair of Ecco shoes!).

Drummoyne looks as if it was constructed mostly between 1900 and 1950. Parts of it reminded me of Cambridge (well, not the jacarandas and palm trees, but in 1983 I had a flat in a building of a similar architectural style).

Along the left side of the road, what ever might have been there has been replaced by apartment blocks. On the other side, nice old houses that probably once had water views and views of the city before the apartment buildings went up.

Just as I arrived at Birkenhead Point it started drizzling. The city disappeared in the mist, so I stayed indoors - bought a pair of shoes and had gelato. I bought my first pair of Ecco shoes in 1983 in Copenhagen. They were actually made in Denmark. Unlike other shoes, Ecco shoes were foot-shaped rather than trying to fit your foot into a fashion-shape. They dropped that idea pretty soon, but the shoes tended to remain very comfortable. My next pair was made in Portugal, the next in Brazil and today's pair in China. This story somehow encapsulates world history in the past quarter century. Still, the leather is really soft and they look nifty as always.

When the rain stopped, I walked out under the Iron Cove Bridge.

Under the bridge a boy was packing up his fishing gear, having caught this huge thing. He told me it was a yellow-tailed kingfish.

A new bridge is being built. God knows, Victorial Road is already enough of a bottleneck without adding to it, but that's the logic of NSW "planners". The building in the background is the old Callan Park psych hospital, now Sydney University's Art school.

I have driven along Victorial Rd, Drummoyne many times, but the traffic is always so bad there's no time to see what's by the roadside. Walking along it today I found that the majority of buildings are devoted to selling things for the home - kitchens, bathrooms, furniture, etc. Between these lie some oddities. For example, down the driveway of one of these buildings, at the back of a Chinese restaurant, I found the Mona Lisa hanging on the back wall of a shed full of paintings.

A bit further along, was a shop specializing in (copies of) old military hats...

... and beyond that a Scottish kilt shop.

PJ Gallagher's Irish Pub - "We’ve transported the style of The Crown Liquor Saloon on Great Victoria Street, Belfast". That means it has Guinness on tap and flies the Irish flag on the roof. Never mind that Belfast isn't in the Irish Republic and there's another one of these at Parramatta. It sits at Drummoyne's main intersection.

One of the older houses backing onto Victorial Rd. Seems to be some kind of childcare centre nowadays.

My claim to the "Holy Land"

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 07:27:25 GMT

A few years ago I read this genetic stuff by Brian Sykes - the Seven Sisters of Eve or something like that. It is based on their genetic work on mitochondrial DNA at Oxford University. mtDNA is passed down by women. My mum sent off a sample and found that among her ancestors is a woman who lived in northern Greece about 45,000 years ago. The Sykes group called this woman Ursula, though in their scientific publications (which I also read) the seven women who are in the ancestral lineage of 99% of Europe's present population are simply given letters (X,Y,M, etc). DNA is made up of different bits that are coded by the letters CGAT. Your type of DNA depends on the combinations of these 4 letters. Ursula, who great(power of x) grandmothered about half of Europe's population, represents a change by one letter in the order compared with her own ancestor who migrated to Europe from the Middle East. They plotted the migration routes by looking at where the different types of DNA have the highest density. Given that mtDNA mutates about once every 25,000 years, that would put my Middle Eastern great(power of x)grandmother around 70,000 years ago. My ancestors lived in the fucking "Holy Land" before the Jews!

Now I am going to start a movement of Ursulans to colonise the so-called "Holy Land" and drive out not only the remaining Palestinians, but also the Jews. I will establish a modern democratic state for Ursulans, with a necessarily well-armed and efficiently brutal security apparatus because the human rights of me and my fellow Ursulans must be protected at all costs. All Ursulans and, let me make this absolutely clear, only Ursulans have automatic citizenship and land rights. After all, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights says that everyone has the Right to Return to their country (whether or not in possession of a passport). All Semites (Muslim, Jewish, Christian, whatever) should return to their country which, I believe, is somewhere in the vicinity of Kazakhstan. (I didn't do any research on this, but the little birdie told me. The little birdie is now and henceforth known as God, with a capital G.) I will support all UN sponsored motions to provide the current population of Israel with the Right of Return to Kazakhstan. The Kazahks, who are undoubtedly descendants of Genghis Khan can then move back to Mongolia. They have a lot of space in Mongolia, so it won't be a problem and I also have no genetic evidence on the origins of the Mongolians, so they obviously belong nowhere.

Loss of holiday privileges

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:13:07 GMT

Since so many Americans seem to believe that justice involves something approaching an eye-for-an-eye, they are no doubt relishing the scenario in which 23 CIA agents are kidnapped off the streets of Washington DC and "rendered" to some torture chamber in... let's say... Iran or North Korea, before being whisked off to serve out their sentences in a Roman dungeon. Of course revenge would be even more delicious if, instead of the 23 convicted criminals, it was their bosses - Colin Powell, perhaps, or Donald Known Unknown. In reality, no such thing will happen. Despite Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian justice system remains moderately civilized. The only punishment that is likely to be meted out to these criminals (not their bosses though) is that they won't be having anymore Roman Holidays.

Virtual walking

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 06:00:16 GMT

In the last week I made 36 km, so I'm now 2 km short of Karuah. My step average has increased a bit, but I'm still not anywhere near the 10,000+ steps a day that I was doing during the challenge. My work productivity has gone up though!

For these entries I google the name of the place and link to whatever I like. Most images of Karuah are of the bypass or the real estate shop. Pretty much gives you the idea.

ETA: I should stick to Flickr