a slow decay

My time recently has been spent working on the website’s various galleries Two of the earlier portfolios are now pretty much in place—Bowden and Port Adelaide. They look pretty good. The next step is to reconfigure the rest of the portfolios in this carousel style.

The daily poodle walks in both the morning and evening have been just quicker walks with little time being spent on scoping photography. The grasses are rapidly drying out on the coast and they represent a real problem as they hook onto the standard poodle’s coats, and then quickly work their way into the skin. So I am avoiding areas where there are lots of grass seeds.

Rambler, old dump, Victor Harbor
Rambler, old dump, Victor Harbor

The Rambler picture in the old Victor Harbor dump was one of the last scoping photos that I’ve done. Rambler is slowly falling apart from neglect. Rambler was built by Peter Sharp at Cruickshanks Corner, Port Adelaide in 1875 and it was possibly Australia’s oldest racing yacht.

It used to on the slips at Searle’s Boatyard–in the historic boatyards in the Central Basin of the Port River–before Port Adelaide’s oldest surviving boatyard was closed down to make way for the residential waterfront redevelopment of Port Adelaide. The redevelopment at Newport Quays failed to regenerate Port Adelaide. The development of the expensive dog boxes on the waterfront was scrapped but not before it had successfully destroyed the fabric of the history of the port.

It is sad to see Rambler just being left in the ex-dump site to rot. It needed have been so, since it just wasn’t necessary to destroy the Port Adelaide’s oldest surviving boatyard for expensive dog boxes that never eventuated.

The ex-dump is now an edge land. I’ve gone wandered around there with the poodles to take photos in the morning and evening light of the bits of rubbish still lying around:

Rubbish, ex-Victor Harbor dump
Rubbish, ex-Victor Harbor dump

There’s just bits and pieces of rubbish left, as most of the rubbish was taken away when the dump was closed late 2012 after the Alexandrina Council and the Victor Harbor Council joined forces through the Fleurieu Regional Waste Authority to manage waste and recyclables jointly at the existing Goolwa Waste and Recycling Depot. Consequently, photographically speaking, there is not much to work with, even though the edgeland itself is a good space to walk around.