Gap in the fence



A gap in the fence


Dosser's camp


Gas towers




Next stop Telarah


There are always trains going back and forth: passenger trains, goods trains and the mile-long, seemingly endless (when you’re waiting to cross the line at the Clyde Street lights) coal trains. Two of the sounds that I’ll always associate with Hamilton North, if I ever leave, will be the clanging of the crossing bell at the Clyde Street lights and the reluctant squeal of empty coal trucks being pushed back up the valley at night.

I see some trains regularly; the morning two-car passenger train to Telerah’s the most common. I wonder if people look down into the creek and think, there’s that bloke with his dog again.




Our solar system


These two balls turned up on the same day and immediately reminded me of the classroom exercise in which the teacher is the sun (of course) and various people take on the role of planets: Geoffrey Flynn with the permanent nasal discharge is Mercury (a ping-pong ball), early-developing Pauline Cumberbatch is the Earth (an orange), thieving Trevor McAlpine is Neptune (a blue balloon) and so on.


I don’t ever remember being picked to hold a round object as part of our solar system. I was more your “third king” at Nativity, with a modified lampshade for a crown, or the back row of the choir (and perhaps you might want to just mouth the words, Mark).


Trolley mania


There was a monster flush at the end of June and, ladies and gentlemen, it brought down not one …


not two …


but three trollies.



Days like this


On days like this – when there are egrets, herons and ducks at the water’s edge, and cormorants drying their wings on the litter boom, and flocks of woodswallows swooping like confetti – it’s easy to imagine the “drain” as something else: as a creek.


We were renting in Hamilton before we bought in Hamilton North. Hamilton was nothing but sparrows, Indian miners and feral pigeons and so Hamilton North was a revelation. The creek forms two of the boundaries to the suburb and acts as a corridor, mainly for waterbirds, but falcons, yellow-tailed black cockatoos, wrens, cockatiels and silvereyes all appear around here, if you’re prepared to notice.

If Styx Creek as a walking destination comes up in conversation I usually get blank looks, until the person’s eyes light up and they say, “Ah! The drain!” I’m ambivalent about people referring to the creek as a drain; some people revel in Newcastle’s “draininess” and I kind of like this urban reclamation. But the other half of me can’t help but think of author Toni Morrison’s quote, that “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was”. In June 2007, Hamilton North saw what happens when water remembers. How can you take a winding, sinuous creek that’s taken thousands of years to find its way through this floodplain and make it into this?:

Styx Creek

Telegraph wires


Like them or hate them, you can’t avoid them.


Tags and street art


I’m not sure if the stuff that appears on the creek banks and bridge posts is either one or the other: they seem too big to be tags but not public enough to be street art. Occasionally the council sends a batch of these kids down to paint over all the tags/art/graffiti, thereby leaving a beautiful new white canvas for the next lot.


Whenever I see a fresh batch of cans my brain automatically starts singing the Arctic Monkey’s Riot Van. They just wind the coppers up. Ask why they don’t catch proper crooks.

Spray cans