On Monday night the temperature stayed up to 26C, just a touch short of the hottest February night ever in Sydney.
Here are various cool or cooler people in Eddy Avenue and Belmore Park.
This guy is hot or cool, depending on your viewpoint. Me, I'm just envious!
Indian student -- well probably on both counts...
Of course I am more this vintage than I am either of the above.
Here it is, and after that what I saw when I came out the front gate each morning. Just a few doors up in the other direction is the Forest Lodge Hotel.
I lived in this street just around the corner from St Johns Road in 1987-8. Burgled three times in that twelve months. I was staying with Andy Smith, a former Wollongong acquaintance originally from North Carolina. Great guy. Some of his relatives visited while I was there and I got the North Carolina accent down pat and annoyed my friends no end by slipping into it it from time to time.
One small anecdote: we were all in the pub one night when one of Andy’s rellies, a lovely elderly lady of impeccable manners, said she hadn’t enjoyed herself so much since the shagging competition back home in Raleigh. “The what?” I asked. “Why sure, even the pastor used to go in the shagging competition.” I was having very strange visions at that thought, but it turned out that in Raleigh “shagging” was a kind of square-dancing. In Oz, of course, it is something four letters long beginning with F.
Not all gentrified yet:
When I was living in Glebe in the 1980s this was Roy Garner’s Coffee Shop – and left-wing bookshop. There I would go for the excellent coffee and healthy food, for conversation with the very interesting Roy, and soon also the band of local regulars for whom, as for me in due course, the shop was a virtual home. Such a mix was there, including a few genuine crazies – like the conspiracy theorist who always had with him a great folder of items about the Lindy Chamberlain case. It was there too that I met Kristina, mentioned in the previous post.
I have a lot of memories of Glebe going back thirty-two years. One is represented in this photo of houses behind The Nag’s Head Hotel where in 1988 in the house behind the big tree, then inhabited by my friend the Aboriginal actor Kristina Nehm (Fringe Dwellers), I sat one night listening to a genuine songman telling me a dreamtime story.
Now The South Sydney Herald has asked me for a 400 word article on Glebe’s colourful past. Any anecdotes you’d like to share?
In my earlier periods in Glebe this was reputedly a great place to plan a crime, but today it is quite up-market, though not off-putting. In fact it is a really great pub with a fine selection of beers and great food. The Rabbit and I had a couple of sessions there this century. 😉
It is amazing, when you think about it, that in the boom of the 1880s so many municipalities built such grandiose public buildings. It is also worth noting that at a time when NSW had around one million people there were so many more local government areas to serve them. Today close to seven million are served by a much smaller number of local governments.
Glebe Town Hall (1880) is no longer the hub of a local government, being subject to the City of Sydney.
Neil's Wollongong & Sydney 