A BRIEF BREAK FROM SELF-IMPOSED ISOLATION Yesterday I ventured past my driveway for the first time in ages to walk to the chemist in Blackheath village. My little camera is always in my pocket, so here are a few pics taken along the way. April is such
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This is a new chapter in the Blackheath Wonga romance, but first a brief recap. Last year our resident male Wonga fell in love with his own reflections in the shiny hubcaps of our house painter’s vintage VW van. It meant a long, lonely season, as he
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I made my first, post bushfires visit to Lithgow recently. This town has such spirit and resilience. Nowhere is it better expressed than in a laneway off the main street featuring art created from discarded bicycles. How’s this for sheer exuberance? The exhibit at the top of
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About 30 metres below the Park Avenue gates in Memorial Park at Blackheath is a huge thicket of invasive weeds; blackberries, ivy, scarlet montbretia, red hot pokers etc. A lone Japanese maple struggles to survive in the centre. The irony is that satin bowerbirds, wattle birds and
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Just before Christmas, as the bush fires crept ever closer to Blackheath and we all suffered in the heatwave, I photographed a little tractor and water tank in Wentworth Street. I assumed it must be someone’s personal fire protection unit. Mind you, I did wonder about the
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Hello Peeps My elderly guardians Pauline, and Dr Bob went on a little ‘rest and recuperation trip’ to Sydney before lock-down, after a lot of building work at home in Blackheath. I believe it’s called a sojourn. I wasn’t allowed to stay home alone due to a
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My favourite place to stay in the city is the Sydney Hotel QVB on York Street, directly opposite the Queen Victoria Building. While it is no fancy five star hotel, for someone who appreciates and writes about history as I do, it’s pretty well perfect. For the
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Hello, Editor Des here. Well we had nasty fires up here in the Blue Mountains at Christmas time. It was very scary for my guardian Pauline Conolly. However, Mr Bob Conolly and myself protected everything and were extremely brave…especially me if I may say so. But the
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Absinthe is a distilled, highly alcoholic drink. It is anise flavoured, derived from the plants wormwood, green anise and sweet fennel. It was popular in early 20thC Paris, especially among bohemian artists and writers such as Picasso, Proust, Vincent van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar
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Who would imagine that dear old hydrangeas would hold up so well during the 2019/20 fires and heatwave conditions in the NSW Blue Mountains? The origin of the name seems to contradict the very notion that they would! ‘First discovered in Japan, the name hydrangea comes from
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