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mccnmatt

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August 10, 2018

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History, kayaking, landscape photography, national parks, Uncategorized, Waste

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The Great War and rubbish

Hole pattern abstract

There’s nothing I like better than a scene of elegant industrial decay. Place that ruin-porn in the tranquillity of the Hawkesbury at midwinter. What could be finer than a paddle around a rusted out wreck on a still morning, in the company of breakfasting eagles and kites?

The rear of the Parramatta and the slopes below the M1

Rivets and rust

Oystershells of rust

White bellied sea eagle with breakfast

Fisherfolk with fish

What surprised me, back on land, when I dug around to find out more, was the age of this beautiful ruin. The Parramatta was the very first ship commissioned for the newly formed Australian Navy after Federation. It was built in 1910, the first of six torpedo boat destroyers to be constructed by Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering in Glasgow. The destroyer was part of the Australian Fleet in the Pacific during the Great War, hunting enemy ships up the Sepik River in New Guinea, patrolling the waters around the Phillipines, Malayan and the East Indies, and later, battling submarines in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic.

The interior of the wreck of the Parramatta

It’s been a very long time since the Parramatta did what she was designed to do. She was taken off to be dismantled in 1929, when my granddad was a toddler.

Native rock orchids… I think!

A mangrove growing through the hull

But in her post-naval career, she’s certainly been reused a few times. After being decommissioned, she was sold to the NSW Penal Department, along with her sister ship The Swan, and towed to Cowan Creek where each boat was to accommodate 50 convicts. The prisoners were supposed to work on a new road from Bobbin Head to Brooklyn that was to be “the finest marine drive in the whole world”. The stretch from Windybanks to Bobbin Head was declared a detention area, but in the end, with a change of government and not a single vote in favour of the plan from the Kuring-gai Chase Trustees, the idea of building a road was shelved and the boats were sold again. Their purchaser hoped (ultimately fruitlessly) to use them as a floating hotel for fishermen. It’s rumoured they went on to house unemployed men and store water during the Depression, before being towed to the north end of Milson Island and used as a floating sand and gravel pit.

Flowing fog at Milson's Island - the location of the Parramatta is on the right

Looking north past Milson’s Island – the wreck location is near the right of the photo

In the early 1970s, the historical significance of the wreck was began to be appreciated and the bow and stern of the ship were retrieved and preserved for posterity – the stern at Queens Wharf Reserve on the Parramatta River, and the bow at the Garden Island military base in Sydney. Other bits have been less officially repurposed – all its valuable brass portholes, for instance, have been nicked.

The back of the Parramatta

Hypnotic ripples

Mangrove saplings

It’s not really clear how the wreck ended up on a mudbank on a bend of the Hawkesbury. It’s rumoured she and her sister ship The Swan were being towed downriver in a gale in 1934 when they broke away. The Swan filled up with water and sank twenty metres deep in the river near Little Wobby public wharf, while the Parramatta was stranded in the shallow water amongst the oyster farms below Cascade Creek.

Looking over to Grace’s Shore in Muogamarra National Park

She’s not the only bit of flotsam and jetsam on that bend of the river, though, by a long shot. I pulled in amongst the mangroves to stretch my legs below the waterfall, to find all manner of rubbish. A discarded shopping bag was filled with drink bottles, polystyrene, coke cans, bait bags and the odd thong in a matter of minutes. I even found a functional tupperware container and matching lid, some thing that I almost never see in my own kitchen cupboards.

Parramatta with hills amended

I have no pictures of any of this trash, needless to say. Unless it’s on the epic scale of Edward Burtynsky’s sublime depictions of industrial landscapes, utterly transformed by excavation and waste, our tide of plastic detritus is nowhere near as photogenic as the rusty bones of our military past. But it will will last hundreds, if not thousands, of years longer.

Rust abstract crop

Other local history posts

The Hawkesbury vs the engineers: some history of the Hawkesbury Railway Bridge

Canberra on Cowan Creek? The strange and beautiful story of Smith’s Creek.

The ghost freeway: the wildlife and history of Mooney Mooney creek

Two sad islands, three whistling kites: stories from Peats and Barr Island

Further references

Boon, Paul (2017) The Hawkesbury River: a social and natural history, CSIRO publishing.

Mangroves through the bones of the Parramatta

The escarpments above the wreck

Metal textures

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mccnmatt

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February 5, 2016

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History, kayaking, national parks, Uncategorized, waterways, Work

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A bridge fetishist paddles to Brooklyn

I have a weakness for bridges. Romantic trysts just happen to be arranged with the backdrop of the world’s first iron bridge. Multiple crossings of the gorgeous Severn Suspension Bridge are absolutely essential for that work trip. And in pride of place of the mantlepiece, of course, is a railway poster of the famous cantilever bridge over the Firth of Forth.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that my paddles lately all seem to end up under what it pleases me to call Brooklyn Bridge. That’s not its real name, mind, but since it starts on Long Island and takes you through the thriving metropolis of Brooklyn (population 744) I think I can get away with it.

