Stick Shed on 101 heritage list

Major news, as local icon - the Murtoa Stick Shed - is being placed on the National Heritage List next to natural places such as the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park and the Great Barrier Reef; other built heritage places - the Sydney Opera House, Port Arthur Historic Site, and Melbourne’s Royal Exhibition Building, and alongside our other local listing – the Grampians.

Australia's national heritage comprises exceptional natural and cultural places that contribute to Australia's national identity and encompasses those places that reveal the richness of Australia's extraordinarily diverse natural heritage.
The heritage listings defines critical moments in our development as a nation and reflects the achievements of Australians.

This is Australia’s highest heritage honour, The Stick Shed, becomes just the 101st place of Australian cultural significance to be National Heritage listed, giving recognition to its significant role in the history of Australia's wheat industry and the impact of the Second World War on the home-front.

The Stick Shed (The Marmalake No. 1 Grain Store) was born out of desperation and inspiration. Initially a temporary emergency building, it was erected during 1941 when the war prevented exporting the wheat harvest overseas. The Australian Wheat Board was left with a valuable resource but insufficient, adequate storage for it.

Work started in September 1941 on a building designed to hold over 3 million bushels (92,500 tonnes) of wheat. The design was based on the same angle a pile of wheat forms naturally. Nearly 600 unmilled hardwood poles were used to hold up the roof.

 

The Stick Shed under construction (PROV)

The wartime restrictions meant that only raw, local and recycled materials were available, labour and machinery were scarce. Builders had to rely on ingenuity to overcome problems and shortages, they adopted common bush techniques to brace the poles.

What the builders erected was an adequate storage facility which has outlived its intended lifespan, but they also unintentionally created a serene cathedral-like interior amongst its forest of poles. 
 

Federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt said National Heritage listing meant the grain store was recognised as a significant part of Australia’s history and ensured it would be protected and celebrated for future generations.

The Stick Shed is open this weekend on Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 4pm, as part of Muroa's Big Weekend - don't miss Australia's 101st National Heritage Site.

The decline of Detroit grandeur

Grandeur Lost: The Modern Ruins of Abandoned Detroit is another abandonment post from WebUrbanist

The now famous pic of William Livingstone house

Detroit is arguably one of the most fascinating modern cities in the world. This is thanks to the city’s unique balance between its former identity as a manufacturing mecca and its current state of sectional abandonment and renewal. It is neither deserted nor wholly occupied, but exists in tension between destruction, creation and everyday living. 
French photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre saw the abandoned parts of this compelling urban landscape and documented it in their book The Ruins of Detroit.

United Artists Theatre - talk about decayed grandeur!

Despite the empty neighbourhoods, abandoned buildings and crumbling structures. The city balances its former glory, its current semi-abandoned status, with pockets of fresh new life and creative directions springing up from the ashes.

East Side Public Library

The city, so rich with history both industrial and individual, was once the fourth largest in the United States. It housed some of the country’s brightest engineers and most promising entrepreneurs. The city grew and its residents continued to expand their living areas into planned suburbs.

Atrium of the Farwell building

But the automobile industry which played such a large part of the city’s early days also proved part in its undoing. White middle-class residents used those cars to move out of the inner city and into their new suburbs. Segregation increased steadily until the violent race riot in 1967.

Following the riot, the city continued its rapid decline. The industry that built Detroit moved on to other locations. Inner-city residents fled their homes by the thousands. Every race and every economic class was affected by this exodus; the city simply bled away until it held less than half its former population.

Lee Plaza Hotel

Unlike almost any other place in the world, Detroit’s abandoned buildings and ruined structures are not isolated in one part of the city. Grand, well-kept buildings can exist just meters away from crumbling ruins. Inhabited and abandoned homes exist side by side in neighbourhoods.

The grandeur of the multi-storey Michigan Central Railway Station

What is so compelling about the images in The Ruins of Detroit is the seeming urgency of the city’s abandonment. In civic buildings, papers and boxes still occupy offices. In abandoned libraries, books continue to line the walls. Schools still hold desks and police stations are stuffed with forgotten and mouldering mug shots. Chairs are tipped over as though the former occupants of these buildings suddenly evacuated due to an emergency. No hope of salvaging the situation.

St Christopher House Public Library

Given the slow but steady decline of the city’s population, this urgency is baffling. Surely there was more than enough time to clean the buildings out, remove anything that could be reused or salvaged and clean the buildings up. But it seems that no one cared to take the time to do so.

This state of partial ruination is ephemeral – eventually it must give way to complete ruin or rebuilding. As witnessed in my Decaying Detroit post, the photographers’ goal was to capture Detroit’s current state of abandonment before fate tips one way or the other.

