Moonscaping
Sounds so fabulous doesn’t it… but its not…
Moonscaping is the name given to the usual illegal practice of cutting down trees, or razing buildings in the dead of night, or at the beginnings of public holidays, or just before the weekend starts. Generally a time when residents minds thoughts and actions are based around family, holidaying or just resting from a working week.
And we have had many examples of this in Ballarat East over the last little while, who can forget the trees in stockade st, and the council is currently prosecuting a case near Canadian Valley. So while it pays to be vigilant, sometimes we have lives to get on with!!!
We wanted to draw your attention to a particularly brutal example of moonscaping which happened April 29th, not in Ballarat East but definitely worth being aware of… as part of Ballarat’s collective history and heritage…
Who remembers the Signal Box on MacArthur Street? You should it has been there a long time, and now is no more… Peter Sparkman took these shots:
It looks like this for the last few years, a bit uncared for by owners, but NOT unloved by locals… 
Then one morning it looked like this after some awful vandalism… locals wrongly believed as a historic building it would be restored – surely…
Nuh ah… it was leveled on a fine Sunday arvo – here are the boys doing just that – perfect example of moonscaping… what will happen to the rest of our signal boxes? Think of the lovely but also uncared for one on Lydiard St – would make a perfect studio for someone, can VLine come to the party rather make use of another bonfire?
We didn’t even know it was gone until yesterday on the Steam Train Ride! Everyone was asking where it was, and pointing and commenting about how disappointing it was that the vandalism occured, but then to realise that it wasn’t even there at all was even worse!
That’s a shame, it was a shame when the gates went, it’s more of a shame now that this has gone. I grew up there (not in the signal box but around the corner) went to Macarthur St Primary school and remember the signal man. He invited a couple of us up and shown us the levers that changed the trains tracks, let us have a go at it. It wasn’t just the direction change between the Ararat and Creswick tracks, there was the switching to push in and out the carraiges to be filled with wheat from the Silo Mill on the other side of the road. Sometimes a train would be sitting across Macarthur St blocking the traffic for long terms, and we as kids would climb over the trains linkages or under the carraiges and the only trouble we got was from workers in the mill. Never the Signal box man. I think there was quite a few through the seventies working the box, but they were all good guys. If anyone reading this was a signal operator at Macarthur St through the seventies, perhaps you might remember my sister playing her recorder all the way to and from school 😉