Camperdown cemetery

A view of the cemetery talked about yesterday.

Camperdown Cemetery sandstone pediment

According to one source, this stone pediment came from the original Maritime Services Building built in the 1850s and commemorates the numerous naval personnel buried in the historic Camperdown Cemetery in inner Sydney. One mass grave holds the remains of the 1857 shipwrecks of the clipper ship the Dunbar (20 Aug 1857) and the barque Catherine Adamson (24 Oct 1857).

The Dunbar was a fully-rigged ship that was wrecked near the entrance to Sydney Harbour, with the loss of 121 lives. See here

The cemetery surrounds St Stephens Anglican Church in Church St, Newtown, just off the busy main road, King St. There are 18 000 people buried there, mainly between 1848 and when it closed (full) in 1867, Many of the graves were of paupers.

Sydney Park wetlands 2

Realised I had some better pics of the wetlands than the one I published on Saturday, so before we leave the park, here they are. We used to take our son here to feed ducks when he was little. It has been made much nicer since then.

Brickpit chimneys, Sydney Park

Over the last two days I've showed a couple of different aspects of Sydney Park at St Peters, in the inner southern suburbs of Sydney.
This park is less than 20 years old. The site was used for clay extraction for making bricks, and then rubbish disposal. These are the brick pit chimneys (which are just visible on the skyline in yesterday's picture.)

Wetlands, Sydney Park

The "other side" of Sydney Park to that shown yesterday. This is the other side of the hill.

Sydney Park

Surfing

Sorry

Photo above from the Sydney Morning Herald

Montage above (left to right, top to bottom):

Welcome ceremony, Parliament House Canberra Tue 12 Feb 2008 (Sydney Morning Herald); The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, delivers the apology and faces around the country (SMH); My artist trading card "Reconciliation"; detail from poster; detail from poster; woman wearing "Thanks T-shirt, Parliament House crowd (ABC TV); detail from poster; Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags; Kevin Rudd with Matilda House, who delivered a Welcome to Country at Parliament House 12 Feb 2008; art work; 'Sorry' in skywriting, over Sydney Harbour; Midnight Oil perform at Sydney Olympics wearing "sorry" clothes; march; didgeridoos; Redfern Park - an important venue in the history of "Sorry"; cleansing ceremony, Australia Day 2008.

An amazingly emotional, and unprecedented day in Australian history. The new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, presented the first motion of the new Parliament. It was to say "Sorry" on behalf of Government and Parliament to the Stolen Generations, their families and communities. The Stolen Generations were those Indigenous people taken as children from their families because of government policy between 1910 and 1970. Their "sin" was to be born Aboriginal. Official policy of the time was to "breed out" Aboriginality. The forcible removal of children was meant to effect this over time.

You can hear the Prime Minister's speech, which includes much of the history of these institutionally racist policies, and see a lovely multimedia presentation here.

In 1997 a report titled "Bringing Them Home" documented the harrowing accounts of many who were stolen. Amongst other things, it recommended that as a first step towards Reconciliation an apology be made to the people for the wrongs and traumas that had been endured. The previous Prime Minister refused to utter that most simple and eloquent of words - "Sorry" .

On May 28 2000, 250,000 people walked over Sydney Harbour Bridge to express their support for Reconciliation between Australia's Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Read about that moment here.

On 10 Dec, 1992 then Prime Minister, Paul Keating, who commissioned the Bringing Them Home report, had gone to Redfern Park and made a speech which set the tone for Reconciliation. Read the speech here. Keating, along with other former Prime Ministers, Gough Whitlam (1972-75), Malcolm Fraser (1975-83), Bob Hawke (1983-1991), Paul Keating (Dec 1991-1996) were present to support the apology. The only living ex-PM who didn't attend was the immediate past one, John Howard. His party, however, supported it today.

New turf

The cricket pitch in Arncliffe Park has recently been re-grassed. What luck we've been having so much rain to help things along.

Roll Out The Rollers

I bet you have never seen so many Rolls Royces in one place! I was passing by this Rolls Royce hire business, saw the ones parked out in the street, so stuck my head inside the garage for a sticky beak. The convertible in the foreground of the second pic is a Morris Minor. The owner told me that the stretch in the front of the line of three Rollers is the only one of that model in Australia.