The East Methodist Church

Yet more photographs at the Weburbanist site.

Schools running wild

I was out and about on the weekend searching for school sites and, late in the afternoon, arrived at Rainbow East or the Hazeldene school site.

Back when the school was open 1908-1960 it was a wide open expanse with little to revive the outlook, and it is still much the same today - a concrete plinth in the corner of a crop paddock. What surprised me was the swathe of grape hyacinths in the gutter of the road verges. The hardy little bulbs still emerging after more than 50 years of abandonment.

Grape hyacinths and a few capeweed daisies

But it does make you think about the efforts of the past pupils and teachers who planted and cared them, often in difficult circumstances.
I've come across a number of bulbs that emerge each year, typically jonquils, belladonna lilies or nerines at abandoned schools and homes, and also more rarely the beautiful yellow Autumn crocus found at both Ellam (1927-1970s) and Sandsmere (1887-1951) school sites.

A clump of Autumn crocus at Ellam

As well as a number of perennial plants: these two were found at the older Tooan site (1882-1969) overlooking St Mary's Lake. 

The site is surrounded by sugar gums, a few pines, and a herbacous plant crowding the window, and clumps of jonquils and daffodils each spring. 

The newer Highway site has a mammoth flowering cacti.






 Usually you can guess at the location of a school by larger plants: sugar gums, pepper trees, and strangely - cactus/cacti.

Boyeo School has all three

The Watchupga (variously named Watchupga North East, Watchupga Railway Station, and then Watchupga) site is almost triffid-like, under attack from invading spiky cactus. The school has only been closed since 1972.

At the Miram North East school (which featured in “Mad as rabbits”, no relationship that I can see) it is a succulent that has been running amuck since 1933, constrained it would be a great pot-plant.

Miram North East school site

The Lake Hindmarsh marker surrounded by an overgrown garden

Then there are places like Wal Wal which are still a veritable park with a specimen palm, deciduous trees, roses (desperately in need of a trim) and small plants. The school closed in 1973.

Atomspheric gothic narrative

Alison Croggon's 'Dark Spring' is a gothic retelling of 'Wuthering Heights' but with the addition of the lore as divined by vindictive wizards and ruled by generations-long vendetta.
Lina (Catherine) is the enchanting but willful daughter of a village lord. She and her childhood companion, Damek (Heathcliff), have grown up privileged and spoiled, and they're devoted to each other to the point of obsession.
But Lina's violet eyes betray her for a witch, and witches are not tolerated in this brutally patriarchal society. Her rank protects her from persecution, but it cannot protect her from tragedy and heartbreak. And ultimately to the devastation that ensues as destructive longing unleashes Lina's wrath, and with it her forbidden power.
There are differences to the Bronte classic, Lina doesn't have a brother, but the consequences in this version are similar. I also found the narrator (Emily Bronte's Lockwood) here named Hammel, is just as reminiscent of Harker in Bram Stoker's 'Dracula', and the description of his journey  and arrival at the Northern Plateau beneath the Black Mountains parallels Harker's appearance, especially as he passes the stone towers and all the grave markers - a desolate landscape of cemeteries.
It is Alison's vivid depiction of the landscape which places you in the same Bronte-esk atmosphere, the Plateau could as easily be the moors, the bleak weather, the houses a dark brooding bastion, and its remoteness from civilisation.
Whether drawn by the romantic, the magical, or the gothic, readers will be irresistibly compelled by the passion of this tragic tale - even if you know the ending, you don't know the story.

Exploring with WebUrbanist

So much to see...so little time. The people at WebUrbanist have done it again, with 'Urban Exploration Tips, Tricks & Guides'.

Especially the link to '30 Websites & Online Forums for Adventurous Urban Explorers' as the title suggests, it is a list of online resources for would-be urban explorers around the world, from urbex forums to photo sites and more, dedicated to abandoned places and vehicles worth exploring.

Gull lightship (from Derelict London)

Too many to list here, my only objection is that there are some dead-links, still heaps to observe and read about. Just do as they suggest and bookmark it.
Always remembering as WebUrbanist put it - 'Urban exploration (also known as ‘building infiltration’) is a risky sport at best and an illegal one at worst. While WebUrbanist can’t endorse breaking the law there is fortunately no law against reporting on it and some forms of urban exploration are fortunately legal, for those interested in exploring this illicit urban sport'.

Drive-by reading

Twisted Sifter's 'Picture of the Day' - a garage door painted like a giant bookcase in the Los Angeles neighbourhood of Hollywood Hills.