A new park in Acton

For the last eternity members of the building trade have stuffed up the shore line to the NW of Commonwealth Avenue bridge.  This was creating a new park.  This is the third go that various Governments have had at this area:

  • Kate Carnell: Futsal slab (used once according to my memory);
  • Katy Gallagher: pop-up nightclub thingy (not sure of usage but looked atrocious)
  • Andrew Barr: New park
The park finally opened last weekend.  Which I find interesting as it didn't get any coverage in the on'line edition of the Canberra Times.  Given the activities of the navvies has stuffed up a significant area for quite a long time I'd have thought the culmination of their efforts would have been worth a few electrons at least. 

As we were in town we went for a stroll there with daughter and the SPs.  The first comment is that it seemed to be getting quite a bit of use from the citizens, which is a major advance on the two previous efforts.  Herewith some snaps.

A Darter seemed to have made itself comfortable near the start.
This is the first time I have really noticed a Darter's foot.  It looks really huge, especially contrasted with the basically microcephalic design on the bird.
 One of the jetties was enabling some hypoactive youth to add to their nap routine.
For some reason - currently not known to me -I didn't take any photos of the exercise frames that have been installed in the body of the park.  Here is a view of the other jetty at the South end of the area.
The swans came ashore ....
 .. and were peered at by a spotted dog (a Damatian, not one with measles).  There was some discussion of who would win between the swans and the dog with a consensus that the swans were short priced.  This was confirmed by a comment from the dog's owner (who kept it leashed and controlled) to the pooch that "That swan would kick your butt."

A tourist snap under the bridge showing the colourful foliage on the Manchurian pears..
 A nice brass (surprisingly not the rusted iron tat used by NCA in other areas) inlay on the end of the jetty marks the alignment of Burley Griffin's water axis.  This looks North to Black Mountain.
This looks South, possibly pointing to Mount Molonglo, one of the peaks in the Taliesin Hills behind our house.
Overall, and much as I hate to praise anything dome by the ACT Government and/or the National Capital Authority, I reckon this is a very good outcome.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A tour of the West (part 1)

Image
A friend from my time in the UN sent me some photos of her family trip along Route 66.  They did this is a large camperwagon rather than a Chevy Corvette (apparently the kids jacked up about being offered a trip in the trunk).  It seems to have been a very good trip for them and most interesting to see their photos.  It was also educational for me, as I found out the German for rocking chair (schaukelstuhl, since you ask). They did 7200 miles in 30 days - a pretty serious bit of distance. This made me think of the trips we did in 1981 when living in Denver.  Frances initiated that idea by getting a book about the National Parks of the West  and marking interesting places.  I then worked out a route on a Rand-McNally Road Atlas (GPS was unknown then  - as were iPhones, personal computers and the internet).  From memory, taking nearly the whole Summer school holidays we covered about 10,000 miles in 70 days.  Here, approximately,  are our routes: That map comes from Google Maps (G
Read more

Insects from pine trees

Image
This afternoon (13/1/2015) we were looking out of our sunroom and noticed a strange bit of mist.  On getting my binoculars on the case I found it to be a cloud of tens of thousand of insects.  They appeared with naked eye to be flying away, but with binoculars I thought they were circling. Here are some images In the second one it may be possible to see there are two streams coming from the top of each tree. There was a loud buzzing noise but that could just be several thousand wings. Earlier in the day Frances had been to some nearby willows and they were infested with many little black soft bodied insects.  Perhaps they shifted to the pines and were swarming? Help!! Any information welcome. A colleague, from Wamboin, had noticed a similat phenomenon, but involvng eucalypts rather than pines!  Here are the photos he took with his phone. I have consulted some expert friends.   Their responses were: I would have gone for chironomids. I recall years ago driving al
Read more

Maslins beach rules

Image
Anyone who was in Adelaide in the 1970s will be having a good nudge nudge at that title.  However the beach is really nice even though it is the haunt (in Summer ) of naked people.  (As an aside one of the 'van park staff was talking to some other guests and commented that the sights on the beach in Summer were not at all exciting.)  In April it is the haunt of seniors, many of them exercising their dogs, and thus a far more attractive place. Getting to the beach was a walk of about 1km along roads, from our van.  The second half of this went past a rather daggy looking paddock with many formed ridges in it, as though it was irrigated, although a water sources wasn't evident.  The paddock got interesting towards the end as some green parrots appeared.  Thanks to Frances eye for detail we have subsequently identified these as Elegant Parrots: my first lifer for 2014.    The locale is indicated by the red lines in this mudmap: Here are the birds: The view from the top of
Read more