Category: Short articles
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Brisbane,1946… on Google Earth!
As a certain amply-sized entrepreneur of self-branded cleaning products used to say, “I’m excited!” I’m excited because I’ve just made a new gallery featuring aerial imagery from 1946 (the earliest of Brisbane, as far as I know) as you’ve never seen it before: in Google Earth! Even better, you can see the difference between then…
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Detail Plans on Google Earth
Having recently Google-Earthified several historical maps of the Milton Reach and surrounding suburbs, I thought I’d apply the same technique to some of the City Council’s ‘Detail Plans’. These plans were produced prior to sewerage being installed in Brisbane, and they depict the built environment at a much finer spatial scale than the maps I…
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Map Mania!
In several posts and pages now I have used screenshots from Google Earth showing overlays of historical maps, such as the example below. I have found this to be a very useful way to both explore and present these maps, and because Google Earth is freely available, I had also hoped that it would provide…
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The legend of the lost lagoon
If you’ve read my earlier post about the Waters of Milton, then you will have already encountered this story, but I’d like to give it a post of its own. It’s the story of a lagoon that existed in the area bounded by Cribb Street, Park Road, Coronation Drive and the railway line — just…
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Where a creek begins
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…
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Are we learning yet?
A story in the Brisbane Times this morning, titled Buyers less fearful of flood zones, made me a little bit mad. Though I try not to buy into the blame game around the 2011 flood, I suspect that the real estate industry is partly responsible for the false sense of security that set in after…
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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.) Then again, we shouldn’t be surprised: there’s no reason why floods should be spaced out evenly over time. Indeed, the historical…
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When waters collide
Just over a week ago I posted about the ‘tidal limits’ of Milton Drain, noting that at a very high tide, the drain is pretty much full to the brim. Today, I braved weather that ranged between miserable and awful in order to see how the drain held up when it had more than just…
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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…