NEWS ITEM: This Friends Website established 2024

Sunday 15th December 2024:  

 

This not-for-profit website has just been created by Steven Ridd assuming the role of The Friends Archivist, having been a former Working Group member of the Friends of Katoomba Falls Creek Valley Inc. (affectionately, The Friends) and who continues to be a local resident of ‘inner west’ Katoomba, as with other former members of The Friends.

The primary purpose of this website is to establish a publicly available online platform (via a secure portal) to be and Internet-based depository for the archival records of The Friends who operated voluntarily as a local resident bushcare and environmental activist group for 27 years between 1989 and 2016. 

Those archival records are collectively entitled The Neil Lewis Stuart Archive.  This is due to the sad and untimely passing of the The Friends founder, Neil Lewis Stuart in 2016 and then following The Friends management committee’s decision to de-register The Friends as an incorporated association later that same year.

 

 

This website has been subsequently established, registered, designed and managed under the ongoing legal business entity of The Habitat Advocate: https://habitatadvocate.com.au/. 

The Habitat Advocate, is a registered business and based in Katoomba, Blue Mountains Australia since 2001.  Indeed, it is situated within the water catchment of Katoomba Falls Creek Valley, which also locally and affectionately goes by the name ‘The Gully’.

It is acknowledged that this website domain name is rather long in name, being: https://friendsofkatoombafallscreekvalley.org/.  It is deliberately so and accurate in title out of respect to the group’s original name and to those residents who voluntarily served a highly noble local conservationist cause.

The Friends became a local voluntary resident group founded by Katoomba local resident Neil Lewis Stuart under his vision, passion, activism and generous community leadership. For a while, it will remain a work in progress due to  both the substantial* and considerable* nature of the Physical Version of The Neil Lewis Stuart Archive, which is currently being digitised.

It is appropriate here to acknowledge previous ideas and initiatives by former members of The Friends to indeed establish a website for this resident group and its cause.   Details of this are to be included on this website, and news will be forthcoming in due course under this website top menu heading ‘NEWS‘. 

Here’s a sneak preview:  

 

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* READERS PLEASE NOTE:  The English language adjectives ‘substantial’ and ‘considerable’ are mostly used interchangeably to describe a large amount, size, or degree. However, ‘substantial’ implies a solid, material, or core significance (something “with substance”), whereas ‘considerable’ refers more generally to something worthy of being considered large or important.    Both adjectives are apt in this case.

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