Monday 12 October 2009

honeysuckle creek

Went up to Honeysuckle Creek yesterday - it's the site of one of the old earth receiving stations used to relay messages and tv pictures from the Apollo missions - in fact it was where the first pictures of Neil Armstrong on the moon were received.

After various programs ended in the early eighties they took the dish down and removed the infrastructure, just leaving the concrete foundations and the iron stubs of the dish mount.

Apart from some sign boards and a stainless steel marker to commemorate it's role in history it's utterly enigmatic - sure you can see the remains of a shower base and tell what was concrete floor and what was car park, but it's basically all going back to bush, other than a small area used as national park campsite.

And that's interesting as it shows just how enigmatic and difficult to analyse sites are. Here is a a well known site, where the plans are known. But over thirty years tree roots have started to lift the concrete, the tarmac has started to decay, soil and leaves have started to build up and the scrub has started to grow. And that's on a site visited by tourists and bushwalkers, and occasionally tidied up by national parks staff ...

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