Removal of Willows at Crookwell

Themes: Crookwell

One of the most frequently searched terms which brings hapless punters to this quiet corner of the interwebs is ‘Crookwell’.
Don’t worry. I’m just as astonished as you.

Let me be clear, I’m not for a moment surprised by the fact that there are scores of desperately sad, silently despairing, shiny-bottomed, keyboard pilots peering out the windows of their silicon stalagmites through the noxious soup cynically re-branded as ‘air’ and dreaming of a better world. Whose shoulder have they got to cry onto?
Where else can they turn for words of comfort and assurance?
Who else will listen to the ascii outpourings of their existential angst?
Other than the internet Oracle.
The prophet, pimp, pusher, and purveyor of all that virtually is.
iGod of post-modernity THY NAME IS GOOGLE.

In fact, I’m reliably informed that if Google detects that you’re an eligible, clean-living, fair-minded, eco-friendly type person (based on search history and facebook updates) AND YOU DON’T TYPE ANYTHING into Google’s search field, but rather, just HIT “I’M FEELING LUCKY” it will immediately search for ‘Crookwell’.

Of course people are searching for Crookwell. It’s a spiritual thing.
What is astonishing is that they find my papermind.

For the uninitiated, Crookwell is a small country town 30mins drive North-West of Goulburn. It is a haven of peace, sanity and potato farming 900metres above sea-level on the South-West Slopes of the Great Dividing Range. It is also where Emma and I own half of a little piece of land and a cottage with my parents.

We were down there last weekend on our way to Canberra. Our property is bordered by Kiamma Creek, which, in the past, was a little waterway completely choked by old willow trees. The willows were very pretty but they’re a menace when it comes to Australian waterways. Their roots soak up and de-oxygenate the water so that fish and frogs find it hard to survive. The local council and landcare group have just finished completely removing the willows and are planning to replant the fringes of the creek with native trees and rushes. The plans look good (you can click for a closer view). At the moment the poor old creek looks pretty wrecked. It will take years for the replanting to really get established and look good. But already the water is flowing better.

We are also planning to plant out the lower section of our property with trees sometime in the next few years. Hopefully this will eventually create a really nice parkland area along the creek.

Any volunteers for a tree-planting weekend, just drop me a line.

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Crookwell II

Themes: Crookwell, Personal

Whenever we go to stay with Emma’s parents (who have Foxtel) I always find myself watching British house-renovation programmes – mainly because Emma has a serious addiction to the LifeStyle channel. For a little while recently, it felt like we were in one.
It had all the elements – a run-down house in the country, family, drama, doubt, resolution.

If you haven’t caught the news, Emma and I went halves with my parents in a country cottage with some land in the village of Crookwell, half an hour North-West of Goulburn.
The property is going to be let out to tenants but before that would be possible it needed some serious affection.
So my whole family – parents, 4 kids, 3 spouses – went to work. Mum and Dad and I stayed there for during the second week of January, the others came and went during the week as they were able. Since then, Emma and I have made another overnight trip to finish some things off.

It’s hard to know where to begin.
Probably with the moment that Dad started sugar-soaping the ceiling in the main lounge in order to prepare it for painting. Up til that moment we’d been under the impression that the ceiling was painted yellow. When the first wipe over brought down a stream of brown water, we realised it was white, with 20 years of cigarette smoke…
there was much cleaning to do.

Later in the week, Sam (my brother) was poking around in the attic, in the old part of the house. He found an old-skool rabbit trap, with the nasty metal jaws, and a foot. A bit later he found a possum skeleton covered with the last few bits of fur, and without a foot.
Yes, someone had once trapped a possum in the roof, and it had rotted there while they lived with the smell. Probably somehow related to the cigarette smoke.

