Lake Wallace
April 7, 2015
Lake Wallace and the power station are now the most conspicuous features in the Wallerawang landscape. This view overlooks the spot where Barton Park stood. Barton Park was built by the Walker Bartons on the site of the earlier Wallerawong Station where Charles Darwin had stayed . There is a peculiar but meaningless irony in […]
Square and Compass Inn
April 7, 2015
Another building that featured in my romantic childhood view of history, an old Cobb and Co inn (or so I was told) at Lidsdale. It also happened to be where my kindergarten teacher Mrs Holt lived. I thought of it as incredibly ancient and exotic, built by early settlers. After a few years when the […]
Our Orchard
April 7, 2015
We planted over fifty different fruit trees in the garden of our Blackberry Lane house. They were planted in an area of compacted and contaminated road fill outside the shed that had once been a truck maintenance garage and a car demolition yard. After clearing it and bringing in countless truckloads of new top soil […]
Lidsdale House Garden
April 7, 2015
The garden surrounding Lidsdale House was designed by Paul Sorensen. It is lush and manicured. But the 1940s extensions to the house are in a creepy and ominous style. They have an uncanny lost domain feeling that haunted me as I cautiously peeked over the fence as a child. In some strange way they projected […]
Cemetery Gate
April 7, 2015
The Walker Barton private cemetery now overlooks Lake Wallace. Initially it overlooked Barton Park, formerly Wallerawong Station where Charles Darwin stayed. Perhaps in time the dam will be removed and the Coxs River returned to the platypuses.
Solar Newnes
April 7, 2015
Newnes was set up to mine and process kerosene shale, an industry that, like coal mining or fracking, was eventually uneconomic. It was also environmentally destructive although in less than fifty years the bush had reclaimed most of the site with only the pub remaining. When locals complain about mines closing down I point out […]
Railway Viaducts
April 7, 2015
The Lithgow railway viaducts are a link around the globe to the Roman aqueducts of Italy and southern France. Indigenous stories read the landscape in one way but the British invaders superimposed their Greco-Roman gods as well as their architecture based on Roman models. Even Sydney’s name stretches back through its namesake Viscount Sydney to […]
Walker Barton Cemetery
April 6, 2015
Lake Wallace was created in 1978 to supply cooling water to Wallerawang power station. The Walker Barton Cemetery on the north side of the lake would have been flooded but the grave markers were removed, the ground level raised by about six metres and then the gravestones reinstalled. So this is not the cemetery it […]
Wallerawang Ferals
April 6, 2015
Occasionally cows, kangaroos, dogs, goats (named “Butthead” and ” Buttarse”) and local teenagers would come wandering uninvited through our garden at Wallerawang.
Darwin Monument
April 6, 2015
In January 1836 Charles Darwin stayed for several days at “Wallerawong” Station where he collected a platypus and investigated the geology of the Wolgan Valley. His diary entries contain the first written suggestion of his theory of evolution. …I had been lying on a sunny bank & was reflecting on the strange character of the […]