Stories From: Sustainability

It’s a bustling Thursday morning at the Blackheath Community Op-shop (BCOS). Volunteers are happily accepting donations of furniture, clothes and boxes of books, and satisfied customers are loading up the same. Passing by the racks of clothes to a large sorting table in the rear, I find David O’Brien, a serene agent in a storm of activity. We repair to a quiet courtyard behind “the …

  “There’s a lot of great people doing amazing things in the world and you can be one of them” – Emma Magenta If you’re not sure if you’re powerful enough to change the world, just look at the fact that you’re still alive in a system designed to kill you. You’ve survived this far and congratulations. This is no …

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 …

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 … …

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 I came and …

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 …

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 …