28 JANUARY 2021
ISSUE 006
REAL INDEPENDENT LOCAL WEEKLY NEWS
News
The Great Wall of Ettalong
Two Peninsula residents have been recognised in this year’s Australia Day Honours List (one posthumously). See page 10
Out&About
A dancer from Umina Beach led a performance at a Sydney festival this month to help celebrate the stories of First People. See page 17
Health The Helado team and the newly constructed wall
A 3-metre high timber wall has been constructed in front of a popular set of shops in The Rocks Arcade at Ettalong Beach, leaving local businesses and community members
scratching their heads. Owner of Helado Cafe, Chris Perkins, said they had no knowledge of the construction until they discovered the newly built wall outside their café on January 20.
“I don’t know what the idea behind the wall was, we have always stayed within our lease,” Perkins said. “When you walk down the street, the café has kind of become invisible and (it) has
also limited the amount of seating I can place there because it’s encroaching into our space a little bit.” The Memorial Ave arcade was purchased by a developer with plans to demolish half of
the site, making space for a five-storey hotel equipped with function facilities, a roof-top terrace bar and swimming pool. Continued page 4
Woy Woy’s own spider man A Woy Woy resident has made national news after discovering a new species of spider in Western Australia last month. Adam Fletcher, an electrician and keen photographer, identified the Maratus Fletcheri spider during a three-week expedition through the southern parts of the wildflower state. And on December 17, the new species was named after Fletcher and described by Photo: Adam Fletcher
Julianne Waldock at the Western Australian Museum. Fletcher said he has always had a love for photography and spiders. “After years searching for and photographing these little beauties, my good friend Michael Doe and I became friends with Michael Duncan, an entomologist from Western Sydney University,” Fletcher said. “After many weekend trips away searching for different
species of Peacock spiders, we decided to form a not-for-profit group called Project Maratus. “We wanted to put them out in the world so everyone could see what they were, and we tried to do as much research as we could ... where they are found, what habitat. “After five or six years of doing it, we’d already found a few new species that had been given other names by people who wrote the paper. Continued page 4
More than 800 people were tested for COVID-19 in just six days at a pop-up testing clinic established at Woy Woy Hospital in the lead-up to Christmas. See page 31
Sport
The 2020/2021 Newcastle Permanent Junior Ironperson Series came to its conclusion on Saturday, January 23 at Ocean Beac See page 35
Puzzles page 22
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