Where a creek begins

A pond in a tributary of Ithaca Creek, Mount Coot-tha. (February 2013)

A pond in a tributary of Ithaca Creek, Mount Coot-tha. (February 2013)

This is just a quick plug for a side-project of mine that has mostly sat on the back-burner since this website was conceived. Before I started mapping out Western Creek in my imagination, I had started to map out Ithaca Creek (a real creek!) photographically. My plan was (and still is) to photograph Ithaca creek from one end to the other, documenting its journey from the headwaters in Mount Coot-tha Forest through to the much more suburban surrounds of Red Hill where it joins its bigger brother, Enoggera Creek.

Ithaca Creek is a neighbour of Western Creek, sharing a catchment boundary along the ridge of Stuartholme Road, Simpson’s Road, Macgregor Terrace and much of Latrobe Terrace.

To see the Ithaca Creek photo-map, click here and then click on the small banner at the top of the page to go to the Picasa Web Album (Google appears to be phasing out Web Albums in favour of the happy-snap functionality of Google+, so I don’t know how long this will remain functional). Beneath the small map on the right-hand side of the album there is a link which takes you to a proper map view of the album.

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Here we go again . . .

I don’t know about you, but I didn’t expect to be seeing scenes like these just a couple of years after January 2011. (See the new Gallery page for more pictures of today’s flooding.)

Gregory Park, 28 January 2013. The tide was still rising, and water was gushing into the park through this drain.

Gregory Park, 28 January 2013. The tide was still rising, and water was gushing into the park through this drain.

Milton Drain, from the mystery building on Milton Park, 28 January 2013.

Milton Drain, from the mystery building on Milton Park, 28 January 2013.

Then again, we shouldn’t be surprised: there’s no reason why floods should be spaced out evenly over time. Indeed, the historical record of Brisbane’s floods suggests that they often come in twos or threes.

Flood events greater than 1.7m in the Brisbane River since 1841. Also shown are the estimated mitigating impacts of river works and the two dams. All data sourced from the Brisbane River Flood Study except the effect of the two dams, which is indicative only and has been inferred from an analysis on page 523 of the final report of the Flood Commission of Inquiry.

Flood events greater than 1.7m in the Brisbane River since 1841. Also shown are the estimated mitigating impacts of river works and the two dams. All data sourced from the Brisbane River Flood Study except the effect of the two dams, which is indicative only and has been inferred from an analysis on page 523 of the final report of the Flood Commission of Inquiry.

Meanwhile, just downstream . . .

A duckbill valve on the riverbank at Milton

A duckbill valve on the riverbank at Milton

I’m also guessing that the Brisbane City Council wasn’t expecting their new backflow prevention devices to be put to use so soon. As explained in my essay Backflow to the Future, the Council has recently installed duckbill valves and flap-gates to prevent flooding in several locations, including the Cribb Street drainage system in Milton. This area spans between Cribb Street and Park Road.

After my little adventure this morning I took a walk around this area and could see no evidence of flooding. Unless this whole area is higher up than the Western Creek area (which I do not believe to be the case), this means that the duckbills and flap-gates are doing their job.

If this is the case then the Council can give itself a pat on the back. And if it has any sense, the Council will look for ways to tell everyone how many properties these devices saved from being flooded. Then again, the Council may not want to create too much work for itself. Before long, every suburb in Brisbane will be wanting one of these duckbill thingies . . .

The moon, the drain and the diving bats

I haven’t found the time to do any real research recently, so I thought I’d post some photos instead. I took these back in January and they have been gathering virtual dust on my hard drive ever since. According to the SunSurveyor app on my phone, this was the last time in a while that a full moon would hover over Milton Drain at a low enough angle to catch it reflected on the water. Exactly why I felt the need to capture this event is a good question… probably something to do with seeing the beauty in an otherwise ugly piece of suburban infrastructure. At any rate it made for an interesting photographic challenge.

While I was taking these photos, I occasionally saw what looked like a flying fox (fruit bat) swoop down towards the water and emit a strange sound before skimming the water and flying back to a tree. It looked an awful lot like they the bats were fishing, but I thought that flying foxes only ate fruit. On top of that, I’m not even sure that flying foxes use echolocation (they have big, sensitive eyes instead). So, either they were doing something other than fishing, or they weren’t flying foxes at all. Any ideas???

Return to Cubberla Creek

The descent from Sir Samuel Griffith Drive, down to the tributary of Cubberla Creek

The steep descent from Sir Samuel Griffith Drive, down to the tributary of Cubberla Creek

Recently, I returned to the tributary of Cubberla Creek that I wrote about here just over a month ago. I was determined to see more of it than I did on the first visit. So this time, I approached it from the top, with the aim of working my way downstream. There is no path to this creek, so I just scrambled straight down through the scrub from the side of Sir Samuel Griffith Drive, not far from the Kuta Cafe on the top of Mount Coot-tha. I soon discovered that this was a pretty dumb idea, and for one simple reason: lantana.

The path I carved through the lantana that covered most of the stream

A path carved through the lantana that covered most of the stream

Whoever introduced this infernal weed to this country has a lot to answer for. More than a few times, I wished it was them instead of me getting scratched to pieces as I slashed my way (with a stick!) through the thickets that covered nearly the whole length of this stream. So it was tough going, but it in the end it was worth it for the pleasure of discovering the few beautiful pockets of the creek where the lantana did not intrude. In fact, pausing in these places was all the more rewarding given the work required to find them, and knowing that in all likelihood, no-one else had stood in these places for some time (surely it can’t be that often that a fool like me stumbles down here).

Anyway, this time I made a point of taking my camera, so I at least have something to show for this little adventure besides smartphone snaps. You can see some of the results above and blow, and there are more in this set on my flickr page. Something that interests me about this creek is the way that it abruptly ends when it disappears into a drain under the residential blocks at Ringway Place, Chapel Hill. On one side there is the creek in a near-natural state (if you can ignore the lantana), and on the other side is suburbia, in all its sanitized glory. They are two different worlds, and yet they were once the same.

A pond in the Cubberla Creek tributary

A pond in the Cubberla Creek tributary

Seeing the past and the present in the same view like this is not so easy in Western Creek — except perhaps up in the headwaters near Tristania Drive, but let’s face it, even here you’ve got to use your imagination here to see the creek sometimes. Wouldn’t it be nice if just a little bit more had been left for us to enjoy?

What’s in the Governor’s backyard?

Last Sunday was open day at Government House, the big white mansion at the top of the hill on Fernberg Road. These events only happen once or twice a year, so they are a rare opportunity to see inside the Governor’s backyard — and the Governor’s house, of course, if that takes your fancy.

This was the first open day since I started working on this website (there would have been one on Australia Day but it was rained out), so I did not want to miss the chance to explore and photograph those parts of the grounds that you can’t see from the outside. Along with the weedy scrub up around Tristania Drive and Stuartholme, these grounds contain the only substantial remnant bush in the Western Creek catchment. They also contain three ponds (one natural, two artificial), some steep overgrown gullies and even (thanks to the wet weather) a running stream.

I’ve put the results of my little expedition in a new page called Fernberg from the inside (Fernberg, meaning ‘distant mountain’, is the name given to the property by its first owner, Johann Heussler). I’d be interested to know what other people think about the Fernberg grounds, and particularly whether they could be improved or made more accessible to the public.

The lower of the two ornamental ponds at Fernberg

The lower of the two ornamental ponds at Fernberg