Things have been pretty quiet here recently, and I’m afraid that they are likely to remain so, at least for a little while. I’ve just commenced a PhD at the university of Queensland, so naturally enough, that’s where nearly all of my mental energy is being channelled. And rather than keeping things simple by basing my PhD on this website, I’ve chosen a different direction altogether. I’m looking to explore large-scale text analysis and data visualisation as methods for examining social discourse.

And as if I needed a further distraction, I have started another blog as an outlet for my text analysis and data-viz experiments. It’s called Seen Another Way, and the first post may be of interest to followers of this site. It features some animations that I created with the Queensland Government’s database of groundwater bores. The animations show 144 years of groundwater development history in the space of 72 seconds.

But I have not completely switched off from oncewasacreek.org. On Tuesday 17 October at the Kenmore Library from 6pm, I will be speaking at the Brisbane City Council’s Biodiversity Seminar. The theme for the evening is ‘Creeks: past, present and future’, and there are no prizes for guessing which part of that theme I will be focussing on. There will be three other speakers — Leo Lee, Grant Witheridge and Andrew Wallace — who between them will discuss topics including fish distribution, flooding and creek restoration. It promises to be a very interesting evening.

Full details about the forum are available here. The forum is free, but if you wish to attend you will need to book, as places are limited.

Perhaps I will see some of you there!

Are you interested in creeks and catchments? And history? Of course you are!

Well, if you are free on the afternoon of Saturday 21 June, you might want to come along to a seminar called ‘Creeks and Catchments’ being presented by the Brisbane History Group in conjunction with the Griffith Film School.

I will be presenting about oncewasacreek.org, and there will be five other speakers covering other creeks and catchments in Brisbane, including Moggill Creek, Enoggera/Ithaca Creek, Cubberla-Witton Creeks, and Norman Creek. One highlight is sure to be Trish FitzSimons’ study and short films about the history of Norman Creek, about which I have written previously.

The seminar begins at 12.30pm at the Griffith Film School (intersection of Stanley, Vulture & Dock Streets, South Brisbane). The cost is just $10 for Brisbane History Group members and $15 for non-members. Please see the event flyer for booking details, and be sure to RSVP by 16 June via the details on the flyer.

Hope to see you there.
-Angus

oncewasacreek.org now has its own facebook page! This means you can ‘Like’ it on facebook and stay up to date with new pages and activity on the site. Even better, you can share it with your friends on facebook who might be interested. The address for the facebook page is http://www.facebook.com/OnceWasACreek.

The facebook page for oncewasacreek.org

This whole managing-a-page-on-facebook thing is new to me, so I’m still nutting bits of it out. However, to make sure that updates about the site appear in your news feed, I believe you may need to hover over the “Liked” button (after you have liked the page, that is) and select where it says “Show in News Feed”. Otherwise, you may or may not see the updates, depending on whether it is a slow news day on your news feed.

So what are you waiting for? Go and visit the page on facebook and ‘Like’ it now!

The oncewasacreek.org flyer. (Please download the PDFversion if you wish to use it.)

Having concentrated for so long on getting this site up and running and populating it with some content, I’ve recently turned my attention to getting the word out so that people might actually read it. That was, after all, the point of creating it in the first place.

Self-promotion has never come naturally to me, so I’m starting small. I’ve created a ‘flyer’ for the site that I have been posting around the neighbourhood on noticeboards, bus stops and the like. Perhaps you are here now because you stumbled across one of these.
If you would like to promote the site, and have (legitimate) access to a noticeboard or similar advertising space (perhaps in your workplace or school, for example), you are welcome to download and post the flyer. If you want to go that extra mile, you can even cut the tabs at the bottom so that they can be easily torn off.

Of course, you can always tell your friends, family and neighbours about the site the old-fashioned way as well!

Welcome to oncewasacreek.org!

After a very lengthy gestation period, I am excited to finally have the site online. Now I get to find out if it makes sense to anyone else!

This site is a work in progress. There are pages still to be written, and many that have been written will surely undergo further development as I find the time and inspiration to work on them. When I add or revise anything of interest, I will be sure to post about it here in the Newsroom.

There’s no right and wrong way to explore this site, but I suggest starting with the pages that describing the creek, its course and its catchment. Then you may want to look at the essay about the story of Gregory Park, which is the first of what (I hope) will be a series of essays exploring the history of different parts of the Western Creek catchment.

I’d love to hear your feedback about the site, and for you to share your own knowledge and thoughts about Western Creek and its catchment. You can leave comments at the bottom of some pages (like this one), but for most topics I suggest using The forum to share your thoughts. Otherwise you can email me via the Contact page. Given that the site has only just gone live, there are bound to be glitches here and there – if you spot one, please let me know!

Finally, you can read a little bit more about the site, and about me, on the About page.

I hope you enjoy the site!
-Angus