"D is for Fort Denison"

I'm now sitting in Sydney airport (again) and have decided that I'm too tired to do some work. So, I'm going to write about the wonderful trip that Sha and I had to Fort Denison. Fort Denison is the island in the middle of Sydney harbour that is close to the Opera House and the harbour bridge. We got to the island by taking a boat from Darling Harbour (note to self ... the boat keeps going to Shark island. I'd like to go there as well one day). The Aboriginal name for the island was Mat-te-wan-ye and, in that time, looked beautiful - a small, rocky island. However, it didn't take long for the settlers and convicts to destroy the looks of the island (it was quarried to construct circular quay). In 1796 a man was hanged on the island and his body simply left hanging to frighten the arriving convicts. Apparently it frightened the Indigenous community more. Then it was decided to fortify the island, but by the time the fortifications were complete they were already out-of-date. The only time the island has been hit was accidentally by the Americans in 1942.

We arrived just before 1pm and managed watched the gun firing to mark the hour. Apparently it was used for ship captains to set their chronometers because "the salt water attracts magnetism that changes the ship clocks". hmmmm.

Now the island has a a tide gauge (that looks very impressive), a restaurant (that is very posh) and a small, but interesting museum.

The koala park

I'm waiting for a whole heap of files to move around the network at the moment and so thought that I'd distract myself by writing about Saturday. I enjoyed Saturday. After a huge breakfast of bacon and eggs, Sha and I headed off to see the Pennant Hills koalas (with a few delays to photograph Sha in front of every large bunch of flowers that we came across). I can now say "yellow flower" and "red flower" in Chinese. I can also say "I want a green tea icecream" which is more useful. (BTW ... on Friday night, Jonathan and Sha bought a huge tub of green tea icecream to eat at my house ... I prefer chocolate, but was ignored). There were baby koalas. We also fed the kangaroos (Sha decided that she liked kangaroo food). Sha got attacked by a parrot. I was laughing too much to rescue her.

Back to work ...

"C is for Cabramatta"

I liked Cabramatta. This was the first time that Sha and I had been to somewhere that was new for both of us. It took a while to get there. First we walked to Epping station, then took a train to Strathfield, then another one to Granville and then a bus to Cabramatta. When we arrived it was almost time to leave again.

Cabramatta is an interesting place. It's commonly known in Sydney as "Little Asia" and as every sign seems to be in Vietnamese or Chinese it is easy to see why. I've just been learning about the origins of the place. Apparently, in the indigenous language of the area, 'Cabra' means fresh tasty water grub, and 'Matta' means a point or jutting out piece of land (wikipedia). In 1795 the area was covered in trees. The area got a railway station in 1872. In the 1950 and 60s "large numbers of post-war immigrants from Europe passed through [a migrant] hostel and settled in the surrounding area". Around that time "Cabramatta High School was statistically the most diverse and multicultural school in Sydney, and a study showed that only 10% of children had both parents born in Australia". During the 1960s and 1970s the Vietnam war produced more immigrants from South-east Asia who settled near Cabramatta. The recent census showed that more people in Cabramatta had been born in Vietnam than in Australia.

(Also, the film Little Fish was apparently filmed there).

One of the things that I like about heading off to different areas of Sydney is that we keep spotting interesting things. This time Sha noted a small Buddhist temple from the bus window (in Canley Vale). I've just discovered that this is the Kwan Yin Buddhist Temple which is "one of Sydney's best kept secrets". "Built by a group of Vietnamese-Chinese refugees, this temple was constructed as a special act of devotion to Kwan Yin, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy."

I also picked up a free book on "The Practice of Bodhisattva Dharma". I started reading it on the train, but it is quite heavy going. Anyway, if I get to page 12 then I'll learn about "Increasing Bliss and Dispelling Calamities". By page 41, I'll discover the "Four All-Embracing Virtues".

A concert at the opera house

It seems that so much is happening at the moment. At work we've interviewed and selected a new research assistant. I'm also putting together an application to get a new postdoctoral researcher who will work with the pulsar group. Vikram and Daniel have been working hard on their papers. I decided to go home today when my email inbox reached 1,000 messages. Oh dear. I've now managed to cut it down to 299, but still have a long way to go. One thing that was exciting (at least to me) was that I now have three papers with more than 100 citations!!

