Sunshine Coast Daily Photo

Saturday, 31 October 2015

On a clear day...

You can't actually see for ever, because there are too many little children getting in the way!

When the sky clears, it really clears!

Dicky Beach

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Abandoned.

The rain hasn't started yet, the sand is dry with the top blown off it exposing every little twig and stick that has laid buried for months. I think if I hadn't rescued this bucket it may have been buried as well in a day or two.

Bulcock Beach.

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Deserted.

All it takes is a bit of miserable weather and they all stay home. Even the lifesavers are sitting behind their glass door, but they don't have too many lives to save.

It's OK, they need a break after a couple of weeks of holiday crowds and perfect weather to boot.

Bulcock Beach

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If only I could fly.

Ducks and seagulls should be banned as photography subjects, because they just sort of sit there and say "cheese" when one turns up with a camera.

Every now and then though, I manage to get a shot that's in focus, so I use that as an excuse to post it.

Pumicestone Passage
Caloundra

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What is the attraction?

I suppose it's too windy to fly far, and there aren't any people idly discarding their surplus chips, so there's not much else to do but stand around and wait for the weather to pass.

Why do seagulls come out when it gets windy, and where do they go when the rain starts to fall?

Bulcock Beach

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Murky

How quickly things change.

We've had perfect weather for weeks on end; clear blue skies and warm sunny days, then this!

Seventy kilometre per hour winds, rain threatening but not quite arriving although theres and eighty percent chance it will be here tomorrow. Two brave souls with only a zillion seagulls for company.

Bulcock Beach.

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Changing Times

Meanwhile, in the suburbs that change that I mention from time to time rolls relentlessly on. Another old Asbestos cement clad beach house bites the dust in a most inelegant manner to make way for what will undoubtedly be a brand new (perhaps two) rendered block "home" with beachy timber trim.

It's just the way it is.

Dicky Beach

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The times they are a changin'

The store in what was Dyer's Hall has closed. It's a sign of the times I'm afraid and there's no use getting all sentimental about it. If one isn't prepared to support small local businesses, preferring the convenience and price of the large supermarkets, one mustn't complain when one morning one drops in to buy something and finds the the little guy has closed.

Just another building to keep an eye on in coming years to discover how and if it is repurposed.

Landsborough

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The Railway.

That's the railway station reflected in the window. The Landsborough station was built around 1890, and the line is still a single track connecting Brisbane to the Sunshine Coast. One day, very soon perhaps, someone will wake up and realise that our transport infrastructure isn't what it's cracked up to be!

Landsborough

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The Mellum Club Hotel

One of the problems facing building conservators in a country with so little history, is that they also underwent rapid changes in a relatively short time.

The Mellum Club Hotel was originally built around the corner and up the street from its present location in the late 1800's, but was moved over a period of two weeks by night, still operating by day as it went, and has undergone many extensions, renovations and modernisations over time.

It's now called the Landsborough Pub, the name of the town also having changed from Mellum Creek at some time during that century of frenetic economic activity.

Landsborough

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A really nice try.

The restoration work on the old ES&A Bank in Landsborough has found exactly the right balance between providing a bit of the flavour of the old building and not taking itself too seriously I think. The lettering is undoubtedly not too close a facsimile of what it once was, but in its context it works.

When the building was opened in 1922 it was the first resident agency for the bank in Queensland and has undergone many changes since those days when it was a ten by fifteen feet room, and it's nice to see some allusions to its past history remain in spite of them.

Landsborough.

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The view from the fifth floor....

It's a nice sunny morning yet no one is taking advantage of the view. A few apartments have their blinds mostly drawn and lights on inside.

I can understand the aversion to sitting in the sun even when the temperature is barely twenty degrees, but really... lights on?

Mooloolaba.

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Hopelessly helpful

I am always bemused when contemplating how stupid we have become. Until the particular afternoon I found these "facilities" I wasn't aware that there were places specifically for male ambulant gentlemen with vision impairment.

I truly wonder how the less than ambulant actually got to the first floor in the first place, and having produced a presumably super-human effort to do so, when they found they weren't allowed in were they gentlemanly about it?

Coolum

Desperation

As many will know, to take into account the vagaries of my peripatetic habits I usually spend a good deal of time finding photographs for this blog well ahead of the publication time.

Being actually based here now for many months, I thought I should revert to the old daily grind, which is just fine until evening comes and in desperation I find myself trying to photograph flowers in my own garden. Here is a kangaroo paw at dusk, or part of a larger composition ruined by a dark blur on one of the flowers, which turned out to be a fly.

If only I'd had a macro lens.....

Normal transmission will resume shortly.

Dicky Beach

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Spring

I have often explained or boasted perhaps, that we don't have deciduous trees and therefore we can't tell the seasons by looking at the vegetation.

Perhaps I have overlooked the frangipani, with it's tiny red shoots pointing towards the spring sky.

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Gentrification

It's not just the inner cities that "suffer" from gentrification as rising property values attract a different type of resident to an area. On the coast old beach shacks and holiday houses are rapidly giving way to new beach houses, many of them occupied by retirees "living their dreams". This is not a new thing though, it's a cycle that has repeated every few decades for the last sixty years with the ebb and flow of the financial world.

Moffat Beach.

Shelter redux

It was touch and go at the beginning of the month whether to use this photo for the "shelter" theme day. Nothing illustrates the effort we go to to stay out of the sun more than the coverings we build over outdoor play areas.

