this is going to be problematic, not because i don't have much to write , quite the opposite. my earliest memory would be very very young, i'm talking 1960/61. it was the skateboard fad. i say fad cause it never lasted long . maynes parade is right of the fire station, a split road, high and low. billy carts were the go. the skateboard thing was nailing roller skate wheels to a board, and rolling down the hill. by the time i got to kindergarten this fad had past.
26june17
one reason for that last first entry was the parks name, unanderra skate park. as long as i can remember it was just called 'the park'. back in the mid 40's it was a horse racing track, trots. back then cars were pretty much scarce. one car an hour on a good day. horse and sulky were the main, as were pushbikes, bus and steam train on time table.
30june2017
i haven't really thought much about this in the last few days. to put it bluntly my spelling is fucked, and spell check doesn't have a clue. i couldn't spell scarce in that last bit, it took me about half an hour to figure out how to spell it, by that time all inspo was kaputnick . i just thought, fuck this. too many things. the other day, i seen this bloke i knew, took me nine hours of raking the brain, to remember his surname. it's a good feeling when it comes to you. speaking of names i thought about the name of the park. the park of good and bad, came to mind. good and evil is a bit strong, although some evil may have happened there.
2july2017
the good and bad has to do with a sports match, whatever it is . it is good for the winner and bad for the loser. i've seen many winners and losers at the park. as a matter of fact a lot of things that get reflected in my mind come from the park. as this tour will progress, i can go to any inch of the park and reflect on a time and scene that happened. not so much from the eighties on, but the 60 and 70s.
22june2017
this is the first of a series of photos i took on my little outing that day. the street is central road, looking across to the park , at which you just see a few trees. i see a cubs building and a pensioners hall. both buildings have since been demolished. the tennis courts are still there and the old 2nd unanderra scouts hall, that black hole between the trees yonder. my mind has stories about the pensioners hall and the cub hall, both buildings built after the scout hall, a long time after. that's probably the significance of the photo.
this next photo is taken around the same spot , more or less looking north. the significance here is the two roads, central road and the mall. like i said before not to sure if it's called the mall, maybe it's called the club car park. all this bitumen and concrete is new to me, although a bit was done around the 80's. probably up to the mid 70's central road from this point was two lanes bitumen and dirt sides and was lower. the mall had a gutter. there was a house to the left and a little road going start through to the next road, blocks of land on each side and blackberry bushes. they built the club. one block was their car park , then the other became a car park.
this next one is a short walk up the road from the last photo. the little mall shopping centre has been swallowed up by the club. in it's hey day, the little mall had a butcher shop, a mini type supermarket, probably the best description would be two shops into one, small spinarooni turnstiles , a couple of smallish shopping trollies. pretty much the same as them modern convenience store, but the prices being inbetween supermarket and convenient store. also there was a chemist and a fish and chip shop. and the little rental office. so, this photo shows that long telegraph i was on about. it used to fascinate me as a child, the other side of the club is my old primary school. i think it has something to do with hoses. get all the water out or something.
30may2018
early photo of the mall
so with this one, that little road is the same as the one i talked of earlier. the gutter being v shaped, again swallowed by the club. i had an idea about a periscopic pipe with a hose attached. say a ten foot hose , when water pressure is applied the hose lifts up to a horizontal level spraying the fire . just an idea. with the fire station , i can't really remember but i felt a bit let down when i was young, there was no slide down pole. like in the little golden books.
a bit of vague recollection there. here, i've crossed the road, the tennis court has change a bit. there used to be corrugated iron fence with meshed wire on top. even the courts are different. you probably might think it's boring, but to me it's like a time capsule. my mind thinks more of them poshy type that ran the thing back then, it was mainly a girly thing.
this shows the skateboard park thing, rinky dink. all new to me. and yonder is a syrian orthodox church. as i remember that was a church of england, i think or one of them type. where the skateboard park is , was a netball field , and after that was like change room , toilet sheds. we would hang out there after school and such and smoke cigs and kick balls and cricket with bins as wickets. the bins then were square and rectangle long and chamfered at the top and hooked on a pole. they were ideal as wickets. you also had to watch out for them dirty dick characters hanging round. as youngsters we were warned of such people.
behind the tennis court was swings, see saw and this plank swing thing. there gone, replaced with this monstrosity. councils scared of litigation, removed all the old swings, slippery dips and see saws.
good and bad park.
friends and foes, unanderra hearts. mr campbell was the local street sweeper.
twenty years on and the goalie in that 1965 picture was still playing , bottom left billy bailey.
20april2020
here's a comment from where i swiped the photo,
Anthony Acton - This
year was 1984. That year we played Wollongong Sports in the 2nd Div Res
Grade GF at Berkeley and the match finished in a draw. It was the only
time that Grand finals were decided by a penalty shootouts but with a
difference. 5 players had to take the
ball from the halfway spot and dribble it toward the opposing goalie and
try and score past him ... a very ordinary way to decide the GF ..
suffice to say we lost. I think maybe it didn't help when I got sent off
just on halftime 😕
some more old photos
this is just a photo of the fields. mt keira is in the left background, the hill in the middle is green hill estate. estate? the queen stopped there for a cup of tea back in the sixties. nowadays it's been built out. on the right is cobbler's hill to the right of the goal post. them lights weren't there in the seventies. unanderra hearts sheds and canteen are where that orange looking something to left of goal post. the park was split into hockey and soccer , there were concrete cricket pitches in between the hockey fields. the hockey was moved over to the other park.
30may2018
the queen comes on a drive through 1970
this is the 2nd unanderra scout hall, maybe , it was in my day. at bit spooky, even the scouts were in the news today . i was never in conformity, although i did most things they did without accolades. no dib dib dob dob bob a job here. their shop was out warrawong. i bought their book and practiced the knots , i mastered the reef knot, that's about it. a thing we had was army disposal stores, army jackets were the in thing for a bit . 50 cents and plenty of pockets, shirts were 10 cents, i'd cut the sleeves off and dye them black. a bit like the clash, i'm talking 69 to 71 . with the demise of the cadets at schools this fizzled out. the car park was dirt, there was a small creek on the left of the hall. it ran from one end of the park to the other.
1june2018
don't know whether i know these dudes or not, maybe? unanderra scouts
every now and then i tuned in to the local rag website to see what's happening on the never ending scroll of dickhead antics. one of the stories was this one, lightning strikes . i don't know how long they keep these stories up, so i'll cut it short here. lightning struck the pole at wollongong fire station. the pole is called a hose whip, it's used to dry out hoses. i know i wrote about these poles in one of these blogs, not really knowing what there for. the link here is the actual fire station. okay, i had an appointment with a cardiologist in december , not far from the fire station, the same adjacent street. i had to have a blood test at a pathologist that was located across the road from the fire station, which was all to close. i told the cardiologist about how my old man was going buy that block of land, at which the fire station is built, back in the fifties for 100 pounds. i thought of how they're renovating the joint. after leaving the cardiologists , i walked down the street and really took notice of the pole out the back, thinking there got one in wollongong too. it was weird how i just tuned into the newspaper website and that story was there.
1june2018
this ariel view of the newly built unanderra housing. you can see the park tennis courts and the framework of the mall, in the back left. also, the fading reminisce of the race track.
judging by this photo it's a holiday, like xmas or something. it's the top of maynes parade. you can see the mall and the fire station pole before the club was built, and the walking tracks to the mall and pub. that bottom road where the walking tracks being is a power pole. this guy came flying round the corner on a pushbike, and hit the pole and died. he was an up and coming sports person
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