Updates
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John Oxley Centre Fail
Back in April 2012 I posted about the renovations of the big courtyard in between the two office towers of the John Oxley Centre on Coronation Drive. This courtyard sits more or less on top of the old stream of Western Creek (now Milton Drain) just before it met the river. It is quite likely…
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Milton Drain’s tidal limits
Last Saturday (the 12th of January) we had a particularly high tide. According to willyweather.com, high tide at the Port Office was 2.7m at 10:51am. The Bureau of Meteorology’s tide tables suggest that we won’t get another tide this big (give or take a few centimetres) until the 26th of May. I was aware of…
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Floods aniversary special
Two years ago today, Rosalie and many other parts of Brisbane were underwater. Any misconceptions we had about the power of Wivenhoe Dam to save us from ever being flooded again were swept away, and before long, attention turned to what, if anything, we could do to stop this from happening again. In a post…
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Backflow to the future
Backflow to the Future… or: How we learned to stop worrying and love the floods Angus Veitch — 12 January 2013 (updated January 2014) Duckbill season If you’ve walked along the riverside bikeway at Milton recently and paid close attention to the riverbank, you may have noticed one of these: This is not a piece…
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Picturing the past
If a picture says a thousand words, then today’s post should more than compensate for the lack of writing that I’ve done in recent weeks. For a while now I have been collecting any historical photographs I can find of The Western Creek catchment and surrounding area. So far these are limited to those that…
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Guppies & Geysers – Stories from the drains of Western Creek
At about 10.30am on Saturday morning, a freak storm raced through Brisbane. The rain was so heavy that parts of Gregory Park went underwater, bringing back memories of the lead-up to the 2011 flood and reminding us again of this park’s swampy origins. Unfortunately I was not in a position to take any photos, given…
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Guppies & Geysers: Rosalie’s drains in the 1970s
Guppies & geysers: memories of playing around and under Paddington in the 1970s Steven Cowley, November 2012 This page was written by Steven Cowley on behalf of his friend Rhonda, who grew up in Herbert Street in the 1970s. After getting in touch with me and asking if I would be interested in a child’s…
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Exploring McKellar’s map in Google Earth
The fun with maps continues… As detailed in last week’s post, I have recently been experimenting with ways of importing historical maps into Google Earth, which enables them to be explored from a whole new perspective. I initially did this for three maps, dating from 1843, 1859 and 1864. Today I’ve done the same for…
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Fun with Google Earth
A few weeks back, I posted some images that I put together by combining old maps with recent aerial photographs. Since then, I’ve discovered how to import those same maps into Google Earth. This is really exciting, because it allows you to explore these maps in an interactive way. Instead of being stuck with an…
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Once upon a time in the west
I’ve finally finished a new page about the early estates of Milton. This page focuses on the early land divisions in the Milton area, and the houses and farms built on them by the early landowners. It also goes back a bit further, touching on Brisbane’s beginnings as a penal settlement, and further still, revisiting…
Got any book recommendations?