7/08/2014

Boring and sleepy

We are going to Canberra on Friday via train and bus and staying there until Tuesday morning. I considered driving but I would rather use the travel time to do readings ("do readings" sounds weird but it doesn't sound as bad as "read readings") on the for my intensive subject starting July 21. I only just realised this is the first holiday I've taken since April 2012, not counting Golden Plains in 2013, so the idea of going anywhere is kind of scary (after I booked the V/Line tickets I had one of those "good lord what have I done..." moments). At the very least it will be good blog fodder.

Just before I started typing this I saw flashing lights through the venetian blinds so I went out onto the balcony to find 3 firemen pouring water on the mulch of a fig tree on the nature strip. One of them approached me and thanked me for calling them (I didn't, though) and explained that somebody had flicked a cigarette which had landed on the mulch and caused it to smoulder and eventually set alight. There was a police car too which left soon after. It was very weird and I am pretty sure the guy next door is at fault, because there's a 5m radius of discarded and stubbed-out cigarettes around his balcony. Not that I'm accusing him, of course. I just feel bad for the poor tree and surrounding grass. And I guess I'm also surprised something could catch alight in the middle of winter.



Old flour mill in Albion
Frozen cake at Sunshine Woolworths. Someone also left some cream in the freezer and it became a solid block

7/02/2014

Let's talk about quarries again

While I'm in Canberra I plan on visiting the Yarralumla brickworks, in part motivated by the similarity of the site to my Sunshine North quarries (but also because Walter Burley Griffin designed some great chimneys and I want to see one in real life). Site operations ceased in 1976 and the place has been left unused since aside from what I gather to be some ghost-motivated urban exploration by particularly wild Canberrites, based solely on these Google search suggestions:
Searches related to Yarralumla brickworks
yarralumla brickworks haunted
yarralumla brickworks ghost
why is brickworks yarralumla a.c.t haunted 

This aspect is not even mildly intriguing, sorry potential ghost hunters and sleuths, if I could be bothered I would make a clever reference to Derrida's ghost idea and Marcucci's ghost landscapes etc. but I won't and you can just pretend I did.  

I just think this is really neat - source
Anyway, there's a quarry there too, which is going to turn into a park one day. This thing has some renders of the proposal and it looks OK (but only OK), in my expert opinion as a quarry enthusiast. A quick critique of the proposed park details, as per document linked above: 
  • All quarries that become parks, or part of a larger housing estate, look the same
  • There's always some reference to the quarry walls being dramatic and geologically significant, or being used for storm water purposes (a return to productivity?). This quarry has both
  • Something about pathways and "wetland edges" reminds me of Kaplan & Kaplan (1989 I think). They had a lot of good ideas about space and human preferences/perceptions which are interesting when applied to quarries (i.e. industrial landscapes are no good; humans inherently like salubrious [there's that word again] scenes with water, nature and mystery, but also need environments to be ordered and simple enough to understand/not get lost in). I feel like a lot of quarry parks try to play up the nature aspect and simplify the space by creating controlled or defined spaces in which to do something (in that sense, welcoming/formalising some uses and discouraging others). 
  • I read a Wolfe & Rivlin (1987) thing a while back about neat edges and imposed order on environments which I also think is relevant to the quarry-park remediation thing. The image below makes the quarry look like a curated space
  • I also find it funny that the document uses the term 'informal' in reference to sporting uses, which I can imagine means that it isn't formal or organised competition. I only bring this up because it does a great job of showing the difference between informal and "informal" (that makes sense to me right now but I bet you I'll read this again in 3 weeks and wonder what on earth I meant by that) 
  • Can I just say "a crust of housing" is a really unpleasant way of saying there are going to be houses surrounding the quarry? I just think of stale bread 
A render from the document - this is eerily tidy and green

Critiquing that quarry-park makes me feel really mean so I'm going to stop now. In order to balance out the vibes of this blog I give you a sunset, happy coffee foam, and a cool textile 


It was originally an apple, I added the face