Shellharbour trip part 2

February 27, 2014

This follows on from part 1 of the report on this trip. I hope that it isn't too linear to have part 2 following part 1!

Kiama was found easily and we swung into the town following signs marked to the Blowhole, which is the big tourist item in the area. This was our first example of working out where to park a camper and was initially a bit fraught as no double length drive-through spots seemed available. However we eventually found a parallel park from which we could walk back to the War Memorial.

En route we met some more marine-life themed pavement art.

This tin shed is attached to the old fire station (now an art gallery, see below) but no-one seemed to know anything about who painted the shed.

Here is the front of the fire station. In contrast to the she d the painted cow (Daisy) has a webpage all about her. Any students of bureaucratic OHAS obsessions are encouraged to read the PDF guidelines for painting her!

This is the basic war Memorial in Kiama.

Between the arch and the street is a large wall to which a few plaques have been affixed to honour veterans who are not listed on the arch.

Opposite the Arch, set in a pleasant, but surprisingly canophobic, park were a row of attractive older public buildings including the police station court house and Post Office. It is interesting how the Post Offices are often among the best preserved buildings in country towns: let us hope this continues as Australia Post continues along the New World Order of focusing on bottom line..

When we visited the Shoalhaven area almost exactly a year ago we looked down on Kiama from the spot where Lloyd Rees painted the view. That spot is indicated by the arrow in this image: we were standing just below the lighthouse just visible in the earlier image.

This is the blowhole. As the swell was puny it wasn't functioning while we were there.

A longer view of the Point. A fisherperson was on the first rocky headland but vanished when my camera pointed towards. I guess he was definitely supposed to be at his grandmother's funeral

There was good mineralisation n the rocks. Probably find Ms Rinehart (any of 'em) or Palmer MP thinking - as much as that crew think about anything - about digging the place up and selling the result to China or India.

As we approached the fish shop this large pooch started jumping up and down with excitement. Tammy was pleased to accommodate him but then he ran away!

I thought these spikes were to deter birds from perching and guano-ising the lights.

Nice try, no cigar.

Possibly it does stop pelicans from sitting on the lights themseleves and breaking them off - see below. At this point Tammy and I were sent from the field to get the car while Frances waited for the fish shop to actually start trading. We found this huge fig tree from which strange calls were emerging.

I thought it might be Channel-billed Cuckoos but in fact it turned out to be Long-billed Corellas.

This Pelican was in natural habitat out near the Blowhole,

while this one was conversing with a Little Black Cormorant on the gantry used by the Game Fishing Club.

The anglers in this snap wereunlikely to need th gantry.

On, on down the Highway to Nowra. Whenever there are rumours that the Earth is to be given an enema, the citizens of Nowra start reading their flood emergency plans. On this occasion the sin was that although the road from Nowra to Goulburn is pretty good, and far less hazardous that Macquarie Pass there is not a sign to Goulburn (or Nerriga) on the obvious turn-off from the Princes Hghway so we drove about 5km too far South and then returned.

Once on the correct road we went past HMAS Albatross where a pair of Bell 429 helicopters were having fun doing chicken runs

and formation flying backwards. The most startling manoevre was when they went more or less vertically upwards and then flipped into vertically downwards: as they were only a couple of hundred metres (at most) up, there wasn't a great deal of time for the pilot to work out which lever to pull before a very expensive incident. I think we sat and watched them for about 10 minutes (surprisingly, the forces of repression didn't appear to ask what we were doing).

As we went up the road we came across a lot of flowering plants in Parma Creek Nature Reserve. For some reason, although declared in 2001 this Reserve isn't shown in the NSW OEH list of Parks and Reserves near Nowra. This first is a Persoonia but I am not sure which.