Glebe Island, the no-man’s land between Balmain, Rozelle, Glebe and Pyrmont is officially slated for redevelopment. The NSW government made an announcement last week and I thought I’d have a look at it to understand how our chosen home in Sydney will transform over the coming years once we’re long gone from here.
Balmain map from between 1906-1910, State Library of NSW archives, download a full resolution version here
The Balmain peninsula only lies about one kilometer west of Sydney’s “city”, separated by the natural harbour. The Wangal people have called this area their home for thousands of years before European settlement. I have walked the local streets up and down for leisure and with the baby and often wondered about the stories that have taken place here in the past.
Continue reading
Darling Street in 1999, outside the Institute Arcade, by Philip Gostelow, from the State Library of NSW
Balmain has been our home in Sydney since we arrived here shortly before Christmas in 2021. Physically, our life has revolved around Darling Street. It is a nice feeling to be locally anchored for a peripatetic family like ourselves.
Continue readingClose to where we live, a short walk west on the Bay Run, lies Callan Park, a 60-hectare open green space with several heritage listed buildings on it. We have walked and cycled here often in our three and a half years in Sydney. With a rich and complicated past, the future of this central green space is all but certain.
Callan Park, view towards Bay Run
Continue reading
A slow-motion trainwreck has been unfolding on our doorstep here in Balmain, Sydney. We live about a kilometer as the crow flies from one of the world’s biggest infrastructure developments, the WestConnex and its newly opened Rozelle Interchange. WestConnex is a huge underground road network built and operated as a public private partnership (PPP) that has been under planning and construction since the early 2010s.
I listened in to this presentation today, organized by The Australia Institute, a progressive think-tank. It featured financial commentator Alan Kohler introducing and taking questions on his recent piece in the Australian Quarterly Essay.
While I still have to lay my hand on the issue, today’s talk along with this Guardian extract gives you the gist of what Kohler’s arguments are. I wanted to jot down some notes from the talk, and add some of my thoughts that have been accumulating over the past two years. Continue reading
It’s almost been a year that we have moved down under from Thailand. Moving countries doesn’t get easier the more one does it (I find, at least), but now it seems more and more to me that we’ve “arrived” here. Continue reading