To devote yourself to the community is an extraordinary thing. How does it happen? For Simon Hare it started with his family motto: “be curious, try everything and learn everything you can”. In Simon’s family people were just human animals and animals were people too: their menagerie of a donkey, chickens, cats, guinea pigs, geese and two black Labradors in …

When The Big Fix approached local businesses to see if they’d agree to help Blackheath phase out plastic straws, one common remark was that men rarely use straws … it’s mostly women and children. This triggered an idea that local artist and designer Ian Dalkin developed into a cartoon. It has since become the basis of the Blackheath Gets Real Campaign … …

Popes Glen Creek rises in Memorial Park, close to the town centre of Blackheath, then flows east for about 4km through Popes Glen Bushland Reserve and into the Grose River. Over decades this beautiful interface between the town and the Blue Mountains National Park had suffered the effects of polluted urban stormwater inundating a natural system, and had become a …

Ten years ago, Graeme Roth and his partner Suzanne Kowalski-Roth, took the plunge and left Sydney with their two young children – keen to forge a future in Blackheath. Today they run Bike Storage, an innovative national design and manufacturing business employing eight, and revolutionising bike infrastructure in Australia. As keen cyclists, who’d spent a number of years overseas, they …

  Recently The Big Fix launched its first Youth Cafe in Blackheath … a space for 14-18 year olds to gather on a Wednesday night to socialise, get inspired, and collaborate on tackling both local and global issues that concern them. Two of the members recently trained as barristas, so there’s no shortage of fabulous hot chocolates on the night. …

Walk down any pretty tree-lined street in Blackheath and I guarantee more than a third of the cottages will be occupied by a person living alone. Mostly they’re older people who are on their own either by choice or through life circumstances. After all, our village has long been considered a perfect place for retirement, and many come to live …

Jim Crowther, watchmaker, beekeeper, maker and fixer of objects large and small, picks up a screw with a pair of fine tweezers and holds it in my direction. “That’s not the smallest of them,” he says. It’s tiny. A speck so minuscule that, even looking closely at it, even knowing it for what it is, there’s no resolution beyond that …

  Passion, patience, persistence and the dogged determination of a handful of key champions, with a vision of building a Blue Mountains Bike Trail, finally paid off when the first section of the Great Blue Mountains Trail, from Blackheath to Katoomba, officially opened on Wednesday 26 August 2015. The trail was opened by Blue Mountains Clr Don McGregor and Federal …