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Photo by Trish Davies   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 …

Photo by Graham McCarter OK I admit it, I’ve got shed envy! I’ve now been to the Blackheath Area Men’s Shed four times and each time I’ve found it more difficult to leave than the last. I’m not sure what I envy the most … the beautiful, neatly organised walls of tools and various workshops with projects underway …  like the second time …

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. …

Photo of Mary Moody and family by Graham McCarter 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 …

Photo of Jim Crowther by Berndt Sellheim 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 …

  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 …