Moffat Beach

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Our outlook.

It was late in the afternoon, with a cracker of a thunderstorm looming, the thick cloud in the west changing the colour of the dying sun, and I thought I'd see if I could get a glimpse of the storm hitting the accomodation buildings a few kilometres away.

I couldn't, but the colours of the trees across the road were interesting enough, and provide a bit of a profile of the sort of mix of vegetation in the area. The trees to the right are eucalypts, growing naturally on the waterway beyond. The palm is a Bangalow I think, native to a coastal region a few hundred kilometres south, but found here in reasonable numbers, and the lower part of the shot is the top of a poinciana, originally from Madagascar I think, but adopted as one of our own. It's about to lose its leaves as it does at the beginning of every summer, before breaking out in a blanket of orange-red flowers.

Dicky Beach

© Sunshine Coast Daily Photo - Australia

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Solar power.

I read recently that our region had more roof top solar installations than anywhere else in the world, in some suburbs averaging one installation in every four households.

There are some very mixed messages about how the electricity generating companies are actually making use of this or even if they are, but in the meantime the householder is managing to take a tiny step towards self sufficiency whether that is their intention or not!

Dicky Beach

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Lorikeet interrupting my morning coffee.

For some it is hard to believe, but unlike kangaroos, parrots do visit many backyards in Australia. (To be fair, kangaroos do too, but perhaps not quite so many in the urban areas!)

The only problem with having a flowering tree near our front verandah is that we are tempted to waste a bit more time than perhaps we should just watching. Usually by the time I think to get my camera, the light has gone, or the parrots have.

Dicky Beach

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View in transition.

When you live one block back from the beach, it must be rather disappointing to wake up one morning and find a piling rig at work on what was a vacant lot right in your line of sight.

The inevitable has begun.

Mooloolaba

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Aftermath

The party continues on the esplanade all day after the triathlon. The surprising thing for those of us for whom walking to the letterbox is almost an effort perhaps, is that most finishers just sort of stop, and get on with what they were doing before they started the race.

Oh there are a few bandaids on blisters that weren't there before, but the mood is "let's go and have a shower and grab a bite to eat".

Mooloolaba

Graham

We didn't get here too early, in fact we were just in time to see the winners cross the line and thought we'd see if we could find our nephew in the throng of competitors still torturing themselves.

Finding a single runner/cyclist among thousands on forty-five kilometres of track turned out to be too difficult, so we snapped a few photographs and went for a drive.

A week later, while processing these shots, he magically turned up in them! That's him with the scruffy beard, on his final run leg, a mere ten kilometres to go. The folk behind him are eleven kilometres behind him on the track, the cyclist... well he's got another kilometre to ride before he gets to run.

Well done all of them for finishing, or even just getting out in the sun!

Start - finish - go round again.

In a normal race, when you get to the finish line, you get to stop. At an Ironman event, if you have just completed your swim, you get to go for a bike ride. If you've finished your bike ride, you get to go for a run, and if you've only got here for the first time on your run, well you get to go and run some more!

With several thousand competitors on the track, the tail enders are many, many hours behind the winners, so the fun goes on for spectators all morning.

Mooloolaba

Plenty to see here!

The great thing about competing in the Half Ironman Triathlon, is that you get to see two kilometres of ocean, ninety kilometres of road as you cycle by, and twenty-one kilometres of jogging track.

Apart from that, well I just don't understand why so many people get up so early to make themselves hurt so badly!

Mooloolaba
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Your dreams... our town.

To be fair, there are many things that Council (or someone) does get right. Hosting an event for several thousand competitors, or several events as it does through the year is one of those things.

A few weeks ago it was the turn of the international Ironman Triathlon.

Mooloolaba.

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Tourism - Mooloolaba

This subject of photograph is wrong at so many levels I don't know where to start.

The building behind the fence is Mooloolaba's tourist information office. The barricades are there because there is a monster event underway. Presumably none of the crowds that the several thousand competitors brought with them will require tourist information today.

Perhaps the notices on the shutters tell us where to go, but since they are the other side of the fence we still can't find out.

The fundamental question remains though: Does this building meet anyone's expectation of a tourist information centre in a town which derives its income from tourism.

Some things could possibly be done better!

Small crops, small mountains.

There is still plenty of space within our "city" limits to allow small crop farming. It can only reinforce what a strange, possibly unique local authority area we live in.

There are no prizes for guessing why this particular district is called Glass House Mountains though.

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Close up

As if to reinforce yesterday's post, a close-up of a pineapple ripening.

Glass House Mountains.

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Bromeliads

For reasons that can only be imagined, when we think of pineapples growing we think of green plants and bright yellow fruit, but being a form of bromeliad, they can paint a very different picture in real life.

Glass House Mountains

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Shelter!

I don't know what the collective noun for shelters is, but here we have a plethora of them here.

As I have often reminded anyone who cares to be reminded, we spend a good deal of our time outdoors hiding from the sun, so it stands to reason that even quite early in the morning the shelters are being put to good use. Don't be fooled by the clear blue sky though, for the last two days in a row it's quickly turned steel grey as thunderstorms have rolled over late in the afternoon. When they come, they bring heavy rain and wind, and the picnic shelters don't provide any shelter at all!

Today is theme day in the City Daily Photo Community and the theme is "Shelter". You can see more photos on this theme at this link.

© Sunshine Coast Daily Photo - Australia

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