Monday 6 May 2013

Sprucing up a communal toilet, I kid you not


Dead chooks and uncollected dunny cans were 'flushed' down Flat Rock Gully, during the Depression [the one that was labelled 'great' by some wag], from areas west known variously in those days as Dog Town, Pension Town and Struggle Town, but later known as Naremburn. Naremburn Falls cascaded 15m into 'the Devil's Hole' to the endless delight of the hordes of local urchins bored out of their brains. But pristine bush can not maintain the rage against human effluent and detritous, and the creek clogged, the falls were throttled, the area degraded into no more than the municipal dump.


Time moves on and, being 15 minutes from the CBD, the area gentrified, the toffs moving in, the strugglers displaced. And there is nothing a toff likes less than an eye-sore that compromises house values. The dump was closed, the Council spending hard-earned rate-payer dollars to renovate the gully into the public open space that it is today, with a thriving eco-system, and hordes of toffettes zipping the cycle-lanes on their Bottecchias and XDS Retros.


4 comments:

Allan Lloyd said...

Love your various turns of phrase on this post, Julie. Toffs, eh? Who'd have thought? Back in the mid-sixties I considered buying a 'dump' of an old house in Naremburn (then blue-collars and light industry). If only I'd known. If only I could've afforded it.

Joe said...

"Hordes of toffettes"! I will file that one away in the memory banks Julie. IT does look like the gentrification of this area has done wonders. Love the perspective in the top and bottom shots with the paths meandering into the distance. The clarity and depth of field in the middle photo on the left really isolates the Australian Flora wonderfully well.

Joan Elizabeth said...

It is amazing what human habitation does. Even parts of the Blue Mountains that have not suffered that kind of bad treatment the streams are no longer what they were ... siltation, has clogged up the ponds at the bottom of the falls and weeds have moved down the waterways.

I am glad that people care about the environment enough to clear it up.

B i r g i t t a said...

Wonderful photos Julie!