Brooklyn bridge and stone pillars plus boat.jpg

There was that morning jaunt from Parsley Bay, past the oyster leases and beneath the swooping welcome swallows, to the top of Mullet Creek, where the Newcastle trains disappear into the Woy Woy tunnel, once the longest tunnel in the southern hemisphere.

I’ve been lucky enough to go on on some beautiful railway journeys in my life – from Montreal to New York in winter, past above-ground swimming pools frozen like giants’ ice-cubes; from southern Thailand to Bangkok, looking out at the richest of tropical orchards woven into the jungle; between snowcapped mountains and sea on the West Highland line to ~~Hogwarts~~ Mallaig. But I reckon this journey along Mullet Creek, not a place that will ever be immortalised in the baby names of the rich and famous, is my favourite. There’s something about a railway line that leaves roads far behind, forging its own way along the empty shore.

Sunrise at Brooklyn

Looking back at the Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge and Long Island from the mouth of Mullet Creek

Freight train going up Mullet Creek

“You looking at me?” – pelican at Parsley Bay

If you ask the driver, you can get off near the top of the creek at Wondabyne, the only station sans road access in Australia. Every now and then, you see people jumping off the train and straight into a tinnie, zooming off to the shacks on the other side of the river before their fish supper gets cold.

For a few years in the late nineteenth century, while the first Hawkesbury River bridge was being built, if you were travelling north by train from Sydney, you would disembark at Long Island, board the double-decker paddleboat the General Gordon, and steam off to Mullet Creek Station, then just north of Wondabyne. Now people hop off here to do part of the Great North Walk – a 250 kilometre walk from central Sydney to the beautiful beaches of Newcastle – or to wander up to Pindar Cave. Judging from the smorgasborg of rusted out craft I saw in the shallow water at the top of the creek, it’s also a place where people take their boats to die.

White jellyfish in Mullet Creek

Barnacles on a wrecked ship in Mullet Creek

A boat that may well be beyond repair

Then there was this weekend’s jaunt, downriver from Deerubbin Reserve – a popular spot, right by the freeway, to fish or have a picnic for those who find the perpetual roar of traffic reassuring. With the ever present possibility of a quick exit, I guess it’s ideal for the heavily pregnant or those who find their relatives a bit hard to take. But I can’t really bag people for their passion for the internal combustion engine since I get all hot and bothered at the prospect of a paddle underneath (count ’em) three great big bridges.

Sunrise over Long Island

Three bridges in early morning light: the freeway bridge, the Pacific Highway bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge

Hawkesbury River Bridge in dawn light

This weekend’s jaunt took me past Spectacle Island Nature Reserve, under the Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge, natch, and around Dangar Island, swished along smartly by the current and the falling tide.

Have you ever been bored enough in an airport to try walking the wrong way up a moving footpath? Trying to paddle across the current to get to one of the beaches on the eastern side of the island was a bit like that. It all seemed a bit too hard in the end, so I went where the river wanted to take me, downstream, floating just above perilous rocky reefs by off Bradley’s Beach and veering round the seagrass beds.

Sailing boats north of Dangar Island

Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge at dawn

White boat, blue hills at Kuring-gai National Park

And then through the sailing boats, swaying and tinkling like expensive marine windchimes, to Sandy Bay, the best place in the world to be homeless. The folks whose setup I saw there – a tarp flanked by a beached ramshackle boat and a solar panel – had no-one for neighbours but a horde of blue soldier crabs. There was no sign of the human residents, but I now know what it’s like to be a celebrity, thousands of beady eyes watching and waiting on your every move.

Quite a few people live rough around Brooklyn. “Good caves, a shower at Brooklyn Baths and walking distance to the bottle shop”, as RB commented with unseemly enthusiasm. In the Depression, apparently, lots of people came to live in these parts for just this reason – shelter and a bit of space for chooks or a veggie garden. I didn’t see a chicken run in Sandy Bay but Brooklyn does seem to have some kind of common flock, judging from these good looking fellas that we met down by the marina a while back.

Egg at Sandy Bay

Chickens on the commons at Brooklyn

A floating barn at Parsley Bay

Thousands of blue soldier crabs watching me

Blue soldier crab

I reckon the Hawkesbury estuary is Sydney Harbour through the looking glass – a parallel flooded river valley, bordered by bush instead of multimillion dollar apartments. If the Harbour has its iconic Bridge, the Hawkesbury has its own engineering marvel – nearly three times as long, resting 50 metres and more deep in soft black mud.

The modern bridge is the second one to cross the river here. The old bridge, finished in 1887, was the last link in the railway that spanned four colonies, connecting Queensland to South Australia.