There were a number of odd-jobs that still needed to be done after the week of painting and cleaning. Most importantly, the old electric stove needed to be replaced, so Emma and I went to work on ebay. I lost 4 auctions before we got what we were after – a good quality, 2nd hand replacement. The pickup was from Mt Colah (about an hour north of us in Sydney). I press-ganged my mate Dave into helping me load the stove into our Toyota Echo (small) in the middle of the pouring rain. We wedged it in, then I dropped off Dave, picked up Emma, and drove with it straight to Crookwell. The next morning, I decided to have a go at installing the new stove (normally you’d get an electrician, but hey, I used to do Dick Smith electronic kits…). I found out that I’d left all my tools in Sydney, but I keep a pocket knife in the car.
I was pulling out the old stove and undoing the wiring when I found what I thought was a nest in the wires. I pulled it out with the knife and realised it was a mouse. It had fried itself across the two live terminals. Not real good for the oven, probably lucky it hadn’t burnt the house down.

So many highlights…

The week of painting was aching, hard work. One afternoon I spent 3-4 hours straight, just painting ceilings. Painful.
The result is worth it. The house now has a consistent colour scheme. It is fit for human habitation.
My brother Sam worked out how to cement-render, and rendered up the chimney in the main lounge.
Emma went to Ikea and bought funky light shades, and cool, wooden fittings for the bathrooms.
Russ went berserk with a brushcutter (at 7:00 in the morning), clearing thistles and weeds, wearing Naomi’s jeans under his shorts for protection. Probably just as well because one of the sections he went to work on turned out to be full of snakes. (and one monitor lizard who died needlessly because he looked like a very fat snake).
Mum and Naomi painted the front fence white – it now has a ‘white picket fence’ – an important marketing feature.
Dad hacked out annoying trees, and managed to find quite a lot of viable plants still in the garden.
Min did all the detailing around the fire-places and mirrors – using our special colour ‘twiggy’ – bought from Shane at the Hardware store, who might be interested in renting…
Mick really finished it all off, he came back when we’d all had to leave, to put on the last door handles, replace the toilet cisterns, did the handy-man stuff.

And on the Friday night of that crazy week, we roasted a lamb and a chook on the Barbie, fashioned some seating from ladders and painting trestles, and entertained our first guests for dinner, my Aunt and Uncle from Bowral. Later that night, my wilder relations kicked on at the ‘Horse and Hound’ otherwise known as ‘The Bottom Pub’ over the other side of the creek from us.
I went to bed. But I heard quite a number of wild country yells.

Video: Work in Progress

Pictures
(click for slideshow)

Work in Progress

Basically Finished

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Crookwell

Themes: Crookwell, Personal

Emma and I recently bought a property with my parents, in Crookwell, north-west of Goulburn. It’s a 4.5 bedroom cottage with 3 hectares of land right in the middle of town. The house is on the corner of the block with a huge poplar tree in the yard. The land slopes down to Kiama Creek, there’s a white wooden bridge, and over the other side is the main street of town. (This photo was taken when we first inspected the house.)
It’s pretty rustic but we really like it.
Crookwell is a great little town, people who live there obviously care for it a lot.

On Friday night we travelled down from Sydney to spend the night, we have a lot of cleaning and work to do to make the place ready for a tenant. The lady we bought the house from has left junk and rubbish all over the property. On top of that, the wet spring and summer seasons have also made the grass grow into a jungle. She also had dogs that lived in the house, so it’s a bit stinky inside. We need to clean the carpets, walls, windows, kitchen, everything; paint the inside (at the moment the rooms are painted in a remarkable assortment of ugly colours); tidy the gardens, remove all the junk. And that’s not even starting to think about the paddocks – full of weeds and thistles.
In short, there is lots of work to do.

We woke up to the sound of a rooster crowing on Saturday morning and found this bloke and his lady hen checking us out. He kept trying to come through the door so I had to put up a barricade. The sheep also turned up early to trim the grass in the yard before taking off to the bottom of the paddock near the creek to escape the heat. The sheep and the chooks all belong to the previous owner, the sheep are still there because she’s going to keep grazing the land for a while, since she’s only moved down the road, and the chooks just keep coming back because they have pea-brains.

We walked over the bridge to town for some breakfast, a very nice bacon and eggs at a cafe. The menu offered a ‘shearers breakfast’ – including lamb chops, bacon, sausages, mushrooms, eggs, tomato, who-knows-what-else, and thick toast. I wasn’t allowed to have that. But maybe I can when we finish work.
Anyway, I can recommend Catherine’s Cafe, “Crookwell’s Premier Refreshment Lounge”.

Here’s a video I made of the house and our first days work.

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