Yesterday, Sha and I went to the opera house. It was a great first concert (Sha hadn't been to the opera house before and hadn't heard many classical concerts). We heard three concertos (concerti?). The first was a Handel Concerto Grosso. A nice, short, straight-forward work. The second was Dvorak's cello concerto. Wow!! Wonderful. The 'cellist Gautier Capuçon was excellent. Apparently he was also very handsome. Anyway, all I remember was that he played superbly and is younger than me. My only problem with the Dvorak concerto is that I sit through it wondering how much the triangle player gets paid. He sits completely still for about 30 minutes, but whacking his triangle a few times and then does nothing for the rest of the piece. After the interval we heard the World premier of a horn concerto by Christopher Gordon. I must admit that I preferred the Dvorak!

"B is for Browns Waterhole"

Maybe we should have picked "B is for Bondi". It certainly would have been more traditional and I still have never been to Bondi. Instead we decided to venture into the bush. Browns Waterhole has been annoying me for ages. I found a second hand book in Crows Nest once that told the history of Browns Waterhole and the local area. I didn't buy the book and now can't find any information about where I live. Searching the web doesn't help much although I did discover that "Near Browns Waterhole, at the western edge of the park, is a carved track of wallaby imprints". Sha and I should head back and try and find it! I also discovered that in the 1940's "While parents were forever busy, life was great for children; the bush was their playground, there was fruit to steal, rabbits to trap and Brown's waterhole for a cool dip". It's a bit polluted now and so I doubt that many people still use it for a cool dip.

Anyway, the walk was great.

We ambled past Browns Waterhole and around the Step Track that leads up to a great cliff that overlooks the Lane Cove National Park.

Oh ... I have to have a rant. My parents bought me a great new "Spot" that is meant to keep me safe. It allows me to press a button which automatically emails me where I am. Except that it doesn't. We pressed the button heaps of times during our walk and I didn't receive any emails. Maybe I need to read the manual again!

Another great weekend

Sha came around again on Friday to eat a meal (the first meal that I have cooked for her ... as far as I know she didn't get food poisioning - I introduced Sha to the romantic food: custard!) and watch a movie (we watched the romantic Fawlty Towers!). On Saturday we did some shopping and then, in the afternoon, met up with Nicole and Jonathan to drive to Kate's house to practice some string quartet music. This led into ping pong (I think that I lost every game) and then to a great dinner that Kate's family made. On Sunday we went hiking in the Lane Cove national park (spotting lots of different parrots) and then went into the City to have dinner in an Italian restaurant in Darling Harbour. Then I went home via a few cold railway stations.

"A" is for Ashfield

It's scary! In a few days I'll have been in Australia for seven years! I'm getting old. It also quite scary that there are so many places in Sydney that I've never been to. So, Sha and I are going through the alphabet. "A" is rather obvious as Sha lives in Ashfield. I'd been to the railway station heaps of times (mainly to change trains to get to the Chinese embassy), but had never been out of the station. Ashfield doesn't have a particularly good reputation. The most recent news article was about a possible murder. One before was about an assault.

But Ashfield is actually quite nice. It's dominated by Chinese restaurants, Chinese people and Chinese supermarkets. The restaurants are called "Shanghai restaurant", "Shanghai dumpling restaurant", "New Shanghai restaurant" ... and so on. After eating jiao zi for five days running I decided that we should try food from a different country. We walked from one end of Ashfield to the other. The only option that we found was a Korean restaurant.

Wow, I've just found a site that tells you more than you'd ever want to know about Ashfield. Apparently, "The original inhabitants of the Ashfield area were the Wangal Aboriginal people. European settlement of the area dates from 1794". Apparently 10% of the Ashfield population are from China and 5% from Italy (so why couldn't we find a nice Italian restaurant?). 37% of the population are from non-English speaking backgrounds.

Sha and I had another great weekend just now ... where we went to "Browns Waterhole", but I'll write about that tomorrow.