Sir Henry Parkes, on the day of the bridge’s official opening, pronounced: “In this great system of material arteries which we completed today, we see the crimson fluid of kinship coursing through all the iron veins” (Sharp, 2001, 4). Apparently the other grandees were a bit more underwhelmed by the prospect of a federated Australia, bound together with railways. Nonetheless, the day after, the headline in the Sydney Morning Herald was headline was “United Australia”

Bridge silhouette 1

At the time it was built, the old bridge was the longest in Australia and had the deepest footings in the world – 180 feet below the high water line – though they still didn’t reach solid ground.

The Union Bridge Company from New Jersey won the contract to build it (on a pin-jointed truss system, as I’m sure you want to know), giving Brooklyn, the railway town that was set up to house the workers, its American name. The tender being won by an American company was one in the eye for the old country, though it pleases me in some strange way that the riveted steel for the spans was made by Arrol Brothers in Glasgow, who also worked on the bridge across the Firth of Forth.

The Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge from Long Island

The old Long Island Railway station

White faced heron checking out the engineers’ work on the new bridge

But the original Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge didn’t last. Its piers, filled with rubble instead of solid concrete, fractured under the weight of the trains that crossed here, the only bit of duplicate track on the line. The piles were starting to crack in the 30s, but the problem only came to light when a US railway geek doing a bit of light recreational reading of an engineering textbook spotted that the piles weren’t built to the original specifications. The death knell of the old bridge, though, was the extra rail traffic of the war.

The piers of the old bridge remain, like golden castles guarding the river.

The footings of the 1887 Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge. Or castles as I like to call them.

I’ve had a great time reading the fantastically detailed history of the building of the new bridge by Major-General Albert Cecil Fewtrell, the Chief Civil Engineer of the NSW railways, who supervised its completion.

There’s some entertaining reading between the lines. When it came to putting the metal spans onto the concrete footing, it seems some fool had a plan to float the 1,600 tonne metal spans over to the pilings at water level and then haul them out with giant cranes perched on the piers. But Major-General Fewtrell soon sorted them out:

“Consideration had been given early to the proposal to float out the spans at low level … The decision [was made] to revert to the high level method of floatation following the return of the Author from active service in 1943” (Fewtrell, 1946, 27)

The cuttings made for the construction docks for the 1946 bridge, and the boat that’s now doing bridge repairs.

The prep they did for the task of floating the massive spans from the construction docks – the cuttings still visible on the north shore of Long Island – onto the concrete pilings at high tide also gives you a sense of the guy.

A large board, representing the land and water at the site of the new bridge, was laid down in the southern tunnel. Model piers were accurately fixed in position in the “stream,” and miniature spans, pontoons, and equipment were used so that the men could practice in detail movements and prepare for emergencies.

Don’t you want to play with those 1/32 scale tiny cranes and miniature pilings? I really really do.

Fewtrell thought that everything had gone swimmingly. But the new bridge, the bridge that was supposed to last 200 years, is crumbling. After years of delays, just this last week, work started on repairing the concrete footings and its rusting reinforcing steel. When I paddled past, there were huddled men in high vis jackets and mysterious icons dangling from the bridge deck – all the signs that a new engineering miracle is about to begin. And I’m sure it’ll happen.

But at this stage, once again, I reckon it’s Hawkesbury River 1: human engineering 0.

Work starts on repairing the Brooklyn Bridge

Number 7 pier – the tricky one to get into place

Signal near the new bridge work

The elaborate connections between the pier and the span of the new bridge

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mccnmatt

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November 16, 2014

Posted under

anthropocene, Backyard birds, Backyard chickens, History, natural history

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Dinosaurs in the backyard

I’ve been thinking a lot about chickens’ feet lately. Not as as a convenient snack, like the vacuum-packed ones left on a hotel pillow (alongside a packet of condoms) for my parents to enjoy on a recent trip to China. But as a little reminder that chickens are actually dinosaurs.

Abbey’s dinosaur feet

Shyla’s dinosaur foot (do you think she needs moisturiser?)

Treasure’s goth inspired ready-pierced dinosaur feet

The whole avian dinosaur thing has crept up on us over the years, hasn’t it? Children’s encyclopedia facts shifting under middle aged feet, kooky science factoids becoming simple commonsense. The plastic dinosaurs in the kids’ toy basket, made in the 70s, are discredited heritage items now, with not a feather in sight.

When I was a fledgling, Archeopteryx was the only bird-like dinosaur around. But now, it’s just one of many, and not even the earliest (a title currently held by Aurornis xui, which was covered with fine proto-feathers most likely used for insulation and probably couldn’t fly. Naturally, Aurornis is described as “chicken sized“)

I’ve been reading John Pickrell’s Flying Dinosaurs (University of New South Wales, 2014), and he notes that “there is now good evidence that many carnivorous theropod dinosaurs, even fearsome and well known species – such as Allosaurus and Tyrannosaurus – had feathers” (Pickrell, 2014, 84).

