Rottnest
· Rottnest · Oliver Hill ·
I lunched overlooking "Hell's Gully":
According to the info on OSM (which probably doesn't really belong there) the spot I was sitting was just near the site of a generator building, "due to nature of typical doors and presence of derelict HV cabling and conduit":
Walking past the H2 gun emplacement, I noticed that one of the doors was built by B Makutz & Co. (with a hinge unlike the generator building's):
This side of Oliver Hill has a different heritage conservation policy to the main gun. Here (according to the sign) they aim to "do as much as necessary, but as little as possible", so that we can "gain an understanding of how quickly the army evactuated the Island, leaving a ghostly relic… challenging the visitor to acknowledge the past and the solitude experienced by soldiers". Elsewhere they say that there were up to 9,000 personnel stationed here in WW2, so I'm not quite sure about 'solitude', but I do like the fact that things are left to quietly disintegrate into the sandhills.
After lunch I walked along the spur line back towards where it joined the actual current railway:
My main RSS news feed: https://samwilson.id.au/news.rss
(or Wikimedia.rss, Fremantle.rss, OpenStreetMap.rss, etc. for topic feeds).
Email me at sam or leave a comment below…
samwilson.id.au