In continuing my quest through the outer reaches of Western Sydney, I present to you another two mostly residential suburbs.
Bidwill
If you happen to be in my previous suburb of Blackett, heading vaguely northeast will take you into the suburb of Bidwill.The sort-of-main road I entered through looks like this.
Here, I found a Samoan church (I didn't head through the fence for a better photo as it was a Sunday and folks were here doing church things, so it seemed a little bit rude),
but across the road,
I also found Bidwill square, a kind-of-shabby shopping centre with one mighty exterior.
Marginally more interesting than this are the surrounds, with some mighty gum trees and what appears to be some public housing units with a mural painted on the side.
Still more interesting to me, though, is this Pacific supermarket inside the centre.
Here, you can pick up groceries from the Pacific Islands and New Zealand,
They also have ready-to-eat food in the back with all kinds of meats and stews I could not recognise,
and desserts too.
After finishing up with my Pacific grocery needs,
where I thought to take a look at Long Tan Reserve,
From here, I carried on through admittedly not the prettiest streets in order to reach my next suburb.
Bidwill: Come to pray, leave with 25kg of sugar.
Similar to the shops seen in my last post, the shops here are an outdoor affair, with the similar combination of a non-duopoly supermarket, bottle shop and takeaway.
This one also has an old-school bakery,
and whatever this is.
After this, I was at liberty to pop into residential Shalvey.
as well as 25kg bags of sugar.
I figured I'd take myself to another part of the suburb,
a small park with a mosaicked war memorial to its namesake's battle in the Vietnam War.
Shalvey
After Bidwill, I kicked things off in neighbouring Shalvey, again starting off at the local shops.
Also like my previous post, this turned out to be another suburb with older-style single story houses,
many of which also boast Pizza Hut roofs for some reason.
I also quite like this mural deep in the grounds of Shalvey's primary school.
From here, I cruised through the suburb to head to the large "Peter Van Hasselt Park". My 20 seconds of Googling couldn't work out who this was named after, but I did find a Dutch medical scientist with the same name, so let's assume it's that guy.
So these suburbs have a bad reputation to them due to their above-average amounts of public housing, poverty and perceived danger.
I'm not a sociologist and I don't live here so I'm not in an educated position to comment on how much of their reputation is founded, and how much of it is just rich people who are scared of the poors. After all, I'm just some guy who likes to walk around and look at shit. On that front, these suburbs are pretty interesting due to the greenery of Sydney's Outer West and some of the unique houses you see.
Namely - what's with all these hilarious roofs?
Anyway, this park is a very large rectangle of grass for recreational purposes,
and in the distance, there was a drone club flying their drones. Here's hoping they're the "take neat aerial photospheres" kind of drone, rather than the "blow up parts of Yemen" kind of drone.
And from here, I continued onto my next suburb.
Shalvey: Keep up the research, Dr Pete.
Learning Ground at Bidwill, is for Aboriginal kids who are having issues in school, I have a relative who attended there and went to a ceremony when they graduated.
ReplyDeleteOne thing these older and less affluent suburbs have is lovely wide roads and reasonable sized blocks of land, unlike the newer more upmarket suburbs where there is nowhere to park on the street and they are not even wide enough for two cars to pass each other comfortably. That being said, I worked with a woman who grew up in Shalvey and she said she would never ever live there again.
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