Wow! You could knock me over with one of those proto-feathers.

Monitor skin

Snowball’s flightless protofeathers

Dinosaurs did all kinds of bird-like things. Mei Long tucked her head under her elbow to roost for the night (Pickrell, 2014, 48). Fossils show Citipati osmolskae crouching over its eggs like a broody hen (Pickrell, 2014, 179). T.rex seems to have suffered from trichomonosis, a potentially lethal parasite that which rots away the jawbone. Contemporary birds of prey catch it from eating pigeons; T.rex might have got it from gnawing at each others’ faces. (Pickrell, 2014, 60)

I discovered some crazy facts about birds reading this book. For instance, birds have smallest genome of the vertebrates – and bats’ genome is pretty small too. Smaller cells with large relative surface area means better gas exchange and greater efficiency, enabling the high metabolic rate required for flying. Apparently hummingbirds, with the fastest metabolism amongst birds, also have the smallest genome (Pickrell, 2014, 58).

Hard to believe that such tiny tiny changes could make a macro difference, but I guess if you’ve given up teeth and a jawbone to save weight, economising on your genome seems like a mere bagatelle. Inferring genome size from the space of lacunae in bones, researchers have proposed that between 230 and 250 million years ago saurischian dinosaurs – ancestors of the birds – also started to have smaller genomes, while the bones of your triceratops or hadrosaur soldiered on unchanged (Pickrell, 2014, 59).

I was amazed to read that birds don’t breathe like mammals: they have a one-way respiratory system with multiple air sacs that, when inflated, help make them light enough to fly. When birds breathe, the air flows into their their bones! And some dinosaur skeletons reveal the same spongy, pneumatised bones (Pickrell, 2014, 49-50)

“Dinosaurs and birds unquestionably have very very similar ankles. In fact, nobody has an ankle like a dinosaur or a bird” (Phil Currie cited in Pickrell, 2014, 27)

It’s perhaps ironic that chickens’ scaly feet scream “dinosaur” to me, because one of the earliest feathered dinosaurs was Anchiornis huxleii which actually had feathers on its hind legs as well as its forelimbs. In fact, there were loads of early feathered dinosaurs that looked like this. Paleontologists are still trying to work out quite how it could have used these rear legs in flight without dislocating its hips – they were probably for used to enhance aerodynmics or to create drag (Pickrell, 2014, 114).

The startlingly speedy progression of our chicks from tiny bundles of fluff to whopping great layers, made sense of the notion of paedomorphosis, a process in which animals reach sexual maturity at an earlier stage of development

In the brooder

A fledgeling at 2 months old

Four month old Shyla learning new tricks

Shyla fully grown

In comparison to the slow maturing reptiles, birds, like mammals, grow quickly in early on. Interestingly, as they mature, birds’ heads don’t change much in shape; in comparison most dinosaurs’ skulls morphed dramatically, the comparatively large, spherical noggins of babies elongating into the snouts and jaws of adults (Pickrell, 2014, 54). US researchers Bhart-Anjan Bullar, Mark Norell and Timothy Rowe noticed Archeopteryx’s adult skull is rounded just like the babies of other dinosaur species, and concluded that the ancestors of birds maintained juvenile characteristics later in life. This process of paedomorphosis (or neoteny) often goes along with smaller body size. It seems to allow the emergence of a new and unexpected set of features in an organism. Harvard’s Bhart Anjan-Buller observes “These unique characters may allow the exploitation of radically different ecological niches from other similarly sized organisms” (Pickrell, 2014, 56).

And birds have surely filled those ecological niches. There are aroundabout 10,000 living species of birds, far more types of avian dinosaurs than all the non-avian kind that ever lived. “Dinosaurs are now more successful than they’ve ever been, but they all look the same” says Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum, “With the exception of a few aberrations, they are all bipedal flyers” (Pickrell, 2014, 28).

And let’s not beat around the bush, a really really big percentage of those living dinosaurs are chickens. There’s a global chicken population explosion: there are now about three times as many chickens as there are humans – in the 1960s we were about eekies. And that’s not even considering the ratio of domesticated to wild animals. According to the RSPB, there are maybe 30 times as many domestic chickens as there are the most numerous kind of wild bird, the African dwelling red-billed quelea.

In fact, best not to dwell on this to prevent yourself being plunged into depression about the forthcoming Age of Loneliness, when we humans will mostly likely have few non-human companions. Better get used to the company of rats, cockroaches, and jellyfish. Maybe we’ll have a few bats – to my surprise, there are more species of bats than any other type of mammal except rodents (Pickrell, 2014, 107). And, of course, chickens. Lucky I love my avian dinosaurs.