this morning's west brunswalk

This morning I woke up around 3 am I think and did ironing, etc then decided whatever it's going to be a stupid hot day so if I'm going to walk today I have to get it done sooner rather than later. I didn't leave the house until the sun was just about to come up. 

These pictures are in reverse order of me taking them, that's just how blogger decided to load them and I can't explain but it's OK it leaves the nicest picture till last. So what I did was I walked into Royal Park and then I thought like... fuck I'm soooo bored with RP, today, I'll just get a tram somewhere. It was random in the sense that if a tram had come going towards wherever the southbound trams go, I would have taken one of those but instead a northwards one came, so I took that instead. I got off the tram at the Estonian Club, which is an amazing old cinema which I would love to see inside, in Melville Road. I walked down whatever the street is heading towards the creek/Moonee Valley racecourse just north of the Estonian Club and I walked along the creek, then came up at Brunswick Road and walked through Parkville Gardens to Royal Park again and etc. This is actually the last picture I took though, of a house that has always fascinated me for its chocolate biscuit quality. 

The house below is the last or first house on Brunswick Road depending which way you're coming. The fact of Brunswick Road is that it ends (or begins) in a little weird bend into Union St. But as you can see from this little portion of the 1966 Melways, this was once the main road. 

Compare with current google map: 

So this house used to see all the traffic, now it sees very little. What intrigues me about this house though is that I am fairly sure that when Mia and I lived in West Brunswick, well over 15 years ago, this house was undergoing something that looked like renovation, as it is today. I don't know whether it was renovated in 2005 or whatever, and now it's going through another cycle, or whether it's just an ongoing passion project for someone whose passion is never satisfied. 

Speaking of satisfaction, this is a very unsatisfying picture, sorry. It is one of the backyards along the back of Moonee Ponds Creek which has a range of sheds and then a big green open space, I suspect it's all ex-creek land ('resumed'), so probably can't be built on as is. 

There are a lot of weird little waterways around here, and this was a big fat engineering/flood mitigation project for a lot of the 20th century. I don't know if this bluestone channel is a Golden Era of Bluestone channel or a 1970s Glorious Olde Worlde of Bluestone channel. It's one of the many little creeks which ran through Brunswick and no-one knew what to do with/about them, and so often did nothing, which meant that flooding increasingly became a problem and in fact still is but no-one talks about it, it's the wrong kind of ground / geology for housing really. Gets worse further north.  

Here's another stunner, where the creek/rivulet/creekulet that flows under the racecourse hits the MP Creek. I must remember that as a place to go and hide if I ever kill anyone. And need to hide. From the police. In a drain. 

Yes, I actually said the last picture was the nicest. I think it's more because of the early morning ambience than anything else. Because otherwise it's actually a fairly nasty image. Nice place to walk before the sun properly comes up though. I wasn't the only one who thought so though most walkers/cyclists were on the other side of the creek, where there is a more formal path. 

I must be pretty tired because I keep going for the misspelling of every word that could possibly be misspelt (I just now started to spell 'cyclist' with an 's'). A little more of the formal workday to get through.