FORMER “CityNews” snapper to the stars, Silas Brown, has returned home from 20 or so months of backpacking through Asia and Europe.
Snapper-turned-farmer Silas Brown, left, with permaculture farmer Arafat Sharipudin at a farm one hour from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Silence of the limbs
LIFE after they’ve logged Northbourne Avenue for the tram: the treeless median strip is being dreamily characterised by the spinners at Capital Metro as an “urban meadow”. LOL.
Laughable it may be, but it doesn’t distract from the fact that in the touchable future we shall be devoid of mature trees on Northbourne Avenue, Kings Avenue and Commonwealth Avenue for a generation or two.
With the constant convenient excuse that species choices are suddenly inappropriate or in decline, the chainsaws of progress are looming as the tram plans sweep the trees from the entire length of Northbourne Avenue and, according to a published tender, NCA planners have declared the vegetation along the busy avenues as ageing and that many of the tree species are, wait for it, inappropriate for the dry Canberra climate.
In the plan to “revamp the symbolic gateways to the parliamentary triangle”, it was also shamefully revealed that irrigation to many of the shady old trees was turned off in 2007 to save money, suggesting that European varieties, such as oaks, are for the mulcher.
Reassuringly, Capital Metro says the tram plan matches the vision of Walter Burley Griffin in 1911, who envisaged Canberra’s gateway as a beautiful, tree-lined, urban boulevard fitting of an approach to the nation’s capital. The trouble is it could be decades before we get the greenery back amidst the “urban meadow” that is to be the Northbourne median strip.
YOU don’t have to be a “Whovian” to get a chuckle out of this Dr Who car sticker spotted at Majura Park.
How does this work?
CHIEF Minister Andrew Barr in deflecting figures illustrating a sharp fall in local business confidence, brushed it aside as “statistical noise”.
QANTAS can take you from Sydney to Melbourne for $99, but from Canberra to Melbourne, a shorter distance, the fare is $139.
COMMONWEALTH Avenue temporary traffic lights: for Floriade we have a month to get used to the “changed traffic conditions”. For Australia Day, they just turn them on.
Prime news time?
MONTHS in gestation, but a political snout says the rumour is doing the rounds again that Prime TV at Watson is mulling about reintroducing a local news bulletin now that competitor WIN TV broadcasts its Canberra news from Woollongong.
Prime rather famously recruited Ken Begg, then news director at top-rating Capital Television, in the competitive early days of television aggregation. Begg brought across most of Capital’s newsroom, but to no avail. Capital soldiered on while Prime eventually deserted local news and melted down the newsroom to the skeleton that is Natalie Forrest and her local updates.
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