Where has the week gone?

Somehow it is Tuesday, where did the week go?
Because I have WIIW tomorrow I had better provide the answer to last week's tonight.Nobody guessed 100% right.

Once again I can’t mark Linda G wrong.
It is indeed a cylindrical building with windows!
Linda you would make a great barrack room lawyer.
I guess I have to give you 50%.

The most popular guess was lighthouse which is just dead wrong (although I thought that was what people would guess).
Kitty guessed a turret, I can see that.
Kristen M said NOT a lighthouse, so I guess that deserves 50% for not falling into my trap.
But no one was really close.
Here it is:It is a water tower. This structure is part of the Echuca water supply.

As well as being unusually elaborate for a water tank it has some historical significance from an Oz perspective.
Completed in 1915 it was a civil engineering project supervised by John Monash who went on to become Australia’s most senior General in World War One.

For those of you who are interested, Echuca sits at the junction of the Murray River and the Campaspe River on the border between Victoria and NSW. It's on the southern bank of the Murray which means it is in my current home state, Victoria.

Down and Out in Melbourne

I have to apologise, but the tone of this post isn’t exactly cheery.

Things have been rough lately for many of the guys who use the homeless services I run. The cold weather is having a real impact. A number of guys have ended up in hospital with conditions like fevers and pneumonia.

About the only saving grace in such situations is the major hospitals in Oz are public and essentially free.
Yet getting a hospital bed is not the end of the guys’ problems. Often their condition will only be stabilised and then there is pressure on them to be discharged.
Once they are discharged it means straight back onto the street, there simply are not enough emergency accommodation beds in the city.

So a good deal of our time over the past little while has been work around this kind of issue.

Yesterday for example, a regular of ours (I’ll call him Dave) showed up at our breakfast service clearly very unwell. Dave had a high fever and could barely move for pain. My offsider Greg and I spent an hour making sure he got to hospital. Then I was on the phone a number of times to try to get Dave’s needs followed up.

Dave was discharged today, he’d been on intravenous anti-biotics overnight and looked quite a bit better. But nothing like well enough to spend a night on the street or under a bridge.

So I spent a good chunk of the morning phoning around to get Dave some emergency accommodation. The best I could organise: two nights of motel accommodation paid for by an accommodation agency.

As you can guess a situation like this is extremely frustrating. We are working in a system that is in my opinion badly broken.

It would be easy to get very down about how little we can achieve. Yet, what I take from an experience like this is essentially uplifting. I have done what I can, I have tried my hardest. Dave has at least a couple of nights of safety. That means something.

And who knows what we might achieve tomorrow.

Now for a change of pace a Pacific Reef Heron I “caught” up on the NSW south coast as he hunted along a wave washed rock shelf.I haven’t seen one of these guys before although they are apparently quite common around our coast.

Merimbula day 2

Well the internet here is still dodgy at best. To get any reception I have to sit under a shelter outside in the cold to get wi-fi reception.

Yes, yes, I know that to those in the Northern Hemisphere our winter does not seem all that cold. In truth we have been having absolutely glorious weather down here on the NSW south coast (until this morning). It has been sunny every day with very little wind, temperatures up to about 16 or 17°C during the day. Way nicer than a typical dreary, wet Melbourne winter.

But it is still coat weather in the mornings and in the evenings. In fact as an ex-Queenslander I think it is pretty cold whenever it’s below about 20°C.

Thanks to my current internet woes I will have to keep my Uncle Harry-esque tourist guide to the minimum. (Sorry Uncle Harry).

So on day two of our holiday we headed south to the relatively sleepy port of Eden. Eden is a most beautiful patch of the coast. It is about six to seven hours drive from either Melbourne or Sydney and because the south coast is seen as ‘cold’ it has really avoided the tourist boom that has (in my opinion) ruined the north coast of NSW and south coast of Queensland.

Eden sits on the large Twofold Bay. This beach lies in the outer part of the bay (I guess that would be the outer ‘fold’).

Far across on the south side of the bay stands Ben Boyd’s folly. I posted about the tower last year. It was built in the early settlement period as part of the whaling industry.This piccie is from my post last year.
The town of Eden largely stands on a rugged promontory that extends far out into the bay.The original port of Eden sits in ‘Snug Cove’. The cove is sheltered from the worst weather by the headland.

A small fishing fleet calls the port home.A large tug serves as a reminder that the bay holds a modern port away on the south side. Down on the south side of the bay is a large woodchip processing plant, and the tug is used to manoeuvre bulk carriers into their berths.

I would post more about what we’ve been doing for the past couple of days, but I’ve had enough of the cold so good night!

Down Time

Just a quick post this evening.

We (that is Deb, all the Girls and I) are heading off interstate on holiday tomorrow.

We are going to be staying in a town on the south coast of New South Wales (NSW) called Merimbula.

Merimbula is just north of one of my favourite places of all, Eden.

That’s right Eden NSW.

I’ve posted about Eden before, and no doubt I will take a piccie or two while I am away (Ok, Ok, a piccie or two hundred).

I haven’t been to the NSW south coast in winter before so I am looking forward to seeing what we can see.

Humpback whales begin making their way along the coast at this time of year so they could be one thing on offer.

In any case there is a good chance I will bore you with sights from around Eden like:

Twofold Bay;

Ben Boyd National Park.

The local wild life

But we’ll just have to see.

We’ll be away for around ten days. Now the place we are staying is supposed to have internet, but in case it doesn’t you might not hear from me until I get back.

A Scotsman’s Folly

On the South Coast of New South Wales, almost exactly half way between Sydney and Melbourne and about six hours drive from each, lies Ben Boyd National Park. Hidden in the park are some fantastic places.

Examples include: many kilometres of isolated and undisturbed beaches;

and The Green Cape Lighthouse.If you drive into the main entrance of the park from the Princess Highway and head for Red Point you come to a car park. From there you follow a little path towards the point.

At one spot you catch a glimpse, through a window in the bush, down to the sea. The pounding of the sea has exposed the rich red siltstone that gives the point its name.

Then suddenly ahead you glimpse over the storm twisted Melaleuca trees this unexpected sight.
Looking as if it would be more at home in the UK, this is Ben Boyd’s Tower one of the legacies of an eccentric from the early days of European settlement.

Ben Boyd was a Scotsman who in 1840 raised £200,000 in venture capital to fund development in the Colony of NSW.
Boydtown was founded nearby in 1843 as a port to support a large pastoral empire and as a base for a whaling operation. Four years later a visitor, speaking of the town, mentioned its Gothic church with a spire, stores, well-built brick houses, and "a splendid hotel in the Elizabethan style".
Boyd’s tower was built as a look out to give his whaling boats an advantage in spotting whales as they came north along the coast and he had ambitions that the government would use it as an official lighthouse.But Boyd was too grandiose and by 1849 he was bankrupted. He travelled to the California Gold fields, but had no luck. Finally he disappeared at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands in 1851.
Today the Tower that still carries his name is a shell.
Inside the floor joists are still in place but the floorboards are gone.From the tip of the point you can see across Twofold Bay to Eden, the port that took over as the local whaling harbour as Boydtown fell into ruins.And facing down the coast to the south, is more of the rich red stone that contrasts beautifully with the blue green ocean.This stretch of the NSW coast has to be one of my favourite places on the whole planet.

Next: Eden, a well named slice of country.