Anniversary Special Stop 5: Dundas

This next stop on my Carlingford Line Anniversary Celebration Extravaganza Bonanza is a little special to me. That's because this is the suburb I grew up in as a wee lad. Welcome to

Dundas

As this series suggests, Dundas is the stop and suburb immediately north of Rydalmere.

On the map, if Rydalmere is Elvis, Dundas looks like Elvis' hair. Neat.

Map Data ©2019 Google

Up to this point, I haven't actually bothered to ride a train on the Carlingford Line for these posts. That seemed a little inappropriate for a series about the suburbs on this line, so I changed that by heading into Dundas by train today.

I was one of about ten people on the train on this bright and sunny Sunday morning, and the only person to alight at Dundas.

This station hasn't really changed since I remember it, still featuring half a platform with a single track that you can stroll across at your leisure.

I left the station to see if the rest of this relatively unknown suburb was as I remember, or if it was suddenly full of airports, aquariums and ferris wheels.

The station exits out onto the small local shopping strip which is basically a couple of takeaways which wouldn't look out of place anywhere in the country,

as well as a few other important services such as the post office and bottle shop.

Apparently the good citizens of Dundas can't keep track of their animals, because the local vet contains a surprisingly high number of lost pets. Did these pets get lost on the way to the vet? Are they stuck waiting for a connecting train at Clyde? We many never know.

Extracting all of the minimal commentary that the local shops had to offer, I headed to explore residential Dundas, first marked by the old and new apartment blocks sitting across from each other by Dundas "CBD".

The end of the street spills out onto the wide and busy Kissing Point Road,

so to avoid that I took this back alley deeper into suburbia.

"Back in my day", the back streets of Dundas were mainly old brick, fibro and weatherboard houses that smelled funny. They've definitely modernised since then, with new units marking the landscape instead.

This street didn't end up taking me where I needed to go so alas I ended up back on Kissing Point Road anyway.

Kissing Point Road is where you can find the institution that taught me everything that I know today (mainly about colour-inning).

I managed to find another alleyway off of the main road and into the leafy suburban streets which are much nicer than I remember.

One nice thing about walking through this suburb is that there are a lot of paths for pedestrian use, meaning you can take shortcuts to get from street to street without having to stick to the roads.

Dundas was never a rough area or anything, but it's scrubbed itself up since my days, with fewer and fewer fibro houses,

more new builds.

Even most of the older houses are looking well kept these days.

Although some people have cheated and just used their increased equity to add on a second storey.

I guess that's what happens when the asking price for even a basic house is over a million bucks.

I continued on, using more parkland pathways to traverse my old stomping grounds,

and observing the suburb's rebuild since my days.

One additional back alley walkway led me to Ponds Creek Reserve, a strip of nature hugging the confusingly named Ponds Creek, where the tall grass and morning dew did a fine job soaking through my shoes.

This parkland apparently makes up part of the Ponds Creek Walking Track, a six-and-a-half km walking track hugging this creek and running parallel to the trainline from Rydalmere up to Carlingford. Here's a dodgily scanned brochure from the council if you're keen on doing the walk yourself.

Of keen interest on this creek, however,

are the fine Dundas ducks.

I said goodbye to the walk and ducks, and continued on towards my final point of interest.

Before I go to a suburb, I normally do a few minutes of internet research to see if there's anything I should check out while I'm in the neighbourhood. Well, that research led me to this.

Despite utilitarian appearances, this isn't a block of housing commission, army barracks or anything else of the sort. It turns out that this building is owned by the Church of Scientology, and online news reports allege that this is used as some sort of re-education camp. Yikes.

• https://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-02-25/church-of-scientology-denies-holding-woman-in-isolation/4539658
• https://www.villagevoice.com/2012/02/14/scientologys-shocking-treatment-of-children-held-in-a-suburban-labor-camp/

A far cry from the benign signage which makes it seem like some sort of function venue.

From here, I was at the suburb's border, and so I made my way out before I got sued by a multinational religious corporation and/or somebody jumped on my sofa.

Dundas: This blog post is for entertainment purposes only. Don't sue me Tom Cruise.