First evening observation

I went to the quarry after sunset and stayed for an hour (from 6:45 pm until 7:45 pm). The weather was pleasant (good, clear and still - I just thought I should make a note of this). I parked at the corner of Rice Flower Rd and Riverbend Way which gave me a reasonable view of the quarry 'entrance' (i.e. dead-end road). The first half-hour was uneventful. A soccer match was on at the Melbourne Knights football ground and their stadium lighting conveniently illuminated the quarry walls and surrounding area (this was also a bad thing [the soccer match not the lighting], which I will mention in detail later).

At 7:13 pm, a car (dark station wagon) drove down Rivervalley Boulevard and slowed down at the roundabout, continuing further along Halong Drive. I thought this was a bit weird because there are more direct ways to get to RVE (turning right on Sunnybank Rise) which don't involve driving downhill and uphill again. A second car (black 4WD with super tinted windows) did this at 7:15 pm and went back uphill via Rice Flower Rd into Riverbend Way (driving straight past me) which is really weird. Either they intended on doing something suss, noticed me and kept driving in order to avoid surveillance, or it's a less engine-destroying way to get to the lower streets of RVE (Sunnybank Rise is incredibly steep - a quick calculation based on a counter map reveals a gradient of 23% - but this doesn't occur until half-way down the street which means that the movements of the second car were essentially redundant and petrol-wasting, unless they know something I don't know). Maybe I'm reading too much into this so I'll just leave that observation there.

Things got exciting at 7:16 pm when a white ute full of rubbish appeared and parked at the dead-end next to the barrier. The contents of the ute tray appeared to mostly be whitegoods. It sat there idling for 3 minutes, at which point the driver turned an interior car light, opened the door and got out. They stood around next to the barrier for a while. Nothing happened for a long time (maybe they saw me?) but around 7:28 pm, there was a distinct and very bizarre sounding noise - a little squeal, kind of baby animalish, short and sharp (I can't help but wonder if this was a fox?). A few seconds later, the ute driver went back to their vehicle and reversed (maybe they got spooked by the weird noise), leaving via Halong Drive (a strange thing to do because the gradient of Rivervalley Boulevard is much more gentle and less populated than the part of RVE oriented towards the Maribyrnong River, so if they had strange plans it would've made sense for them to leave that way? After all, they did come from that street...).

Roughly around 7:34 pm I heard the distinct noise of a rock hitting another rock but I couldn't tell if this was due to some kind of natural process (unstable quarry wall?) or maybe some soccer-related noise. This is where I'm going to elaborate on the soccer match being a bad thing - for some reason there was a lot of yelling and whatnot which obviously echoed and therefore made me think there were screaming sounds coming from the quarry until I realised they were merely sport noises. I think next time I'll make sure there isn't a soccer match on when I visit.

I also took my camera with me but I stupidly forgot my tripod, which resulted in some very grainy images (the premise behind taking my camera being that a long exposure reveals a lot more than what the eye can see at nighttime - this was helpful because I saw a strange light when I first parked my car and thought it was a person using their phone as a flashlight but turns out it was a reflective sticker on a substation box).

That's mostly it for now. I think I'll go back in the late afternoon tomorrow.