Sweet Wayfaring

Like so many inland towns the railway was very important in days of old but today Kandos is the end of the line. Only occasionally tourist trains come up this far, but the line is still active a little further back for regular coal and cement trains.

Kandos has something that is nearly extinct .. a Post Office that is still a post office!

Most of the memorials were built soon after World War I. With Kandos being a very young town at the time I wasn't sure what I would find.  I thought the next most likely spot was at the Community Centre and Library complex ... a cement building (of course) built in 1954 according to its foundation stone.  My guess was right, the driveway is flanked by two columns with the words Lest We Forget .. very simple by the standards of most towns.  What surprised me however was the actual memorial to the left of this ... it was erected in 2010!

Today is Anzac day, the day we remember our war heros and in thinking of an appropriate tribute I remembered that Kandos has a War Memorial Swimming Pool. There are lots of such pools in Australian county towns, built in the 1960s. Why War Memorial Swimming Pools?  I tried to do some research and could not find the exact facts but I think it was a government funded infrastructure scheme rather like the Economic Stimulus plan today causing the countryside to be dotted with new school halls. Why swimming pools?  Australia is a warm country and our swimmers were succeeding well at the Olympics so swimming was popular.  Note that this is an Olympic swimming pool which is actually a reference to it being 50 metres long - not all towns could afford to build such a big pool.  By the 1960s the sea baths were polluted with sewage and the swimming holes in inland creeks getting clogged from fertilisers causing water plants to grow.  Clean swimming pools were seen as ...

Below the ropeway is a building that has been in the corner of my photographic eye for quite some time. The colour is somewhat unusual in old Australian buildings.  Perhaps it was the influence of the "new Australians".  There was apparently an influx of immigrant workers in the town who, in appreciation of their new home, donated the clock and the rotunda I have shown recently.

Cement is still big business in Kandos and one of the quirky outcomes is the aerial ropeway that travels 5 kms across the countryside and above the town, carrying limestone from quarry to the cement works.  Buckets still glide overhead as they have been doing for near on 100 years.

Cement was a popular building material in Kandos in the past.  And the cement works are still an important industry in the town.  The town is attractive and quite vibrant with a population of around 1,500 people.